Notices by Joe Groff (joe@f.duriansoftware.com), page 2

it started as an innocent dare—"if you love floating point so much, why don't you marry it?" hours later, they were NaN and wife

The 80s were a dark era of shoddy vendor compilers and shifting standards for pre-ANSI C, but some implementers did interesting things with their compilers to set them apart from the crowd. MetaWare's High C Compiler, in addition to a bunch of nice quality-of-life extensions, had closures and generators with non-local returns, 30-odd years ago!

https://duriansoftware.com/joe/the-lost-language-extensions-of-metaware's-high-c-compiler

the Riemann sphere is a nice idea and all, but it doesn't take the realities of floating-point computation into account. that's why i'm introducing the Kahan Torus

Our stopped clock technology is still in its infancy, but it's already reached an accuracy rate of two or more times per day, and there's no reason for us to believe that won't improve dramatically in the future

@NeoNacho @krzyzanowskim we should go back to fully user-configurable color schemes imo

@bigzaphod yeah the Commodore 64's BASIC kinda lets you down in providing any easy access to the C64 hardware. There are some third-party BASICs that provide easier-to-use sprite and sound primitives

@bigzaphod my understanding is that it was a pretty rushed port of the BASIC they already had licensed and ported from the PET and VIC-20 before it. Microsoft BASIC as you'd get it from Microsoft didn't really put an emphasis on graphics and sound support until the Apple II's Integer BASIC shipped with easy access to the graphics and sound hardware

@inthehands @gregtitus it's also not always obvious when there's load-bearing "structure" hidden in the "mess"

@inthehands this seems to be a general pattern with how human systems evolve, whether they be hardware, software, bureaucracy, spoken language, etc. once you have experts in the system, it becomes costly to change their learned workflows even if it would lead to an overall simpler, easier-to-use, or more efficient design, so new capabilities get pushed into weirder and weirder niches

a while back, someone asked, "why isn't there a way in C to tell if my code is optimized?" thankfully, we can implement this as a library function