[OT] Eternal programming

[Roman Suzi]

On 10 Jul 2001, Quinn Dunkan wrote:

>>If the English language has changed too much, and
>>there's no-one left who can understand the spec,
>>you might have a bit of a problem...
>
>Let alone latin letters.  Or even utf8.  Or 8 bit bytes.  I think the real
>problem will be building a machine that can read old fashioned hard drives.
>And if they do, will they still work?  Consider all the 9 track tape rotting
>away in closets.
>
>I think it's good that old software rots away.

If you read carefully the goal, it's about saving procedures
to access stored data: crypto technique, format converters, etc.

I want to be able to restore my old tar.gz archive, etc. Yes, nobody will
probably use it anymore, but the data it contains could be of interest.
So, I want to make sure procedures will be written in such a language to
allow fast retrieval.

The fastest way to do it is to implement special very simple interpreter
(in the language which will be available in the future) and then feed it
with data input and receive data output.

>If it's gone it's because
>nobody needed it anymore.  A lot of other software which would still be
>interesting is interesting because of the specific platform it ran on and the
>time at which it ran (consider Amiga demos).  A language won't help for those,
>you need a museum.

Sincerely yours, Roman Suzi
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