[SqNOS] Question for all
Johnathon Meichtry
johnathon-dev at meichtry.org
Thu Jul 13 13:04:48 UTC 2006
Gera,
Wow good question/topic and one of those things where five years from now
we'll look back and say "why-the-heck did Gera choose that!!?!?!" ;)
I say 1-based semantic is the way to go as I am imagining of some "dreamy &
distant" point in the future the typical user would spend their whole life
within the Squeak world whereas what is used by other platforms would be
irrelevant. I know, it's a dream but a good one.
Of course I totally agree that 1-based increases the risk of errors in
porting code and docs from other languages but it could be really messy 5
years from now where anything hardware/device/driver related is 0-based and
the rest of Squeak is 1-based.
Johnathon
----- Original Message -----
From: "Gerardo Richarte" <gera at corest.com>
To: <squeaknos at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 13, 2006 1:36 PM
Subject: [SqNOS] Question for all
> uhm... one of this questions that newbies usually ask, I need your
> subjectivity.
>
> PortHardwareDevices have a basePort. All I/O is indexes through this
> port, i.e.
>
> PortHardwareDeivce>>byteAt: portNumber
> ^ self primInPortByte: basePort+portNumber
>
> (where portNumber should actually by portOffset or something).
>
> Anyway, from this implementation we can see that PortHardwareDevices
> have a 0-based semantic for accessing the ports. This is what common
> literature uses (register 0, register 1, for example), and what every
> other software out there uses to (C based or asm based mostly).
>
> Now, we all know that indexable objects in Smalltalk have a 1-based
> semantic.
>
> so, the obvious question for the incredulous reader is: should we
> have 0-based or 1-based semantic for the PortHardwareDevices?
>
> 0 based will be "mathematically correct"(?), will be ok according to
> standard literature and other implementations.
>
> 1 based will be Smalltalkish... and I guess we could get used to it
> (but I'm sure will introduce more bugs when copying from documentation
> or other code to Smalltalk)
>
> so? ah! got you! :-)
> I don't really want a debate, but some opinions will be nice
>
> gera
>
> gera
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