Re: FW: Re: [Exim] Exim on a single-user system

ph10@??? (Philip Hazel) wrote on 09.01.02 in <Pine.SOL.4.33.0201092130270.10252-100000@???>:

> On 9 Jan 2002, Kai Henningsen wrote:
>
> > Actually, I agree with every example you mentioned: people should in fact
> > actually know these things. (Well ok, change "change a fuse" to "reset a
> > breaker", I haven't ever seen a real fuse for an electric light in all my
> > life, all of them were on electronic gadgets ... and a lightbulb is
> > practically a fuse that nearly everyone knows how to change anyway.)
>
> You clearly aren't old enough. :-) I'm talking fuse-wire here, not
> plug-in things.

I thought I pointed out that I do understand the difference?

> > My personal variant is "every programmer should have learned at least one
> > assembly or machine language".
>
> Although I agree, that's exactly like learning to change a fuse!!!

Not quite. It's not yesterday's tech that they should understand. Assembly
isn't dead, it's just much less visible. Hang out on linux-kernel@vger.
kernel.org or gcc@???, for example, and you'll see it mentioned rather
often.

The reason I'm saying it is I see what a mess people can make of their
programs when they have no idea what the compiler makes from their nice
code. More than once I've speeded up a program by more that two orders of
magnitude just by knowing these things (especially wrt. string handling).
No, string operations are *not* as cheap as basic arithmetic!

Incidentally, the debates about junking gcc -traditional (or % and !
handling) are more like fuse wire handling :-)


MfG Kai