On 2025-08-10 23:49:47 +0000, fir said:

some thought -often programming is showed to be dealing with 0 nad
ones, but it strike me that in fact this is untrue, come better could
say that data/storage is from 0,1 but prgramming on its front in fact
is dealing with opcodes (?) (numerical commands) and adresses - yet
also all this microcycles... co in fact coding should be presented
more like stream of numbers: 90 3349, 87, 6787 378236, 736 23872387,
not bits

An early term for 'assembler' was "automatic programmer". However, later consensus is that "coding" is to write a text that can be given to a
computer for compilation or execution and "programming" includes coding
and whatever the person doing the coding does before the coding. There
may be some variation at the latter point if the programmer does something
that could be given to someone else for programming.

--
Mikko

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On 2025-08-10 23:49:47 +0000, fir said:

some thought -often programming is showed to be dealing with 0 nad
ones, but it strike me that in fact this is untrue, come better could
say that data/storage is from 0,1 but prgramming on its front in fact
is dealing with opcodes (?) (numerical commands) and adresses - yet
also all this microcycles... co in fact coding should be presented
more like stream of numbers: 90 3349, 87, 6787 378236, 736 23872387,
not bits

My first computer job involved working for a company that operated
computer systems specialized for hospitals. This was in the mid 1980's,
and the founders of the company had previously worked for NASA, where
there was typically very little room for a big computer systems. The
system handled prescriptions, doctor-prescribed meal menus, and payroll
for the entire hospital using only 256 KB of memory, two magnetic tape
drives, and a dozen or so hard-disk drives about 16" in diameter.

If the system ever needed to be rebooted, there was a documented
procedure that had to be followed. There was a set of 8 switches on the computer that were used to set the bits of one byte. There was another
switch that caused the address of the byte being set to increment by
one. We were supposed to use those switches to enter a program listed in
the procedures manual that was 256 bytes long, and then press another
switch to start that program running. I'm very glad that I didn't stay
with that company long enough to be the person responsible for doing that.

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fir <profesor.fir@gmail.com> wrote at 23:49 this Sunday (GMT):

some thought -often programming is showed to be dealing with 0 nad ones,
but it strike me that in fact this is untrue, come better could say that data/storage is from 0,1 but prgramming on its front in fact is dealing
with opcodes (?) (numerical commands) and adresses - yet also all this microcycles... co in fact coding should be presented more like stream
of numbers: 90 3349, 87, 6787 378236, 736 23872387, not bits

Bits are used to represent larger numbers, through binary. Generally,
bits are grouped into a byte (8 bits) that can represent 0-255, and you
can add more bytes to represnt exponentially larger numbers, with the
current maximum being 64 bits/8 bytes per number and a maximum unsigned
integer value of 9e18.

000 - 0
001 - 1
010 - 2
011 - 3
100 - 4
101 - 5
110 - 6
111 - 7
1000 - 8
... and so on.
--
user <candycane> is generated from /dev/urandom

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On 2025-08-10, fir wrote:

some thought -often programming is showed to be dealing with 0 nad ones,
but it strike me that in fact this is untrue, come better could say that data/storage is from 0,1 but prgramming on its front in fact is dealing
with opcodes (?) (numerical commands) and adresses - yet also all this microcycles... co in fact coding should be presented more like stream
of numbers: 90 3349, 87, 6787 378236, 736 23872387, not bits

Opcodes are literally the series of transistors that are switched "on" (typically represented by '1') or "off" (typically represented by '0')
in the CPU's instruction register so that you get the operation you want
out of the processor (e.g. addition or subtraction in the ALU, or
jumping the program counter to some other address, or whatever other
operation the CPU supports).

Likewise addresses are the same thing -- the physical manifestation of {8,16,32,64} transistors that need to either be "on" or "off" in order
to read a specific amount of data. Perhaps the "memory address" is that
of a single bit, or a byte, or some multiple thereto.

Not really sure what a "microcycle" is. Are you using it as terminology
from when they counted Hertz as "cycles per second"? If so, yes,
transistors are fast.

The result of "coding" (or "programming" or whatever you want to call
it) is a stream of numbers, like this (intel-format) hexfile that will
blink a LED on an AVR microcontroller (although I don't know offhand
what specific chip it was compiled for).

:020000020000FC <-- start of flash memory, $FC is a checksum
:100000000FEF04B901E005B926E033E14EEA4A9565 < bytecode($65 cksum)
:10001000F1F73A95E1F72A95D1F705B1009505B9C1 < bytecode($C1 cksum)
:02002000F3CF1C <-- end of bytecode $1C is checksum
:00000001FF <-- EOF


(not that this makes a lot of sense -- I'd have to read up that AVR is little-endian or big-endian; not that it really matters when writing C
for it though :) )


--
|_|O|_|
|_|_|O| Github: https://github.com/dpurgert
|O|O|O| PGP: DDAB 23FB 19FA 7D85 1CC1 E067 6D65 70E5 4CE7 2860

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On 11.08.2025 01:49, fir wrote:

some thought -often programming is showed to be dealing with 0 nad ones,
but it strike me that in fact this is untrue, come better could say that data/storage is from 0,1 but prgramming on its front in fact is dealing
with opcodes (?) (numerical commands) and adresses - yet also all this microcycles... co in fact coding should be presented more like stream
of numbers: 90 3349, 87, 6787 378236, 736 23872387, not bits

Your "numbers" here are actually unsigned integer numbers, so there's effectively not much difference to bits but the number base (2 vs. 10).

Programming doesn't even need to be defined in integral quantities, or
need to assume a von Neumann architecture; it could be real numbers in
analogue computers, where the program is defined by connecting analog
adders, multipliers, integrators and configure them by potentiometers.

Rarely anyone seems to recall analogue or hybrid computers. Let's wait
for the quantum computers for yet another principle of computing...

Janis

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