[Gllug] Advice on getting on the career ladder for c and linux

[Formi]

On Sat, 15 Mar 2003, Nix wrote:

> On Thu, 13 Mar 2003, James de Lurker mused:
> > It doesn't seem that long ago that Hitachi brought out "compiler" tools
> > that first made C coding for tiny micros a realistic proposition.
>
> For DSPs, even C is grossly impractical; the instruction sets are so
> weird and the memory-capacity so limited that assembler is the only
> practical proposition.
>
> (The MAS3587F inside the MP3-playing box next to me , for instance, has
> 4K of code memory, 4K of `coefficient' memory (i.e. data space), 256
> registers, and if I read the data sheet right[1], has assembler
> instructions to do things like Fourier analysis. I doubt many C
> compilers would know how to use *that* instruction, but its use is
> absolutely critical to the sort of code one writes on there...)

 I'm a person who likes to be minimalistic, (even my manners are),
 but can I be told why those chips use that minute amount of memory,
 knowing about prices of hardware nowadays...

 I can come out with several possible reason, but I'll refrain from
 becaming the laughing stock of the list for just this once..

 I passed my assembler exam, and believe me it was really difficult,
 because we were only taught the minimum amount of instructions to be
 able to code it. And there was no error margin, appart we were just given
 a piece of paper where to write the code.

 It was really basic, something like do in assembler the following

 if a > b

   print "a is bigger than b"

 else

 print "b is b"


 If you put it in context that it was a course in "Business Computing"
 secondary technical school, 2 years, and the rest of it consisted in
 computing maths, commercial maths, accountancy, databases, word perfect,
 basic cobol, pascal and dbase III, the assembler exam was way too much.

 It was geared to provide "clued" secretaries for small businesses, I did
 it because there was that or uni, nothing more.

 I passed the course with good marks, some people had trouble understanding
 some DOS commands. Obviously they managed to pass the DOS exam, guess
 what happened with the assembler one...

 I won't mention what somebody did to said teacher.


 Formi
 FreeBSD 4.7 ThinkPad 570               He who for pleasure dies,
 Linux Registered User #235743                 even death enjoys.

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