[SqNOS] Question for all

[Johnathon Meichtry]

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
> _______________________________________________
> SqueakNOS mailing list
> SqueakNOS at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/squeaknos
>