00:22:01 <lament> wow, a creationist troll in #C
00:22:31 <calamari_> what does #c have to do with religion?
00:25:02 <calamari_> do you have it? you could start quoting "verses"
00:36:54 <fizzie> have been reading comp.lang.c tonight, seems that they often ask "can we have chapter and verse for that?" when people state facts and non-facts.
00:40:18 <calamari_> best I could find from amazon.com :)
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05:57:43 <Keymaker> Hello everyone; haven't been here ever before, and excuse me my bad English.
06:04:59 <lament> that's ok, english is a hard language :P
06:05:14 <lament> And I expect our Finnish is worse than your English
06:05:35 <lament> That's why I said Finnish
06:07:16 <Keymaker> Hmmm, too bad I have to go now. I'll come back sometime later, goodbye everyone.
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12:40:24 <Keymaker> Are you 1.) discussing privately or 2.) just idling? :)
12:53:32 <mtve> we can also discuss something publicly :)
12:55:50 <Keymaker> Well, what language you're interested most about?
12:58:47 <mtve> me? mmm, befunge of esoterics, perl.
13:00:29 <Keymaker> i just read something about befunge, gotta say i didn't understand anything :O but it seemed interesting
13:08:21 <Keymaker> But well, I think I'll go to do some coding or play Commander Keen, cya.
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14:55:47 <Keymaker> I just realized (=read) Befunge code is in 2d table. No wonder the code looked so cryptic before. :)
15:02:17 <mtve> it's fairly simple in fact.
15:03:11 <fizzie> simple, yes, but the lack of functions makes it messy. you "can" simulate functions by directing code flow manually, but it's.. not fun.
15:03:50 <Keymaker> by the way, where does the code start?
15:03:59 <Keymaker> from some corner or is there some symbol for it?
15:04:08 <fizzie> (0, 0), going left-to-right, does it not.
15:04:41 <fizzie> mooz has that funky qsort example which I think shows that most non-trivial algorithms in befunge are.. messy.
15:05:08 <Keymaker> i might take a look at it later :)
15:05:32 <fizzie> at http://quux.befunge.org/qsort.html if you want.
15:05:37 <fizzie> syntax-highlighted, even.
15:06:28 <Keymaker> wow, probably wasn't pretty easy to code that one..
15:11:49 <fizzie> hm, since when have I had this '@' character in front of my name and why? it's scary. if I make an U-turn I might hit it and it'd terminate this program. (assuming life works like befunge. would think it does.)
15:18:04 <Keymaker> Before I realized not so many mins ago that Befunge consist of single characters like BF and the code is in table, I was pretty confused when I was trying to figure 'is there any logic in this language?'. I was trying to think what syntax and instructions it used and didn't realize the different instructions were in front of my eyes as single characters. :\ (sorry, I just had to say this now because I forgot to say this totally ^ up there)
15:19:24 <Keymaker> Probably it'll be better to search some info before looking at the code, for now on. :)
15:19:46 <mtve> check out first url from the topic
15:21:28 <Keymaker> you probably mean the cat's eye page about Befunge?
15:23:14 <mtve> yep. Chris is the author of befunge.
15:23:56 <mtve> http://catseye.mine.nu:8080/projects/befunge93/doc/befunge93.html
15:24:41 <Keymaker> hmm, is he in this room at the moment?
15:25:00 <mtve> nope, i havn't seen him here.
15:25:35 <mtve> also, looks like he's not interested in esoteric languages anymore but only in esoteric oses.
15:25:54 <mtve> operating systems
15:26:04 <mtve> i mean DragonFlyBSD
15:26:44 <Keymaker> ok - though, i don't know (yet) what it is
15:26:44 <fizzie> that sounds more like an esoteric drug than an operating system to me.
15:27:07 <fizzie> and if not that, then something from the BBS era.
15:28:16 <Keymaker> i'll stay with brainf#ck, but this befunge is just something i don't wanna miss :)
15:28:33 <Keymaker> is there any good interpreters/compilers?
15:28:57 <Keymaker> too bad i have to confess, i'm still using win :(
15:29:22 <fizzie> my befunge interpreters are on the opposite end of the spectrum from good.
15:30:33 <fizzie> there's glfunge98 which had Real Bugs (tm) and died before it even started (although someone apparently had time to make a HPUX-package of it), then there's "ff" which has few minor bugs too, although I've forgotten what they were, and then there's ff2 which I haven't even ever managed to compile.
15:30:51 <fizzie> I have, however, managed to make gcc eat ~1GB of memory while trying to compile the beast.
15:31:44 <fizzie> ff's in http://befunge.org/ff/, the rest I'm a bit too ashamed to mention.
15:32:35 <fizzie> usually if I have to run befunge(93) code, I'll just use mooz's interpreter. am not sure if it's in the interweb somewhere, though.
15:32:46 <fizzie> it's approximately as fast as ff, but lacks the bugs.
15:33:13 <Keymaker> that's big plus (lack of bugs)
15:33:30 <fizzie> I've forgotten what the bugs in ff were.
15:33:54 <fizzie> at least it's not pretty c.
15:34:47 <fizzie> ff2 tried to take the ff approach a bit further, and also to compile without gcc.
15:35:07 <fizzie> end result was a mess of code that doesn't compile even with gcc.
15:35:47 <fizzie> although it seems to be relatively valid C. I tried to compile it with intel's c compiler, and it didn't issue any warnings or errors. it did, however, crash.
15:36:45 <fizzie> haven't tried to compile with gcc-3.x, though. might satisfy my curiosity now.
15:36:58 <fizzie> at least befunge beats actually working here at work.
15:39:01 <fizzie> currently j2me stuff for stupid multimedia mobile phones. I hates it. this was supposed to be done using the native c++ api symbianOS phones have, but in the middle of the "project", if it can be called that, 'they' decided "hey, we'll do the whole thing on j2me (although it will be ran only on symbian phones)"
15:40:10 <fizzie> who (besides lunatics and madmen) writes dsp-like code in _java_ to run on a _phone_? I don't want to know how slooooow this thing will run, if my guesses on the performance of the java VM are correct.
15:40:44 <fizzie> hey, gcc-3.1 compiled my ff2, in only 1:30 minutes.
15:42:09 <fizzie> you want to fix it? go see http://gehennom.org/~fizban/tmp/ff2.c
15:42:19 <fizzie> I definitely don't want to fix it.
15:42:36 <Keymaker> sorry, but i'm not really good coder :)
15:43:41 <Keymaker> hmmm, just wondering, how many here are actually from finland?
15:43:45 <fizzie> neither am I. the macros used in ff2 look really really sick, though.
15:43:54 <fizzie> just me and mooz, and you, I think.
15:45:07 <fizzie> well, three out of ~10 isn't too bad, I guess.
15:46:42 <Keymaker> hmmm, by the way, why c? why not c++?
15:47:00 <Keymaker> i think that's somehow simpler
15:47:09 <fizzie> c++ isn't my favourite programming language.
15:47:19 <fizzie> although I guess I could have made a big enough mess with c++ templates.
15:47:44 <fizzie> maybe I'll write ff++ next.
15:48:43 <Keymaker> if i have time enough ever i think i'll write somekind of brainf#ck interpreter
15:49:08 <fizzie> besides, when writing C++ I have this strangest urge to write well-structured, oo-like code.
15:49:48 <fizzie> I don't think I could've made myself write all those computed gotos in ff if it were c++.
15:49:51 <Keymaker> i just realized at the same moment i asked :)
15:50:31 <fizzie> this is probably one of those urls that keep circling around irc, but it was very convincing: http://www.j-walk.com/other/wifispray/
15:50:51 <fizzie> is that a rumble of thunder I hear? (or am I just hungry?)
15:51:39 <Keymaker> hmm, too bad probably not true :(
15:53:00 <fizzie> what, the wifi speed spray thing? how could it not be, there are _equations_ there.
15:53:39 <fizzie> besides, ted smith, todd smith, tina smith, toraido smith, theresa smith and tim smith all recommend it.
15:57:09 <Keymaker> it'd take me a lot time to read those funge specifications, but what is the biggest difference between befunge 93 and 98, or are they even same language?
15:57:38 <fizzie> it's 'funge 98', and yes, they are the same language.
15:57:45 <fizzie> funge98 just has a lot of extensions.
15:58:09 <Keymaker> well, i'll use the 93 one when i use this
15:58:12 <fizzie> dynamically loading extensions (that map on the uppercase characters), multi-threading, n-dimensionality, even time travel.
15:58:50 <fizzie> actually I'm not sure if any implementations offer n-funge. trefunge interpreters there probably are.
15:59:38 <fizzie> in/out in addition to left/right/up/down.
15:59:58 <fizzie> most probably don't implement the time travel extension either.
16:00:11 <Keymaker> that all goes too confusing :)
16:00:32 <fizzie> oh, and between '93 and '98 there was that funky funge with multithreading but a shared stack between all threads. (can't remember if it was '96 or '97)
16:00:44 <fizzie> a maybe not so good idea, that.
16:01:24 <Keymaker> i wonder is there any language that anyone hadn't had skills to write an interpreter or a compiler?
16:02:09 <fizzie> oh, and the IP delta (direction) doesn't need to be (1, 0), (0, 1), (-1, 0) or (0, -1) any longer, but it can be any vector with integer components.
16:02:28 <fizzie> which is a pretty lame thing to do, since it lets you jump around. too easy.
16:02:58 <fizzie> there's also the ';' "skip code until next ;" command, which I consider cheating too.
16:03:33 <Keymaker> there was that '#' that jumps over one?
16:03:43 <fizzie> not sure if funge98 included the hex-number-extension though. ('a', 'b', .. 'f' which would push 10, 11, .. 15.)
16:03:52 <fizzie> yeah, but that's too useful to remove.
16:04:25 <fizzie> mooz's mostly-befunge-93 interpreter for the ti-86 calculator family (bef86?) included [a-f].
16:05:25 <Keymaker> are those 1-9 (and a-f) kinda like variables in befunge?
16:05:39 <Keymaker> that one can save some number into those?
16:06:04 <fizzie> they just push the corresponding number to stack.
16:06:30 <fizzie> there are no variables, just the stack. oh, and you can write/read to/from the playfield.
16:06:48 <fizzie> oh, right, funge98 also includes the "stack stack"
16:07:05 <fizzie> where instead of a single stack you actually have a stack of stacks, and you can manipulate those.
16:07:58 <fizzie> kinda. oh, and it includes a "system information" command, which has the side-effect (can't remember if this was in the standard) that you can use it like the PICK word from forth.
16:07:58 <Keymaker> in some ways that 98 version makes the whole thing a lot easier, but also a lot more confusing if someone wants to use all the things possible in it
16:08:18 <fizzie> (if you're not familiar with forth, it just reaches into the stack and pulls out a number from an arbitrary depth.)
16:08:51 <fizzie> I hope it indeed was 'pick'.
16:08:56 <fizzie> haven't been doing forth much lately.
16:10:22 <fizzie> oh, and the playfield was redefined from the older "80x25-unit torus-grid" to "infinite lahey-space"
16:10:50 <Keymaker> so, in 93 there's 80x25 'cells' to play with?
16:11:30 <fizzie> in a strictly conforming befunge93 interpreter/compiler/thing, that is.
16:13:21 <Keymaker> some smaller limits in languages is what i've always liked
16:13:24 <fizzie> oh, and another difference: '93 had a defined 8-bit playfield and 32-bit stack. in funge98 the actual amount of bits is implementation-defined, but stack cells and playfield cells will be the same size.
16:13:45 <fizzie> mostly 32 bits, I guess.
16:14:27 <fizzie> but you can put anything from the stack to the playfield without having to worry about it being too big.
16:15:51 <Keymaker> it isn't pretty useful to have 32-bit stack and 8-bit playfield in 93'?
16:16:39 <fizzie> well, that's the way it is.
16:17:16 <fizzie> sorta-makes sense. the playfield is "text", composed of eight-bit octets, and the stack isn't 8-bit to allow you to calculate with larger numbers.
16:17:50 <Keymaker> actully it sounds pretty logical when you said it that way :)
16:19:23 <Keymaker> a bit off-topic, do you know any language that would have less instructions that bf's 8?
16:19:41 <fizzie> sure. I'm just bad in remembering these.
16:19:50 <fizzie> there was the one-instruction assembly language.
16:21:29 <Keymaker> hmm, now when i think about it probably some language could be made with three instructions probablu
16:21:55 <fizzie> one variant being a language with a single "substract and branch if negative" instruction.
16:22:02 <fizzie> http://www.hawaga.org.uk/text/oisc1.html
16:23:22 <fizzie> I probably heard about them first in the retrocomputing museum site linked from that page.
16:23:45 <fizzie> which has disappeared, it seems.
16:24:13 <fizzie> ah, just a broken link. google finds it easily enough.
16:26:14 <fizzie> I would recommend you to see the 'pilot' link there, but it seems to be broken.
16:26:28 <fizzie> severe link rot in the internet nowadays.
16:29:31 <fizzie> Don't blame me for the language design; I think it's wretched, too,
16:29:31 <fizzie> and I only did this implementation for the hack value. Finally, a
16:29:31 <fizzie> *real* language that's as perverse and limiting as INTERCAL...
16:29:42 <fizzie> writes esr in his pilot interpreter READ.ME file.
16:31:27 <fizzie> I'd recommend reading the standard and the comments.mm from the same pilot distribution, it was loads of fun, but I'm not sure finding those online would be very easy. it's IEEE standard 1154-1991.
16:32:13 <Keymaker> i'll try to see if i find something someday
16:32:19 <fizzie> esr's implementation is for example in gehennom.org/~fizban/tmp/pilot-1.7.tar.gz (since I found it in my ~/tmp/ still.)
16:32:37 <fizzie> I had the standard too, but I'm not sure where I put it.
16:33:00 <fizzie> it's not in ~/txt/ for some reason.
16:34:24 <fizzie> that standard number seems bogus.
16:34:40 <fizzie> "1154-1991.pdf archived [Bus Architecture/Microprocessor/Microcomputer]"
16:37:24 <fizzie> "1154-1991 IEEE Standard for Programmed Inquiry, Learning, or Teaching (PILOT)"
16:40:30 <Keymaker> it has been nice chatting, see you some other time :)
16:41:09 <fizzie> I'll abuse hut's IEEE account to re-fetch the standard since I seem to have terminally misplaced it.
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17:36:40 <lament> you guys have talked for pages and pages.
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20:01:23 <Keymaker> hmmm, does Daniel C., that brainf#ck coder, visit this place sometimes?
20:05:32 <fizzie> sometimes an apparition with the nickname 'dbc' indeed appears. usually it creates some sort of piece of ascii art.
20:06:17 <Keymaker> just thought it would be nice to talk him a bit sometime :)
20:07:01 <fizzie> for example, see what happens in the beginning of http://tunes.org/~nef/logs/esoteric/04.05.25
20:09:17 <fizzie> another example is http://tunes.org/~nef/logs/esoteric/04.04.29
20:13:04 <Keymaker> heh strange stuff, but well made
20:13:26 <Keymaker> i wonder if it's some brainfuck program that did those fractals?
20:44:21 <Keymaker> Just curiously asking; how old is this channel? I mean how many year you've been here?
20:45:14 <fizzie> I don't think it's been very long.
20:45:36 <fizzie> in one sets of my irc logs #esoteric.log was first opened Mon Dec 09 07:24:10 2002
20:48:04 <fizzie> hm, my lists/lang-eso email folder has 840 messages. wouldn't have thought it that active.
20:48:30 <Keymaker> is there any way to read those in web?
20:49:12 <fizzie> Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 06:08:17 +0000 (GMT)
20:49:17 <fizzie> Subject: [chat] Re: Esolang IRC channel
20:49:22 <fizzie> OK, so now we can be found at OPN, #esoteric (it's ours!).
20:50:05 <fizzie> http://esoteric.sange.fi/archive/ should have the list archives.
20:50:19 <fizzie> although it's been pretty silent lately.
21:11:21 <mooz-> quux.befunge.org/jsbef for all your online computation needs :)
21:12:19 <mooz-> mainly it's the only useful debugger I know that works in linux
21:18:44 <fizzie> except the glfunge98 debugger, which exists in approximately .2% of the parallel universes. not in this one, unfortunately.
21:19:54 <mooz-> for wumpus cave generation, jsbef is a lot slower than bef86
21:20:28 <fizzie> "the de-facto befunge93 benchmark"
21:20:34 <mooz-> all that javascript optimisation and still a 10000x speed difference compared to simple assembly
21:20:40 <fizzie> although I've always used fibre when comparing interpreters.
21:25:57 <fizzie> which maybe isn't the most balanced befunge program ever written.
21:26:06 <fizzie> doesn't measure stringmode speed at all, for example. :p
21:26:48 <mooz-> well, put/get may have "unnecessary" penalties
21:26:57 <mooz-> like checking for illegal memory accesses :P
21:29:16 <mooz-> and a JIT style intepreter would have to do a lot of processing to deal with self-modification
21:31:45 <fizzie> wonder how lindi's x86 compiler thing is doing.
21:39:19 <lament> i _almost_ wrote a befunge debugger
21:39:47 <lament> well, i wanted to write one.
21:39:47 <mooz-> I wrote one with single stepping in C and got bored :)
21:42:27 <mooz-> if that qualifies as almost, then all the almosts over the world should qualify as several quite functionals :)
21:43:27 <fizzie> you wrote the ti-86 debugger thing, and a ti-86 befunge interpreter. combine these two and you have a befunge debugger.
21:43:39 <fizzie> maybe not the easiest one, but still.
21:43:50 <lament> mooz-: you wrote the ti86 interpreter?
21:44:15 <lament> i've sort of looked at it
21:44:41 <lament> but it was very impressive :)
21:45:05 <mooz-> yeah I think it crashes if there are no befunge programs on the calculator :>
21:45:16 <fizzie> I've played hunt-the-wumpus with it during boring math lectures in was-it-now-high-school-or-what-oh-the-school-systems-are-so-different-everywhere.
21:45:47 <lament> i deleted it because actually _editing_ befunge programs was such a pain
21:45:56 <fizzie> I don't think I've done anything else that would be considered useful with it.
21:46:18 <lament> i wrote a bf interpreter in ti-basic, but my physics substitute teacher deleted it :|
21:46:31 <lament> i never did revenge him
21:46:43 <mooz-> that's horrible :/
21:46:45 <fizzie> I wrote a 'furth' interpreter in ti-basic. a forth-clone/forth-based-language.
21:46:50 <lament> unless writing a combinatory logic interpreter qualifies as revenge
21:46:56 <lament> which it probably does
21:47:25 <lament> it understood s,k,i and * for output :)
21:47:45 <lament> and i nearly went mad designing it.
21:48:26 <mooz-> ti-basic is one of the worst flavors ever
21:49:02 <Keymaker> i haven't had a good change to test the language :( always too busy
21:49:15 <lament> it's sufficiently broken to be considered esoteric
21:50:06 <lament> especially if you use the calculator to input the code
21:50:39 <mooz-> I don't think there's any way to input characters like _ \ `
21:51:07 <mooz-> one has to make a string or basic program on the computer to do that :P
21:51:23 <fizzie> one way to do that is with the befunge interpreter and put, right?
21:51:50 <mooz-> and then freeze the state
21:52:52 <mooz-> so the frozen program contains the altered playfield
21:54:22 <lament> but the assembly wasn't exactly better :)
21:56:02 <mooz-> however the supplied coding method of typing hex values might not be optimal
21:56:14 <fizzie> but after you've managed to input them once, you can put them to custom menu and then you at least _can_ write befunge with the normal editor.
21:56:33 <fizzie> although programs with >=20-character lines were problematic.
21:56:46 <lament> i dunno about z80 being nice
21:57:05 <lament> maybe i just don't appreciate assembly
21:57:28 <lament> it would certainly be cool to hack together some custom hardware using a z80 as the brain
21:58:03 <lament> that would require learning so much stuff it's not even funny.
21:58:03 <fizzie> z80 felt definitely nicer to write for than for example 6502. not that I'd have done much with either.
21:58:48 <mooz-> lament; thought about that at some point, but abandoned the idea due to massively sucking in electronics :P
21:58:49 <fizzie> I have seven z80 cpus somewhere here, in case I ever felt like that. 'yleiselektroniikka' sold those for something like 0.50e/piece.
21:58:57 <lament> the most i have done in z80 was a program that converted a (hardcoded) number into a string like "three thousand eleven hundred fity one"
21:59:11 <lament> fizzie: not connected to anything?
21:59:32 <mooz-> an fpga platform from xilinx might be fun for practising with an fpga though
21:59:32 <fizzie> inside a plastic tube-like cover. not connected, no.
21:59:41 <mooz-> vhdl isn't that bad
21:59:43 <fizzie> my biggest z80 program is the md5 algo and OTP-key-calculator.
22:00:45 <fizzie> anyway, building custom stuff with a z80 is significantly harder than with pic-like chips. z80 cpu needs external memory and a set of supportive chips.
22:00:50 <mooz-> I was playing around with the idea of a chip for interpreting intercal
22:01:04 <mooz-> select and butterfly are ridiculously expensive
22:01:14 <mooz-> while a hardware butterfly is just some wires crossed
22:01:23 <fizzie> you were supposed to build us befunge processor, not intercal-optimized ones.
22:01:35 <mooz-> select is no more complex than a multiply
22:01:52 <mooz-> fizzie; yeah, but then thought it'd be slower than an interpreter running on a modern pc
22:01:53 <lament> fizzie: you know hardware/electronics stuff?
22:02:29 <fizzie> lament; no, but I have the z80 book from zilog somewhere, and after looking at it I indefinitely postponed any z80-based electronic-building-projects.
22:02:54 <mooz-> you gave the book to me I think :P
22:02:54 <fizzie> besides, I hate soldering stuff together, mainly because I so much suck at it.
22:03:09 <mooz-> there's definitely one book here that wasn't before
22:03:18 <lament> electronics stuff sounds so cool and exciting.
22:03:30 <mooz-> vhdl would be a sane way to do it
22:03:44 <fizzie> it sounds cool and exciting, but in the end you've left with a lump of solder and the smell of burning plastic.
22:03:52 <mooz-> no need to mess with any hardware, just write code and synthesize the logic :)
22:04:21 <mooz-> the existing test platforms have serial, parallel and vga ports
22:05:07 <lament> at the very least i want one of those small LCDs that one could hack to connect to the serial port and display uptime
22:05:22 <lament> but even that requires much more skills, knowledge and equipment than i posess :(
22:05:57 <fizzie> I have a 20x4 alphanumeric lcd here.
22:06:05 <fizzie> just waiting for someone to solder the connections. :p
22:06:25 <mooz-> soldering is a huge pain :/
22:06:45 <lament> you could get a breadboard
22:07:18 <mooz-> it was a pain just to solder some wires to a normal socket
22:07:29 <fizzie> you don't really need any _knowledge_ for that, though, the thing is directly interfaceable to a normal parallel port. 8 data lines into the chip, few status/output lines that can be tied into the parallel port control lines (out of paper, on/offline and stuff).
22:08:04 <lament> What do you have to solder then?
22:08:26 <fizzie> well, 12+ wires onto the lcd display, and the same wires into a d25 connector.
22:09:06 <mooz-> I think our attempt to solder 5 wires into one DIN resulted in 3 being connected at one point
22:09:13 <mooz-> then it went downwards again
22:09:24 <fizzie> and a 5-din connector is relatively big.
22:10:09 <lament> what equipment would i need to start with electronics stuff?
22:10:26 <lament> A soldering iron, a breadboard, a multimeter - is that all?
22:10:41 <mooz-> and some components, obviously
22:11:48 <fizzie> some 10+ years ago I built few of those "kit contains a pcb, the required components and assembly instructions" kits with a friend.
22:12:50 <lament> and then what happened?
22:12:54 <fizzie> of course soldering stuff into a pre-made pcb with ~1cm empty spaces between stuff I could accidentally mess up I managed to do.
22:14:18 <mooz-> I think the easiest way is to get a breadboard with pre-made connectors going in one direction
22:14:31 <mooz-> then a small drill for severing them as necessary
22:14:49 <fizzie> I have few pieces of that.
22:15:48 <mooz-> and some thin wire for doing connections in the perpendicular direction
22:16:22 <mooz-> that way soldering points can be as far apart as one wants
22:16:29 <lament> i have never even seen a breadboard, but they sure sound sexy
22:17:47 <mooz-> it helps to have a simple but important project
22:18:07 <mooz-> such as interfacing to a 1570 floppy drive :P
22:18:58 <lament> is that a floppy drive made in 1570?
22:19:14 <mooz-> it's for the C64/C128
22:19:29 <fizzie> gehennom.org/~fizban/tmp/lcd.jpg
22:19:54 <fizzie> there's a 20x4-character lcd screen.
22:20:10 <fizzie> the thing under it is a normal-sized cd so you could see the size.
22:20:37 <mooz-> doesn't seem to fit in a 5.25" drive bay
22:21:14 <fizzie> there's a row of 16 contacts, and I should attach and solder a wire into all of them, without any pieces of metal touching each other.
22:21:49 <fizzie> that's the main reason the display's not connected to anything and spends its time in a vaguely pink plastic bag under (other) heaps of junk here.
22:21:51 -!- Keymaker has quit.
22:21:52 <lament> where would all those wires lead to?
22:22:38 <mooz-> parallel port connector?
22:23:17 <fizzie> 8 would go to the output lines of a pc parallel port, "a few" (4? 5?) would go to the out/in/both status-lines of a pc parallel port, two would connect to a +5v dc power supply, and one would hold a potentiometer-thing controlling the brightness of the backlight.
22:25:56 <fizzie> you can check out http://www.powertip.com.tw/product/PC%20SERIES/PC%201602F.PDF if you really want to know.
22:27:03 <fizzie> I also had the programming instructions somewhere.
22:27:13 <lament> and from that pdf you're supposed to understand how to wire it?
22:27:40 <fizzie> well, from that and all the other documentation in the interweb about interfacing lcd displays with a pc parallel port.
22:28:18 -!- Toreun has joined.
22:29:38 <fizzie> like, uh, the stuff in http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~ih/doc/par/
22:30:14 <fizzie> it's not the "what wire goes where" aspect of this thing that causes trouble, it's the physical act of getting the damn things connected the way I'd want them to be.
22:31:36 <fizzie> actually I'd just want to write the code to control that thing.
22:31:46 <mooz-> * Tech Support: "Sir...the 286 chip is soldered on the motherboard!"
22:31:47 <mooz-> * Customer: "I know, I took out my handy soldering iron and took it out and put the 486 on myself."
22:31:47 <mooz-> * Tech Support: "Sir, the 486 is bigger than the 286."
22:31:47 <mooz-> * Customer: "I know, I had to use quite a bit of solder to solder the extra pins together."
22:31:54 <mooz-> I wish it worked like that
22:32:53 <fizzie> oh well. back in your pink plastic back you go, little lcd, to wait for better times.
22:33:13 <lament> your wife will do it for you
22:33:29 <fizzie> I was thinking more about the time when I have my very own robotic servant I can tell to do the soldering.
22:33:35 <fizzie> I think that's a far more likely outcome.
22:34:12 <fizzie> of course there's the problem that robots always turn against humans.
22:34:33 <fizzie> but maybe I could persuade it to solder my lcd display before it kills me.
22:34:49 <mooz-> probably 50/50 with those
22:35:18 <mooz-> same as robots, really
22:37:57 <mooz-> maybe you'll wait until you get a bald, green head, learn telekinesis, start wearing a skin-colored human mask and worship a large atomic bomb
22:38:02 <mooz-> it's bound to happen
22:38:18 <mooz-> (the telekinesis may then help)
22:39:53 <fizzie> I can learn telekinesis already.
22:40:15 <fizzie> I just need to buy a $30 CD, with superliminal hypnotic programming.
22:40:15 <fizzie> I learned this from the internet.
22:46:21 <fizzie> alt.folklore.computers tells of their variant of hexadecimal notation, where the digits were 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, K, S, N, J, F, L.
22:47:21 <fizzie> er s/their/a system called ORDVAC's/
22:50:36 <lament> what do those letters stand for?
22:54:07 <fizzie> no idea. selected presumedly for legibility reasons instead of the usual [a-f]set.
22:54:28 <fizzie> " Through arrangements made by Dean L. N. Ridenour, the University of Illinois began construction of ORDVAC about 15 April 1949"
22:54:49 <fizzie> that's my birthday, only 34 years earlier.
22:55:27 <fizzie> the arithmetic unit in it can do a multiply in 700 microseconds. impressive!
22:56:54 <fizzie> " When ORDVAC was delivered to the Ballistic Research Laboratory its input device was a standard-speed five hole teletype tape reader and its output a teletype page printer. With this equipment, the time necessary to load the entire memory of 1,024 addresses was 38 minutes. The time required to print the contents of the entire memory was the same."
22:57:03 <fizzie> things have definitely changed since then.
23:01:48 <fizzie> I'm not quite sure. it seems to use "electrostatic memory" built with cathode-ray tubes.
23:02:08 <lament> yes, but if the teletype reader had 5 holes
23:02:26 <fizzie> well, it's "1024 words"
23:02:55 <lament> it's logical that words would be 10-bit
23:03:03 <fizzie> 40-bit words, actually.
23:03:11 <lament> oh, fuck logic then :)
23:03:37 <fizzie> words sizes usually haven't had that much to do with logic.
23:03:42 <lament> so the total memory of 40960 bit?
23:03:58 <lament> fizzie: sure, but you need 10 bits to address a space of 1024 addresses
23:04:10 <fizzie> well, they later added an 10032-word magnetic drum.
23:04:34 <fizzie> yes, but you'd want to calculate with quantities >10 bits.
23:05:27 <fizzie> and even later replaced the electrostatic memory with a 4096--word 'magnetic core memory'.
23:06:03 <fizzie> I have somewhere here an orange book that tells how to convert algol-60 programs to fortran-2/4 programs.
23:06:46 <fizzie> it doesn't try to teach any of the languages, only what kind of fortran structures to convert algol structures to, and vice versa.
23:06:54 <lament> wow, http://www.norvig.com/palindrome.html
23:07:00 <fizzie> the book includes a few dozen pages filled with machine word sizes.
23:27:50 <mooz-> lament; I think there's finnish palindromes with several hundred words at least, which make up a semi-coherent story
23:28:47 <mooz-> that's more like a comma-separated list
23:29:57 <lament> probabyl because all finnish words are palindromes
23:30:19 <lament> they have the same general structure
23:30:20 <mooz-> english isn't very suitable for them and finnish is the best suited language I know, that is true
23:30:34 <lament> where V and V is the same vowel
23:30:39 <lament> and C and C is the same consonant :)
23:30:48 <mooz-> saippuakauppias is a word someone might seriously use
23:31:24 <Toreun> I saw a not-so-coherent english palidrome story that was about 2000 bytes long awhile ago
23:31:24 <lament> in some language the word 'palindrome' is a palindrome.
23:32:00 <lament> the word meaning the same as 'palindrome', rather :)
23:32:08 <lament> the word designating the concept of palindrome
23:33:22 <lament> "the word that means palindrome"
23:34:21 <fizzie> >In any case, does anyone remember any other variant forms of
23:34:21 <fizzie> >> hexadecimal inflicted on the long-suffering computer programmer?
23:34:22 <fizzie> on the first machine I ever programmed (or used), the mighty Monrobot XI
23:34:56 <lament> i think ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP would be neat
23:35:22 <lament> better yet, the 16 most common letters of the englihs alphabet
23:35:56 <lament> (i have implemented that as a "string encoding" once, for storing two characters in one byte)
23:36:19 <fizzie> mooz; wouldn't that be WizzooBar.
23:36:47 <mooz-> someone with the nick juuichiketajin posted a way to convert any number into a metasyntactic variable name
23:37:07 <fizzie> I have a sed script which does that for relatively big numbers.
23:38:32 <fizzie> errrr. did my brain just misfire? seems the sed script was about turning numbers to english text-representation.
23:38:51 <fizzie> but I have a C shared library (libfoo) to do it. :p
23:39:00 <mooz-> you never run out of good variable names when 1234567890 can be converted into FizzooBarDazzleBuzzazWazzooHizzooSpooRazzleKuzzinkKazzankKizzonk.
23:40:29 <fizzie> http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=9aqupt%24hd4%241%40bob.news.rcn.net has the original post.
23:40:51 <mooz-> www.hut.fi/~jjarvi1/foo2.scm shows them in action
23:41:16 <lament> what's with all the Zs
23:41:38 <fizzie> I had the "foo.scm" next to that foo2.scm printed out with my dot matrix printer and on my wall.
23:41:44 <fizzie> with the output it produces.
23:42:06 <mooz-> foo bar baz woo hoo spoo kink kank konk fizzoo fizzoofoo fizzoobar...
23:42:20 <mooz-> the izz/azz/uzz designate 10, 100, 1000
23:42:43 <fizzie> char * foo_val[9][2] = {
23:42:43 <fizzie> {"F", "oo"}, {"B", "ar"}, {"B", "az"},
23:42:43 <fizzie> {"W", "oo"}, {"H", "oo"}, {"Sp", "oo"},
23:42:43 <fizzie> {"K", "ink"}, {"K", "ank"}, {"K", "onk"}
23:42:45 <fizzie> char * foo_add[4] = {"", "izz", "azz", "uzz"};
23:42:48 <fizzie> char * foo_div[4] = {"Razzle", "Dazzle", "Giggle", "Wiggle"};
23:42:54 <fizzie> is what my libfoo used.
23:43:24 <fizzie> not sure where the Giggle and Wiggle came from.
23:43:32 <mooz-> luckily you get quite a few names before having to resort to giggling
23:43:38 <mooz-> I'm afraid I came up with those
23:44:20 <fizzie> a random metasyntactic variable: FizzooWooGiggleKuzzinkBazzazBizzarKonkDazzleKuzzankWazzooKizzinkBarRazzleKuzzonkBazzazKizzankWoo
23:45:42 <mooz-> I suppose they could be used as jump targets and the assembler could turn them into a memory address
23:46:08 <mooz-> useful for jumping into a preset location somewhere, and pretending there's a label
23:46:34 <fizzie> next time I write a disassembler or a decompiler or something that needs to generate lost labels, I'll just foo-convert the values of the labels.
23:46:55 <fizzie> goto WuzzooBazzazKizzonkKankDazzleKuzzinkWazzooKizzonkKankRazzleBuzzarBazzazKizzinkHoo;
23:47:42 <lament> witness the power of DNS
23:47:53 <lament> this metasyntactic system makes DNS obsolete, though
23:48:00 <fizzie> no need for resolvers.
23:48:02 <lament> what's google.com in metasyntactic?
23:48:17 <fizzie> google has a lot of addresses.
23:48:32 <fizzie> BuzzarFazzooSpizzooBarDazzleBuzzazKazzonkBazRazzleKuzzinkKizzonkKonk would be one.
23:48:57 <fizzie> (using the three-digit decimal way to convert the address. could use a 32-bit value.)
23:49:43 <fizzie> so obviously BizzazHooDazzleKuzzinkBazzarWizzooWooRazzleBuzzarWazzooSpizzooKink is another way to say the same thing.
23:50:35 <lament> Yes, they even look similar.
23:55:11 <fizzie> well, you see, (i=BizzazHooDazzleKuzzinkBazzarWizzooWooRazzleBuzzarWazzooSpizzooKink, ((i>>BizzarWoo)&BazzarHizzooHoo)*FizzooDazzle + ((i>>FizzooSpoo)&BazzarHizzooHoo)*FazzooRazzle + ((i>>Kank)&BazzarHizzooHoo)*Fuzzoo) would evaluate to BuzzarFazzooSpizzooBarDazzleBuzzazKazzonkBazRazzleKuzzinkKizzonkKonk.
23:55:57 <fizzie> nngh. obviously I mean: ((i>>BizzarWoo)&BazzarHizzooHoo)*FizzooDazzle + ((i>>FizzooSpoo)&BazzarHizzooHoo)*FazzooRazzle + ((i>>Kank)&BazzarHizzooHoo)*Fuzzoo + (i&BazzarHizzooHoo)
23:57:02 <mooz-> curiously, also the japanese use 10000 as the point where a new unit name is used
23:57:20 <mooz-> hmm, could be related to the inventor's origins
23:58:20 <mooz-> it's just as logical and a lot more compact