131–138 of 138 posts
Great article, does anyone have a breakdown of the programs babbage wrote? It always seemed odd that Lovelace was the first programmer, suggesting Babbage created a machine without thinking how his it could be used.
From article: Babbage also wrote more than twenty programs that he never published.[19] So it’s not quite accurate to say that Lovelace wrote or published the first program, though
Great article, does anyone have a breakdown of the programs babbage wrote? It always seemed odd that Lovelace was the first programmer, suggesting Babbage created a machine without thinking how his it could be used.
Lovelace seems to be the first to use loops. Babbage clearly created something first, but without any looping they were by nature much less complex, and so you could make an argument they don't count as programs ("hello world" would only count as a program because the library print function is likely to have some loop in it by this argument). Of course not all of Babbage's programs survive, it is entirely possible Ba…
"In the absence of other evi- dence I have had to adopt the minimal default assumption that both the operation and variable cards can only be turned back- ward as is necessary to implement the loops used in Babbage’s sample programs cited in Ada Lovelace’s notes (originals in L series notations)"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lovelace seems to be the first to use loops. Babbage clearly created something first, but without any looping they were by nature much less complex, and so you could make an argument they don't count as programs ("hello world" would only count as a program because the library print function is likely to have some loop in it by this argument). Of course not all of Babbage's programs survive, it is entirely possible Ba…
Ada was clearly incredibly intelligent. I can't source the original texts for Babbage's program, but it does seem that he was aware of loops, and might have implemented them: "In the absence of other evi- dence I have had to adopt the minimal default assumption that both the operation and variable cards can only be turned back- ward as is necessary to implement the loops used in Babbage’s sample programs cited in Ada…
Has anyone built a virtual machine out of Babbage's instruction set and then tried Ada's program?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From article: Babbage also wrote more than twenty programs that he never published.[19] So it’s not quite accurate to say that Lovelace wrote or published the first program, though
I was wondering if there was another source for the programs? I don't have the book it references.
> In fact, aside from the profusion of variables with unhelpful names, the C translation of Lovelace’s program doesn’t look that alien at all. Clearly the author never met my coworkers.
I'm reminded of a high school programming class where a project partner named variables with the most crude and lewd words he could imagine. Not that I was prudish, but he unsurprisingly never remembered what "butts" was for and somehow never figured out why he kept getting confused by his own code.
I HAD to of course name all of my variables as poets and poems.
So you have "Edgar_Allen gets new The_Road_Not_Taken", all was fine during my tests but for some reason it did not interface well with the code provided by the teacher to do the actual input so I had to take it to the TA for help.
I then learnt why descriptive names, not just comments are helpful. Although, the TA was impressed by my selections XD
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was wondering if there was another source for the programs? I don't have the book it references.
I talk about his "Series L" tables here and link to scans of them: https://pairdebuggingwithlovelace.hashnode.dev/lovelaces-pro...
https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/documents/aa110...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was a link to directly to note G in the article, in fact, it's the exact same URL that you linked to.
Yes, and I said that explicitly in my post. The difference is in my post it is one of the featured things. In the article that claims to show what the program actually did it is buried in the text.