On Tuesday 02 July 2013 08:03:14 John Thornton did opine: > Do you have a git branch set up for this? I'd like to follow along with > the SQL and Python part, I've tried to learn C and C++ but don't get > very far. > > JT
C++ I never got the overall picture of John, but C itself I tend to look at as an HLA, High Level Assembler. With an older C, for OS9 on the 6809's, I was in the habit of stopping the compile at the translator output stage and looking at the resultant code to see if I could spot anything could could be done faster in assembly. The only place I could speed it up was in bit shifts of 8 or more bits. That I could do by hand for an 8 bit shift, in 5% of the time, in one case speeding out actual object up by nearly 25%, but other than that, that compiler was actually spitting out pretty decent code. Code that if done by hand in assembler, couldn't be shrunk by more than 5%, or sped up except for the above exception by more then 2 or 3%. We also have a genuine HLA for that cpu family too. But C's best teacher by far is the two K&R books on it. They are the bible. Where I get lost is the nemonics for X86 cpu's. Hard to remember, harder to understand, its almost like that old saying about putting lipstick on a pig. Moto's versions, even for the more complex M68k stuff, are far easier to learn. But intel/amd won that battle, so here we are. Totally dependent on a higher level language that manages to paint over the mess that the cpu's actually are at the hardware level, clear back to the 80186. I think the chip makers have tried to fix that quagmire, but they have to do it while working around the patents at the same time. So we get improvements only incrementally as those old patents expire. Relatively unknown back in the middle 80's because it wasn't to fit radio shacks vision of business computing was the rather glaring discrepancy between the speeds of the shacks TS-1000 and TS-2000 computers they were offering for PC & business use, compared to that same job being done by the TRS-80 Color computer they also sold as a game machine in the day. But we also had dynacalc to compete with visicalc. Visicalc of course ran on the intel stuff, while dynacalc ran on the 'coco'. Both could do the same job, but dynacalc gave several more decimal places accuracy, and it was 5x or so faster! In some ways, one could look at python and C, and see that generally C is python, without the formatting constraints python imposes. And those eat my lunch, repeatedly. Thats my fault of course. Old dogs vs new tricks etc etc. > On 7/2/2013 6:42 AM, andy pugh wrote: > > On 2 July 2013 12:36, John Thornton <bjt...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> I like python and find it easier to understand and write programs in > > > > I find Python to be rather confusing, especially when it tries to > > out-think me. (last night I discovered that it has a habit of adding > > a "self" parameter to a function call, for example). > > > > However, much of the new stuff I am working on will be in Python, > > because it is then easy for integrators to alter the behaviour to > > suit. Not because of the language, but because it is interpreted not > > compiled. > > > > I would probably be rather further along with the tooltable stuff if I > > wasn't learning SQL and Python (and C++) concurrently... > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > ------ This SF.net email is sponsored by Windows: > > Build for Windows Store. > > http://p.sf.net/sfu/windows-dev2dev > _______________________________________________ > Emc-developers mailing list > Emc-developers@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers Cheers, Gene -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene> is up! My views <http://www.armchairpatriot.com/What%20Has%20America%20Become.shtml> Death rays don't kill people, people kill people!! A pen in the hand of this president is far more dangerous than 200 million guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by Windows: Build for Windows Store. http://p.sf.net/sfu/windows-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list Emc-developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers
