Re: [OT] Antikythera mechanism [was Re: Do have programs have poor documentation?]
On Sat, Dec 31, 2016 at 11:11 AM, Miles Fidelman
<mfidelman@meetinghouse.net> wrote:
> Talk about a thread going South! (Perhaps we can get back to bashing
> systemd?)
There's a chuckle.
> On 12/30/16 7:07 PM, deloptes wrote:
>>>
>>> In what way is the Antikythera mechanism not a computer? And where did
>>> your 400 years come from?
Without a functioning Antikythera mechanism, we really can't answer
that question in a useful manner. However, I could guess that I could
not program that machine with anything that looks like a full C
compiler.
(Guess. For all we know, there were nanotech mechanical CPUs in the
thing before the seawater made it non-functional.)
Subset C, maybe. The difference is important.
>> I understand what you mean, but it was in the last 400y that this machine
>> took shape. In fact it was Turing that defined it. But he would not be
>> able
>> to define it if it was not the mathematicians before him. I agree with you
>> as well, we could go to the roots of mathematics, however even if the
>> definition of such a machine was so old, it wouldn't be possible to build
>> it without the technical advantage, so ... I still think my statement is
>> true. You can argue as long as you will.
>
>
> Well, you kind of forget:
> Joseph Jacquard (and maybe Basile Bouchon)
> not to mention Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelance
> Alonzo Church.
> And of course, John von Neumann (if you want to talk actual hardware
> architecture)
Interesting thing about the siggie and the above.
> --
> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
> In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
Intel really still wants us to believe that the 8086, because it was
Turing complete -- other than the memory limitation (cough) -- was
equivalent to the 68000. Nobody in their right mind used an 8086 to
control an engine, however. (But we do now use subsets of the Power PC
architecture and variations of the SH architecture.)
You can program PLAs in something that looks like a subset of C, but
it's not the same.
You can construct a CPU with a PLA, but you can get much more energy
efficiency and much better CPU speed by laying out the various CPU
parts as dedicated blocks of logic.
On the converse, simulating a switch grid with a CPU introduces
serious inefficiencies, as well.
Different classes of complexity. Programming, but not the same kind of programs.
The info system is another example. Very powerful, but I didn't want
to have to learn the info system just to wade through the info info
pages. It was very intuitive for someone who already had certain
keyboard habits, but not for the rest of us. Keyboard macros are not
the same thing as Forth or LISP primitives or M4 or cpp macrose.
html is a bit less obtuse than info, less concise, and a shallower
learning curve.
And plain text coupled with the apropos command (man -k), with the
in-page search function, still get me a lot farther into something
new, quicker, than info files. Much less keyboard dancing.
My personal vote for the original topic is man 7, as someone else
mentioned. (Yes, the man pages did, from back in the system 6 days,
even, include a _little_ bit of tutorial.)
--
Joel Rees
I'm imagining I'm a novelist:
http://reiisi.blogspot.jp/p/novels-i-am-writing.html
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