Comments by "Peter Lund" (@peterfireflylund) on "Computerphile" channel.

  1. Probably 'cause they aren't just integers. They are abstract references that may be implemented as simple integers... or they may not.
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  2. Tratt, I've been a fan of your writing (and some of your research) for years! The work you did on the (missing) warm up of JITs with the PyPy guys is downright amazing :) (The stuff I'm not a fan of? Mostly the style of language you chose for your Converge language -- I agree with pretty much all your goals for it, of course. De gustibus non est disputandum...)
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  3. SIM cards? Java bytecode, I think.
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  4. TEMPEST.
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  5. The Enigma was simple enough to (almost) explain and the breaking of it was declassified a long time ago. The Tunny break was only declassified recently (and it was much more complicated). There was no public information until recently about the British codes (and how easily most of them were broken by the Germans). And the Enigma has Turing, of course.
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  6. But the raw formats are very easy to write decoders for, so I don't see a problem.
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  7. Unindented K&R?  Really? ;)
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  8. There are surprisingly many useful variations of linked lists. They could easily make 20 videos and not cover all of them.
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  9. Yes, the 80188 and 80186 from 1982 were microcontroller versions of the 8088 and 8086. They had on-chip timers, DMA controllers, interrupt controller, clock generator, and wait state generator. No UARTs or A/D converters, though. There were plenty of 8051 variants with UARTs and A/D converters and lots of other goodies.
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  10. @Walther Penne you don’t seem to know what you are talking about.
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  11. You measure a noisy physical process. For example something related to thermal noise in a resistor or the timing of keyboard input by the user.
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  12. No to both base 2 and to integer. And the memory location, too, come to think of it. Abstraction is hard but crucial.
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  13. It's not hard to ease those restrictions a little. That's what Anders Hejlsberg did with Poly/Turbo Pascal more or less from the start. It worked very, very well -- but gave some of the pointer problems that C has. Not as many, for Pascal has "var" parameters, proper arrays that don't look suspiciously like pointers, and Poly/Turbo Pascal had real strings. That removes many of the uses of pointers in C. There are other ways of doing it as well. Wirth explored some of them in his successor languages. Modula-2 has a type called Address for raw machine addresses (and a module just for bare metal access to the machine). Making pointers totally safe is a really hard problem that we are only beginning to solve well now. It requires some pretty fancy type theory. The only practical language right now that gives us safe pointers -- that are actual pointers -- is Rust.
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  14. Ah, but don't you want A to be the LSB and B to be the MSB? And you wouldn't put the B column before the A column, would you? (Yeah, it annoyed me too.)
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  15.  @michaelsommers2356  The actual NSA documents on the Lorenz machine(s) are from the 60’s but they were only declassified recently. I looked them up. Your claim was absurd.
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  16. You see the >>, right?
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  17. Pointers are chapter 5. They are not hard at all.
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  18. Look at the colours of the switches.
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  19. Ray Kent valves were fast... but expensive. So machines back then were bit serial. Internal registers could use valves (expensive) or acoustic delay lines (slowish). Delay lines didn’t have to use a liquid. A metal wire worked fine. An add instruction involved more than just reading a value from the drum a bit by bit and adding it to some other number in a register... so the drum did move a bit during the add. It moved more during a multiply. Some kind of floating-point support wasn’t unusual at the time, which was even slower.
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  20. It's basically one line = one card. There would be special start/stop cards. The order of the cards was VERY important. People would use a thick marker pen and draw a diagonal line across the side of the deck of cards, once it was in the right order. The line makes it very easy to check that the order is correct -- and because it was hand drawn, you could also see if you had mixed in cards from another deck. Sometimes the deck was large, so you would draw several diagonal lines all the way down the stack, usually "overlapping", usually at different angles (one really long one from top to bottom so you could see the overall order, shorter ones angled much less horizontally so you could see the "local" order).
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  21. No, it isn't. They are almost all Europeans.
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  22. QDIGS06 mr Davis didn’t hold a candle to Carmack.
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  23. That doesn't explain the left thumb.
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  24. Wirth's Pascal barely had any I/O... The Pascal you are talking about come about much later.
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  25. I do -- "The Cerberus C semantics".
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  26.  @michaelsommers2356  No. So what are you leaving out?
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  27. There is a great treatment of them in TAoCP. It’s somewhere around page 20 in one of the volumes.
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