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Re: P-Source: A Guide to the Apple Pascal System



mdj wrote:
On Nov 27, 3:38 pm, David Schmenk <dschm...@YUCH.gmail.com> wrote:


One thing I've found out during this exercise is that current Java
technology has really segmented itself.  There are all sorts of versions
out there to try and satisfy each market.  A small device that runs Java
has megabytes of memory and a 32 bit processor.  Nano device have ~200K
memory and 16 bit processors.  Many of the small devices and almost all
the nano devices have specialized build procedures that massage the Java
class files into a more palatable native format.  Doesn't that run
counter to the write once, debug everywhere goal?  The standard class
library gets progressively smaller as the device shrinks, too. In the
end, I think its a testament what the p-system was able to pull off with
the technology available.


Yeah, the only real advantage is having one source language across
virtually every device, but you're right, the 'tiny' implementations
are pretty light on for class libraries.

Having said that, it's interesting to note that what was a 'tiny'
device a few short years ago (eg. a Cell Phone) can, thanks to
technology progression, now run the entire J2SE implementation, so the
benefits become greater as technology improves and today's embedded
device matches yesterdays desktop for computing power.

Riding the Moore's "Law" wave has become such a way of life in
the software business that it's hard to believe that anyone ever
struggled to produce finely crafted code.  ;-)

And now it will be hard to adapt to the new reality:

We can no longer expect that the processing capacity of our code
will be sped up by a relentless increase in thread execution speed.
Now that the uniprocessor wave is over, we need to be planning for
larger, and variable, numbers of processors running our (still very
serialized) code--like, more than 50...

Unfortunately, "threads" as currently conceptualized, are a relatively
poor abstraction for expressing the fractal parallelism that is needed.

-michael

NadaPong: Network game demo for Apple II computers!
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it's seriously underused."