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Date:	Thu, 31 Jul 2003 07:26:00 PDT7
From:	"Lynn H. Maxson" <lmaxson@pacbell.net >
Reply-To:	scoug-programming@scoug.com
To:	"SCOUG Programming SIG" <scoug-programming@scoug.com > , "Robert Kuropkat" <robert-kuropkat@comcast.net >
Subject:	SCOUG-Programming: Re: Warpstock 2003 Presentation

Content Type: text/plain

Don't be mislead by the subject title as I am responding to a
request to submit a possible presentation at this year's
WarpStock in San Francisco. I have done so separately,
intending this to complement what I have submitted.

I know Peter (Skye) reads these things even if he has no time
presently to participate in any other manner. Following his
recent "adventures" with Relish which doesn't seem to
conform to how Peter feels it should work, it does show one
option that open source allows but Relish (closed source)
does not. While Steven (Levine) patiently responds to Peter's
adventures, benefitting us all thereby, we can continue in our
pursuit to have software which conforms to how we
individually think it ought to work.

We should have no doubt about extending this to our basic
software tools that we use to create our non-basic, and for
us more important, software tools. The one has to make it
easier to produce the other. Open source thus far has opted
to stay the course, to stick with tools and methods of their
use that has economically devastated the ranks of OS/2 ISPs.
At the moment they remain the principal barrier for open
source users to becoming open source contributors.

At this month's SIG meeting I hope to do justice to the art of
writing device drivers. I got a tad nervous when I could not
locate my autographed copy of Steve Mastrianni's "Writing
OS/2 2.0 Device Drivers in C". I quickly bounced over to
amazon.com, did a search, located a used book source, and
ordered it. It arrived in three days.

I reloaded my IBM's device developer's kit and downloaded the
material from the Netlabs site. An examination of the
downloaded makefile shows it expects to use the Watcom
compiler. Getting all this into some sensible order and
presenting it in less than an hour remains a challenge.

Among the challenges is using the Assembly Language
Program (ALP) included in the IBM toolkit to compile the
necessary stub to enable the use of C source code. Maybe
that might lead me to actually use the set of assembly
language books of all flavors that I have accumulated.
Perhaps even some of you might find some of them
worthwhile additions to your bookshelves.

In the process of expanding our set of algorithms in different
programming languages to provide a comparative linguistics
maybe we can also determine which come closer to the
machine architecture or assembly language. Is C closer a fact
or fantasy? We should be able to answer this one. In so
doing determine what could possibly keep any HLL from
producing machine code with the same efficiency possible
with assembly language.

At any rate first things first.

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