[sclug] The C Lang is not machine readable

Alex Butcher lug at assursys.co.uk
Sat Jun 25 21:58:39 UTC 2005


On Sat, 25 Jun 2005, Graham wrote:

> Top-posted from
>> Subject: [sclug] Building very large packages?
>
> 	The problem with the (AST) world today is ... machine readability yesterday
>
> 	The C language is not machine readable.
> 	Makefiles are not, nor shell, Tcl, Pascal, ASM, ...
>
> 	Compilers and bin/make process the files, but they dont _UNDERSTAND_ them.

Sounds to me as if you're talking about Literate Programming
<http://vasc.ri.cmu.edu/old_help/Programming/Literate/literate.html> as
"popularised" by Donald Knuth.

Or is that diametrically opposed to what you're suggesting, and that we
should be writing x86 machine code (_not_ assembly) directly? Or writing
Java bytecode directly for Java processors?

Best Regards,
Alex.
-- 
Alex Butcher      Brainbench MVP for Internet Security: www.brainbench.com
Bristol, UK                      Need reliable and secure network systems?
PGP/GnuPG ID:0x271fd950                         <http://www.assursys.com/>


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