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Niklaus Wirth has died

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Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#191
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

uxn ftw <3

uxn is cool but it's definitely not the same kind of achievement as oberon, pascal, quicksort, forth, and structured programming; rek and devine would surely not claim it was

to quote gp, "beautiful software is still being made today". It's not a competition.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#192
post #147
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not exactly; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_multitasking

Thanks, will check that.

The quick answer is that coroutines are often used to implement cooperative multitasking because it is a very natural fit, but it's a more general idea than that specific implementation strategy.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#193
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

uxn is cool but it's definitely not the same kind of achievement as oberon, pascal, quicksort, forth, and structured programming; rek and devine would surely not claim it was

to quote gp, "beautiful software is still being made today". It's not a competition.

you don't get to be described as an 'apostle of simplicity' just because you like simplicity. you have to actually change the world by creating simplicity. devine and rek are still a long way from a turing award

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#194
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, will check that.

The quick answer is that coroutines are often used to implement cooperative multitasking because it is a very natural fit, but it's a more general idea than that specific implementation strategy.

interesting, i would have said the relationship is the other way around: cooperative multitasking implies that you have separate stacks that you're switching between, and coroutines are a more general idea which includes cooperative multitasking (as in lua) and things that aren't cooperative multitasking (as in rust and python) because the program's execution state isn't divided into distinct tasks

i could just be wrong tho

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#196
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you mean the kind of explicit loop where you write for (;;) { int r = GetMessage(&msg, NULL, 0, 0); if (!r) break; if (r == -1) croak(); TranslateMessage(&msg); DispatchMessage(&msg); } or, in yeso, for (;;) { yw_wait(w, 0); for (yw_event *ev; (ev = yw_get_event(w));) handle_event(ev); redraw(w); } async/await doesn't always hide the event loop in that sense; python asyncio, for example, has a lot of ways to invok…

What worries me is we may have a whole generation who doesn't know about the code you posted above and thinks it's magic or worse, real multiprocessing.

okay but is that what you meant by 'hiding the event loop' or did you mean something different

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#197
I just needed a feature of Pascal yesterday in one of my Rust libraries: ranged integers. I know, you can go about it in different ways, like structs with private fields and custom constructors, or just with a new generic type. But, having the ability to specify that some integer can only be between 15..25 built-in is a fantastic language feature. That's even so with runtime bounds checking disabled because the compiler would still complain about some subset of violations.

What an innovator and a role model. I wish I can be as passionate about my work in my 80's as him.

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#198
post #139
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly won for CRUD apps (yes and a few others). Your DAW, your photo editor, your NLE, your chatbot girlfriend, your game, your CAD, etc might actually want to use more than one core effectively per task. Even go had to grow up eventually.

Indeed, however the experience with crashes and security exploits, has proven that scaling processes, or even distributing them across several machines, scales much better than threads.

preemptively scheduled processes, not cooperatively scheduled

Re: Niklaus Wirth has died

#199
post #2

begin this is terrible news; is there a better source than twitter (edit: https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/pipermail/oberon/2024/016856.html thanks to johndoe0815); wirth was the greatest remaining apostle of simplicity, correctness, and software built for humans to understand; now only hoare and moore remain, and moore seems to have given the reins at greenarrays to a younger generation; young people may not be aware of th…

> wirth was the greatest remaining apostle of simplicity, correctness, and software built for humans to understand; now only hoare and moore remain…

No. There is another.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Whitney_%28computer_s...

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