Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute. Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman in MIT Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs course (via Brevity vs. Clarity · An A List Apart Blog Post )
The old man turned back at his coffee, took a sip, and then looked back at me. “In fact, I’ve done lots of things that haven’t been done before”, he said half-smiling. Not sure if he was simply toying with me or not, my curiousity got the better of me. Oh really? Like what types of things? , All the while, half-thinking he was going to make up something fairly non-impressive. ...
Grace Hopper – Nanoseconds (via YouTube ) 1 ns = 11,8″ That is: 29,972 cm ~ A4 paper height
What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic Floating-point arithmetic is considered an esoteric subject by many people. This is rather surprising because floating-point is ubiquitous in computer systems. Almost every language has a floating-point datatype; computers from PCs to supercomputers have floating-point accelerators; most compilers will be called upon to compile floating-point algorithms from time to time; and virtually every operating system must respond to floating-point exceptions such as overflow. This paper presents a tutorial on those aspects of floating-point that have a direct impact on designers of computer systems. It begins with background on floating-point representation and rounding error, continues with a discussion of the IEEE floating-point standard, and concludes with numerous examples of how computer builders can better support floating-point. ...