Date   : Tue, 19 Jul 2011 07:04:44 +0200
From   : rick@... (Rick Murray)
Subject: GoMMC as a harddisc?

On 19/07/2011 00:36, J.G.Harston wrote:

> Only one computer? How do you write inter-computer communication code
> with only one computer?  ;)

Mom: What do you want to do that for?

Trust me, you can't argue mom-logic. The best thing to do is pretend to 
be listening. ;-)


> For ages I had to make do with a single BBC B with four sockets,

I presume you mean four EPROM sockets? The problem, I think, is we've 
become lazy and complacent. Memory wasn't a big issue on the RISC OS 
machines so you could splurge. Hell, it was "more efficient" to 
implement bitfields as word arrays, never mind wasting thirty one bits 
to hold the value of one, wasting obscene amounts of memory. These days? 
My mobile phone's memory card is smaller than most of my fingernails 
(microSD) and holds 8Gb...

Beeb work is sometimes an exercise in pain, but at the same time it is 
an exercise in frugality. It makes you think about how you're going to 
code, instead of "let's reserve array elements in multiples of a hundred 
to reduce clobbering the free space pool" [*] and suchlike.


You know, VB5 (and 6? later?) doesn't have any binary shift 
instructions. Sure, it isn't hard to fake [**], but the point is a 
language that doesn't do such basic things as shifting probably has a 
memory allocation system that would make a grown man cry. And then 
there's the idea of the "Variant" type. Um...


Best wishes,

Rick.

* - ...because I'm too mentally messed up to bother to do it as a
        linked list structure.

**- I've actually seen:
        ' shift left four times
        myvar = ((((myvar * 2) * 2) * 2) * 2)
     I bet that calls the mul code four times. <smirk> um <sigh>

-- 
Rick Murray, eeePC901 & ADSL WiFI'd into it, all ETLAs!
BBC B: DNFS, 2 x 5.25" floppies, EPROM prog, Acorn TTX
E01S FileStore, A3000/A5000/RiscPC/various PCs/blahblah...