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The software development process.

D

David Brown

Jan 1, 1970
0
Frithiof said:
Openoffice is an office clone, therefore it aquires the same properties: In
this case Bloated beyond Sustainability.

OpenOffice is certainly large, and to some extent bloated, but it's
fairly close to being complete as an office pack - there are very few
features that could be added that are of real use to the great majority
of users. MS Office reached that stage with Office 98 (or was it 97? I
never use the stuff myself, so I don't remember exactly). The big
problem MS has with Office is persuading people to keep upgrading -
there is nothing that many people want to do with the software that can
be done better with the newer versions.

I do hope that OpenOffice doesn't get much bigger, though, and that they
don't integrate any more apps in the main package.
Very few open source developers can be arsed enough to keep up tracking bugs
and understanding where to fix without breaking the architecture with 300++
MB of source code. That's what is inflicted on people at work; Open Source
should be fun because youe are not getting paid.

That's true for many open source projects, but not all - some, like
OpenOffice, have a heavy influence of corporate sponsorship. A
significant proportion of the developers of OpenOffice are paid workers
(mostly paid by Sun), and thus *can* be told to do the boring stuff.
 
D

David Brown

Jan 1, 1970
0
John said:
Where I come from, it's

I
you
he/she/it

we
y'all
they

which has an interesting parallel to tu/vous.

John

I thought "y'all" was singular, and "all y'all" was the plural form?

Glaswegian also has a plural "yous", but it has the same verb form as
the singular.
 
D

David Brown

Jan 1, 1970
0
Rich said:
As I remember, one of the "features" of the pascal-style call/return
was that they used the "RET n" instruction, which would increment (or
decrement, whatever - essentially un-push but lose the data) the stack
pointer by n, and _then_ return. So it was the programmer's
responsibility to see to it that he/she pushed exactly the right number
of parameters, every call. In C-style, it's the responsibility of the
calling routine to pop the variables back off the stack (usually by
restoring it from the base pointer, where it was stored before the call,
I think.)

C style makes it possible to pass a variable number of parameters, a la
printf().

Cheers!
Rich

That's the main differences, although there is also the difference in
the ordering (with C ordering, the first parameter is at the top of the
stack, while with Pascal ordering it is at the bottom). The Pascal
ordering is somewhat more efficient and intuitive, but fails badly if
the prototype is not known when compiling the caller - not a problem for
Pascal, which is a modular and structured language, but it is a problem
for "traditional" terse spaghetti C.
 
D

David Brown

Jan 1, 1970
0
Robert said:
Well, in C you do have to be able to take the address of a const. If
the compiler could prove that was never done it could get away without
allocating memory for it but otherwise...

Robert

Many C compilers will remove a "static const" entirely, as then it knows
for sure that the address will not be taken. If it the "const" is not
"static", then the compiler must generate the data.

Of course, "const" data in C is not necessarily entirely constant - you
can write things like:

const int axx = 1;

void crash(void) {
*((int*) (void*) &axx) = 3;
}

The result is undefined, even though compilers will probably accept it.
 
P

Peter

Jan 1, 1970
0
mc said:
Well said, sir!

I like to puzzle beginning Lisp programmers with something like:

(setf a 'b)
(setf b 'c)
(setf c 'd)
(eval (eval d))

the point being that we don't want to create puzzles like this needlessly.
That puzzle is a bit pointless. Wouldn't it be a more interesting if the
last line was
(eval (eval a))

Peter
 
C

CBFalconer

Jan 1, 1970
0
David said:
Rich Grise wrote:
.... snip ...

That's the main differences, although there is also the difference
in the ordering (with C ordering, the first parameter is at the top
of the stack, while with Pascal ordering it is at the bottom). The
Pascal ordering is somewhat more efficient and intuitive, but fails
badly if the prototype is not known when compiling the caller - not
a problem for Pascal, which is a modular and structured language,
but it is a problem for "traditional" terse spaghetti C.

Neither order is a problem for C, since it is required (by C89 up,
and K&R 2) that any variadic function have a prototype in scope.
This makes it possible to pass the parameters in the natural left
to right order (so called Pascal) with an additional invisible (to
the writer) parameter that specifies the count of actual
parameters. That makes the function able to access the first
parameter directly, and also to purge the correct number of
parameters on exit.

It does make the penalties for mis-calling a variadic function more
obvious, i.e. a crash will probably result. It has the advantage
that the generated code is more compact, since parameter removal is
done in only one place (the function) rather than on each call.
Even the more serious penalty for mis-calling is an advantage,
since such errors will be detected very easily, and can then be
corrected.
 
A

Alexander Grigoriev

Jan 1, 1970
0
Homer J Simpson said:
G W Bush has an MBA. He appears to have no managerial or financial skills.

He also has a B.S. in history. He appears to have no knowledge of that
either.


He can BS history pretty well.
 
K

Ken Smith

Jan 1, 1970
0
ISTR a jet engine assembly plant with 120 skilled employees all reporting to
one manager. Apparently it is a model of efficiency and productivity.

Somewhere between 100 and 200 people there is a boundary that can't seem
to be crossed with that model. If everyone knows more or less what
everyone else is supposed to do, management and coordination can happen
mostly spontaneously. If the workers all believe that making jet engines
is the purpose.

I'm sure your've seen companies where the people in the purchasing
department think that buying stuff is the purpose and people in quality
control think that having a very well documented process is the purpose
and so on.

A classic example of evidence that a company that is blowing it happened
to me some years back. One of the suppliers would send copies of the
Engineering Change Order (ECO) form to ongoing customers when they made a
design change. This was OK but a little excessive. Then, on one bright
sunny day, we got the ECO form copy that made us fear for the continuation
of that supplier. There were 3 ECO forms stapled together. The front
copy revealed that the reason for sending the form are that they had made
a completely non-obvious change to the font on the ECO form.
 
K

Ken Smith

Jan 1, 1970
0
David Brown said:
I thought "y'all" was singular, and "all y'all" was the plural form?

Y'all is a collection of humans sort of like a pod of whales and thus is
singular. Unlike herd and pod, for humans the collective term can be used
with only one human. This is not actually the lowest number that can be
refered by the collective form. With lawyers, the collective term is the
nuff and zero members of the profession, can be refered to as a nuff.
 
K

Ken Smith

Jan 1, 1970
0
Paul Hovnanian P.E. said:
The problem with applying this back to software development is that the
barn/garage/house problem is one where the 'design' is complete,

Yes, there are always problems like this when you try to make an analogy.

"if people made buildings like programmers write software, the first
woodpecker would have destroyed civilization"
the
processes are well known but the implementation requires quite a bit of
labor for repetitive processes. With software, its the analysis and
design that takes the time.

One way you can split the labor is to have people develop an efficient
language to write the software in and write a good optimizing compiler for
it.

Writing a library of routines is often not a good way to split the labor.
The person who wants to use the routines will often spend more time trying
to figure out what routine to use and how to call it than it would have
taken to write one. The C language library function memcpy() is a case
that just about falls into this class.

Once that's done, the implementation is just
a matter of burning a few CDs or loading the product onto a server for
distribution.

Depending on the type of software, you also need to do stuff like program
dongles and print manuals.
 
K

Ken Smith

Jan 1, 1970
0
Ken Smith wrote: [....]
onto something else. Several people could be making the roof trusses some
small distance away.


If you have to pay for the labor, it may be cheaper to have the
trusses custom made and delivered,

That would qualify as making the trusses some (perhaps not small) distance
away.
with the advantage of having heavier
splice plated installed by an automated press.

They can also be made with two sticks for each member and plywood gusset
at each corner. The machine made ones like that are very strong.
 
K

Ken Smith

Jan 1, 1970
0
David Brown said:
That's the main differences, although there is also the difference in
the ordering (with C ordering, the first parameter is at the top of the
stack, while with Pascal ordering it is at the bottom). The Pascal
ordering is somewhat more efficient and intuitive, but fails badly if
the prototype is not known when compiling the caller - not a problem for
Pascal, which is a modular and structured language, but it is a problem
for "traditional" terse spaghetti C.

In "traditional" C, everything is an "int", if you don't know different.
There is no problem with compiling with either order of arguments. If the
programmer doesn't match the call with the callee properly, it is his
fault not the compiler's.

In the, non-linux, PC environment, the normal result from this sort of
error is that a random section of the hard disk gets overwritten.
 
R

Robert Latest

Jan 1, 1970
0
["Followup-To:" header set to sci.electronics.design.]
On Thu, 14 Sep 2006 10:40:35 +0200,
The "truth" is another one I think.

The "truth" is yet another one I think.

Where I work, nobody except a few nerds like me have ever heard about
OpenOffice. Let alone the sectretaries who are the main users of office
software. When you tell them that there exist other programs to write
stuff (mostly single-page documents which, in big, colorful letters,
advise people to rinse their coffee cups after use or to shut the door)
they look at you funny because they have no idea what a "program" is.
They'd simply balk if they were told that now they were to use something
else. You'd probably get away with it if you replaced the Oo logo with
that of Word and did away with the splash screen. Then they'd think they
were working with just another version of Word.

robert
 
J

Joerg

Jan 1, 1970
0
Hello Chuck,

Confirmed. A couple of weeks ago I ran into a Louisiana
expatriate, who also was Cajun, and she also said they had been
forbidden to use French (of any flavor) in school.

Please don't strip attributes for material you quote.

Ok, but what do you mean by attributes? Now I didn't shorten anything
and all it left in there was "Joerg wrote:". I am using the Mozilla
newsreader, version 1.6 on this PC.

Maybe my newsreader does something it shouldn't. I know it isn't always
able to do the correct line length. Actually none of them ever was on
all my PCs.
 
F

Frithiof Andreas Jensen

Jan 1, 1970
0
CBFalconer said:
Darin Johnson wrote:
A C const cannot be used in a constant expression. The compiler
will object, unless you are making the mistake of using a C++
compiler.

picky, picky, picky:

enum {
blabber = 25;
co2 = 30;
};

will work as expected!
(for some combine of "work" and "expected")
 
M

Michael A. Terrell

Jan 1, 1970
0
Ken said:
Ken Smith wrote: [....]
onto something else. Several people could be making the roof trusses some
small distance away.


If you have to pay for the labor, it may be cheaper to have the
trusses custom made and delivered,

That would qualify as making the trusses some (perhaps not small) distance
away.


Think about it. The truss company gets a better price than you do on
the materials, and has to be competitive. If it wasn't cost effective,
why are there so many prefab trusses used in building new homes? There
are several truss manufacturers in the area, along with a Georgia
Pacific plywood beam plant. If it didn't save the builders money, they
would make these items on site.

They can also be made with two sticks for each member and plywood gusset
at each corner. The machine made ones like that are very strong.


Some building codes require the metal plates on larger trusses.



--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida
 
F

Frithiof Andreas Jensen

Jan 1, 1970
0
Ken Smith said:
I'd bet you could pick up the Borland version of the Pascal language in a
day. Once you know how to program, learning how to code in another
reasonable language is quite easy.

If your really want to code in C, you can make a header file full of
#defines that make the code much easier to read.
 
J

John Woodgate

Jan 1, 1970
0
dated Thu said:
Think about it. The truss company gets a better price than you do on
the materials, and has to be competitive.

I thought you had stringent anti-truss laws to ensure competition.
 
K

Keith

Jan 1, 1970
0
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Attribution ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Hello Chuck,



Ok, but what do you mean by attributes? Now I didn't shorten anything
and all it left in there was "Joerg wrote:". I am using the Mozilla
newsreader, version 1.6 on this PC.

Maybe my newsreader does something it shouldn't. I know it isn't always
able to do the correct line length. Actually none of them ever was on
all my PCs.
Are you highlighting the text you want to respond to so your
newsreader trims the rest? That will cut attributions too.
 
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