[Chicago] Question about Machine Language.

Tue Dec 8 17:29:13 EST 2015

I tend to like to think that since everything breaks down into a hilo
variation in charge that we represent with 0s and 1s that even I can deal
with that level of math as long as I do not let the theoretical math
discussions of 0 and singularity bother me.

On Tue, Dec 8, 2015 at 4:04 PM, Rob Kapteyn <robkapteyn at gmail.com> wrote:

> I actually have an Altair that I built in high school and I did a lot of
> actual machine language programming.
>
> "Programming" involved scribbling op codes and addresses on dozens of
> sheets of paper, translating those into octal binary codes, and keying them
> into the front panel switches.
> You could not do very much.  There was a game called "Kill the bit
> <https://youtu.be/ZKeiQ8e18QY>" -- which I actually played ;)
>
> I remember how much my finger tips started to hurt after a while ;)
>
> I think it was educationally useful for me, as a 13-year old, to work on
> that level, but I'm not really sure.
>
> -Rob
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKeiQ8e18QY>
>
> On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 3:41 PM, Lewit, Douglas <d-lewit at neiu.edu> wrote:
>
>> Hi there Thomas,
>>
>> I watched that video on the Altair 8800.  Oh my god!!!  How confusing!!!
>> How many years ago were engineers and programmers actually working with
>> computers like that?  Wow!  It really makes me appreciate the abstraction
>> of higher-level languages such as Python!
>>
>> Thanks for the YouTube link.  That was really interesting.... and also
>> kind of frightening!
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Douglas.
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 3:10 PM, Thomas Johnson <
>> thomas.j.johnson at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Because:
>>> * Different computers use different instruction sets (i.e., different
>>> version of machine language)
>>> * The compiler is almost certainly better than you are at generating
>>> optimized machine language from your high-level language. See some examples
>>> of the kind of optimization options gcc has here:
>>> https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Optimize-Options.html
>>> * Unless you are an expert at assembly, you will be more productive in a
>>> higher level language
>>> * We used to, and it wasn't pleasant
>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EV1ki6LiEmg
>>>
>>> On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 3:05 PM Lewit, Douglas <d-lewit at neiu.edu> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Thanks for the correction Naomi, but that didn't really answer my
>>>> question.  Why don't we all just study machine language and that's it?
>>>>
>>>> On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 2:10 PM, Naomi Ceder <naomi.ceder at gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On 7 December 2015 at 13:57, Lewit, Douglas <d-lewit at neiu.edu> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Hi everyone,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I was reading an article on the web about how all programming
>>>>>> languages are "Turing complete".  I believe that basically means that all
>>>>>> programming languages are able to communicate with the computer's CPU using
>>>>>> the binary codes of machine language.
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Uh, that's not actually what "Turing Complete" means...  It doesn't
>>>>>  have anything to do with binary or machine language... from Wikipedia (
>>>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness):
>>>>>
>>>>> "To show that something is Turing complete, it is enough to show that
>>>>> it can be used to simulate some Turing complete system. For example, an imperative
>>>>> language <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperative_language> is
>>>>> Turing complete if it has conditional branching
>>>>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_branching> (*e.g.*, "if"
>>>>> and "goto" statements, or a "branch if zero" instruction. See OISC
>>>>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_instruction_set_computer>) and the
>>>>> ability to change an arbitrary amount ofmemory
>>>>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_memory> locations (*e.g.*,
>>>>> the ability to maintain an arbitrary number of variables). Since this is
>>>>> almost always the case, most (if not all) imperative languages are Turing
>>>>> complete if the limitations of finite memory are ignored."
>>>>>
>>>>> Cheers,
>>>>> Naomi
>>>>>
>>>>> Okay then.... so why don't we get rid of C, C++, Java, Python, Ruby,
>>>>>> Perl, Ocaml, Haskell, C#, F#, etc, etc and why don't we call just code in
>>>>>> machine language?  Bear in mind that I'm asking this question from the
>>>>>> point of view of the Devil's Advocate because I know almost nothing about
>>>>>> machine language.  But it's an interesting question.  It's related to the
>>>>>> question, "Why don't we have one universal natural language?  Let's get rid
>>>>>> of English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic,
>>>>>> Hebrew, etc, etc, and replace them all with one universal language that
>>>>>> everyone understands".
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I'm interested in reading your thoughts and ideas.  Thanks.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Best,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Douglas.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> P.S.  Sorry to hear about the Django Study Group.  I thought Mark
>>>>>> Graves was very friendly and did a great job of demonstrating various web
>>>>>> applications using Python.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> Chicago mailing list
>>>>>> Chicago at python.org
>>>>>> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/chicago
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> Naomi Ceder
>>>>> https://plus.google.com/u/0/111396744045017339164/about
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> Chicago mailing list
>>>>> Chicago at python.org
>>>>> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/chicago
>>>>>
>>>>>
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