andyvanee

Software Engineers assume that your data can be ordered logically. This assumption is built in to the file system. They assume that it's an easy task, but that it's best left to the user. Better than imposing an order that doesn't make sense for some users. ...

After reading "The Art Of UNIX Programming" again, it's got me thinking about the nature of the technological explosion that has happened since the quaint days of mainframes and text-based consoles. ...

I’m away from my Linux box and want to do some assembly programming. Mac installs GCC with the developer tools, but there are enough differences that I haven’t bothered to work through them until now. Here’s a decent tutorial, although it focuses on PPC assembly and I’m using an Intel Mac. The thing that frightened me about the Mac assembler was the default output of gcc -S. There is some strange optimizations and flags in the resulting assembly code. The key, as the tutorial points out, is in the compiler options. Here’s what I used on the ubiquitous “Hello World” program: ...

disclaimer: I copied this from my old blog. Not sure if it actually works:) My calculator code was quite easily polished up. Here’s the revised code which stacks operands properly and supports the main arithmetic operators +, -, * , /. If you flush the stack completely, you get a “nan” warning, which seems reasonable. Here’s the code: (gas, x86) ...