Charles Angelich wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:

CA>> The older Pacific C (K&R) would fit on one 1.4meg floppy which I  
CA>> thought was a hoot! Being K&R became a 'stopper' but it was neat 
CA>> that you could put it on one floppy. :-) 

RJT> Are you saying here that it being K&R rather than ANSI made it 
RJT> less useful to you? Or am I mis-reading your comment here? 

CA> Yes, it became less useful when code was no longer written as K&R.

Well,  I guess depending on what I was trying to do I could live with it. 
  Not that I do all that much programming these days...

CA> --8<--cut 

RJT> I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels this way... I'm also 
RJT> getting *real* tired of reaching for a man page and being told 
RJT> that the bloody man page "is no longer being maintained and I 
RJT> should look at the info pages instead"...! 

RJT> It's got me aggravated enough that I'm about ready to convert that 
RJT> info stuff to some other format, and get it off my system! 

CA> I was a bit perplexed when adding manpage functions to a 
CA> mini-install to find there were _two_ of them (info, and 'man').

It's sorta like those folks that are saying that because I want to run
linux I should learn how to use vi,  or worse yet,  emacs.  I'm used to the
kind of convenience I had with qedit under dos,  or vdo2 under cp/m (a 4k
executable!).  Or WordStar,  for that matter,  where the design made one
heck of a lot of sense -- I can do things a *lot* faster if I can keep my
hands in normal touch typing position and not have to be reaching for
function keys and similar stuff.

CA> --8<--cut 

CA>> The hardware we all have (even me) and the software we use daily 
CA>> is so bloated that size has to double before anyone gets 
CA>> uncomfortable and even then it's considered a speed bump by most 
CA>> (yes, even me).

RJT> I still like lean and streamlined code, and stuff that runs that 
RJT> has "snap" to it. I managed that with what little programming I 
RJT> did under cp/m, way back when, and prefer to do similar stuff 
RJT> these days, when I can manage it. 

CA> I like tight code but the time for kudos for writing tight code has 
CA> long since passed an I am reluctant to put in the time/effort 
CA> required to produce it.

Yeah,  way back when hardware was expensive,  and the time of programmers
was cheap.  Now it's the other way around.  But just because you _can_ use
up big chunks of resources to get something done in a hurry doesn't mean
that I want to.  And since I'm doing this for my own pleasure,  I'll
structure things that way when I can.

Heck,  even now loading just about anything under KDE takes way too long. 
I'm less and less inclined to do things there for the most part.

CA>> For anyone reading this message that is truly interested in the 
CA>> size of binaries this one programmer's story about how he managed 
CA>> to reduce the size of a binary might be interesting reading. When 
CA>> I read this website it reminded me of similar discussions that I 
CA>> followed between Unix C programmers many many years ago. 

CA>> (from a link at my tech website): 

CA>> http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.ht

RJT> Where on your site? I was there earlier, though I left before I 
RJT> got done looking around... 

CA> The link exists on the "compiler" webpage. 

Ok,  I was poking around there and hit one link that took me elsewhere,  at
which point I got caught up in that and never made it back.  I'll get back
in there at some point and poke around some more...

---