Charles Angelich wrote in a message to Bob Stout:

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. :-)

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



>> Q: Is this how you interpreted those events at the time or am I the 
>> only one who saw GPL as a 'negative' overall? 

BS> I've always viewed GPL as an abomination. It accomplishes little 
BS> other than muddying the waters.

CA> I remember that the majority of programmers actively sharing code 
CA> at one time were very much against GPL and considered Stallman an 
CA> outsider (as primarilly a mainframe programmer) who wasn't entitled 
CA> to interject his philosophy into what he really wasn't a part of.

CA> At one point GNU seemed to have died but the popularity of Linux 
CA> brought GNU back from the dead. Apparently Stallman could smell the 
CA> blood?

BS> I bet Stallman is really popular around 
BS> Christmas/birthday/anniversary/etc. times - "Here's your gift and 
BS> here's the list of what you can and can't do with it." 

CA> I like that, saved to disk. ;-)

Yeah.

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

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



BS> The only thing you can tell from a "Hello world" program is the 
BS> size of the essential C runtime components. I've found it tells you 
BS> little about a compiler's overall ability to produce tight code. 

CA> I agree that you can 'see' the size of the runtime components but 
CA> there are so many other ways a compiler can produce bloat that it 
CA> seems only relevant for embedded where they tend to count bytes. 
CA> ;-)

Old habits die hard.

And yes,  I still have some 2102 ram chips,  just in case I need some.  :-)

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

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

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.html

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

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