Re: How do I write directly to a memory address?

[Shark8 <onewingedshark@gmail.com>]

On Feb 9, 7:51 pm, "Randy Brukardt" <ra...@rrsoftware.com> wrote:
> "Shark8" <onewingedsh...@gmail.com> wrote in message
>
> news:7ee1e395-a885-4f86-a3ed-30f773b67803@y12g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
> On Feb 8, 5:03 pm, "Randy Brukardt" <ra...@rrsoftware.com> wrote:
> ...
>
>
>
> >> Lest you think I'm talking about mythical other people, let me say that I
> >> put Janus/Ada (written almost solely in Ada) in the category of garbage
> >> Ada
> >> programs. It was designed by people (including me, fresh out of college)
> >> that didn't understand encapsulation and contracts very well, and as such
> >> it
> >> doesn't use them very consistently. It "works", of course, but it suffers
> >> from a lot of the problems that you might get from a C written compiler.
> >> With one exception: virtually every problem is detected by the failure of
> >> an
> >> Ada runtime check, so it is rare to get the wrong answer as opposed to no
> >> answer.
>
> >Intriguing self-assessment on Janus/Ada.
> >If you don't mind my asking, if you were to scrap-redo the compiler
> >what would you do differently?
> >Assuming you'd be using Ada, would you implement it in Ada 2012?
>
> The last part is easy, yes, of course. Nothing better has appeared, and I
> don't think some one-off language would be a good choice.
>
> The main thing to redo would be to organize the units and interfaces in some
> logical way. We had to work around various arbitrary constraints in the
> early days -- to get the compiler to fit at all on CP/M systems and 16-bit
> MS-DOS systems. That's led to a forest of packages with poorly defined
> interfaces (because putting everything related in one package would have
> been too large for what was compilable on MS-DOS). Moreover, people always
> "cheat" for expediency -- they directly call supposely internal routines
> because they can. (Ada 83 didn't have anything like private packages; we
> used subunits when we could, but they were only effective for large
> subprograms.) Getting rid of that would be good. Finally, there is a lot of
> duplicated algorithms, mainly because we couldn't spare the space to store
> little used values.

I definitely see how that (private packages) could help. This may
be a dumb question but could those duplicated algorithms have
been into a single generic procedures / functions and then
instantiated where needed?

> >Also, in your opinion what's the best thing to do to really understand
> >encapsulation and contracts?
>
> I'm not sure. I didn't really figure it out until I had been burned enough
> by bad ones. :-) And we had experience using a "modular" language at the
> University of Wisconsin (the original Modula), so we already had a vague
> idea of what benefits it could bring.

I see.I get the same feeling [vague idea of benefits] when I think how
an OS with a mind to strong-typing, that logical organization of
units,
and a very object (and stream) oriented would be different n-nature
than
virtually all consumer level OSes.

If you're hiring for a rewrite, I'd be especially interested.
Actually, I
would really love to get in on an Ada shop if possible, so if you are
hiring at all I'm interested.