Hi, 13.08.2025 14:37:21 Alyssa M via 9fans <[email protected]>: > On Tuesday, August 12, 2025, at 2:40 PM, sirjofri wrote: >> Honestly, I really like typedef and goto, at least the way they are used in >> Plan 9 code. > > As someone once said: "if you want to go somewhere, a goto is the quickest > way to get there." I can't argue with that. But I haven't used a goto in a > long time now: see https://xkcd.com/292 :-) > Looking at their grammars, I think Zig has no goto statement! Neither does > Rust from the look of it. Not surprisingly (given the origin of the above > quote) Go does, however, and so possibly puts you at the risk of raptor > attack... ;)
My goal is to write code as simple as possible. In general, reading code is way more important than writing it, and with some training you can write code that you can also read/understand a few years later. With that in mind, I try to maintain quite short functions, usually my functions are way shorter than the window height of my acme, which is not even the full size of my screen. Since C gotos are per function scope, that's usually enough to see all the gotos and all the labels without scrolling. > On Tuesday, August 12, 2025, at 2:40 PM, sirjofri wrote: >> I never understood why people have so much trouble understanding pointers, >> so maybe I'm the weird guy. > > I feel a good grasp of assembly language/machine code is important for > programmers. Without that I'd never really feel I had my feet on the ground. > I think pointers and addresses are much harder to understand in the abstract. I'd like to see learning material or a course that starts at these basic things. Like, tell people what a transistor is and how it works, explain to the the fundamentals of a (simple) CPU, maybe on a breadboard. Then start to dive into programming by actually programming that machine as if you're driving a car or knitting socks, and so on. If someone has any experience with an approach like that (from a teaching perspective), I'd like to know more about it. > One of these days I'd like to write a 9P server in LOLcode > (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOLCODE). It's on my bucket list :) > Something like: > IM IN YR NAMESPACE > I HAS A msg ITZ A Fcall > I IZ convM2S YR msg AN YR buffer MKAY > BOTH SAEM msg'Z type AN Twalk, O RLY? > YA RLY, > ... > OIC > KTHXBYE > > But it would have to run on Plan 9, FTW, and someone would have to port the > interpreter... Not sure which esoteric languages work on plan 9. Could be fun though. I also like the concept of java2k. > On Tuesday, August 12, 2025, at 4:58 PM, ron minnich wrote: >> The acid test for portability, for me, is simple: if it can run on Plan 9 >> and Unix and WIndows and OSX and bare metal, it's portable. Anything else is >> not. Honestly, I like that idea. > I gather LOLcode runs on Unix, Windows and OSX, and has been stable for > longer than Zig has existed. Or Go for that matter... > IM IN YR BIOS > ... > Please no! I'm a bit surprised that zig is that unstable. That's sad to hear. sirjofri ------------------------------------------ 9fans: 9fans Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Ta74fdc99bf0151a0-M88937bb236a6a86e9dd94b5a Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
