Say no to "GOTO"

Dijkstra says so. Read this article published in ACM,1968. So does Niklaus Wirth, designer of PASCAL in his Good Ideas article. Donald Knuth, in his war against GOTO, thinks, almost unambiguously, that the appearance of 'GOTO' in any language is a sure sign of bad design.

Hacker's Delight!

Get this book - Hacker's Delight.

HURD

Maybe I'll deal with GNU HURD in several parts. First let me get off the little excitement of having used Qemu image of Hurd. Ofcourse it is tiny, yet something is up on my screen. Not much, yet something is up.

I  tried to boot hurd iso image using qemu. Incase you haven't heard qemu, it is a portmanteau for quick emulator - pretty fast and neat. Also, for those of you who are still wondering what HURD is, it is a non-linux like kernel designed to replace all linux flavours. It uses mach micro-kernel and is designed to support multi-core-processing and multi-tasking. It hates the orthogonal view of files which was made popular by unix. It tries to do everything via ports.

I tried to capture the boot messages using vnc viewer.  Had to disable AutoSelect option given my gnome settings. One can see mach micro kernel in the first screen shot (enlarge it). I can go pages and pages on its design and on how it is struggling to replace UNIX/Linux (virtually every *ix) but all my talk will still be a poor replica of the Hurd documentation.


Couldn't stop myself from wondering why hurd sounds more like absurd!

Super Optimization

Except for the 'super' in superoptimization, there is actually nothing much super in super optimizers. Take a look at wiki and Denali. GNU Super Optimizer - GSO, is another effort.