6 May
2017
6 May
'17
8:40 a.m.
On 2017-05-05 10:16 PM, Noel Hunt wrote:
...
Donald Knuth wrote a long, beautifully crafted program in some
pseudo-code. Doug McIlroy provided an alternative solution:
Much as I love Professor Knuth, he is still doing this. He always was a
low level coder*, and his programs are longer and more complicated than
the high level equivalents, by the expected factors. (If anyone doubts
it, note that he adopted C after Pascal, and many of his programs are
linked from his web pages.) No doubt he has solid rationalisations for
taking this approach for his purposes, but of course it's not ideal for
all situations.
--Toby
* - Many of us will remember we were expected to understand TAOCP
through MIX. And he started out like this:
http://www.catonmat.net/blog/donald-knuths-first-computer/