Re: Bug free programs

[Ian Grant]

On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 1:29 PM, Mark H Weaver <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi Ian,
>
> I'm going to try to ignore your gratutious and unfounded insults,

They are indeed gratuitous. Think of them as a sort of free software.

> because I agree that the problem you are trying to solve is an important
> one, and believe it or not, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone else in
> the GNU project who worries about this issue as much as I do.

I have no trouble at all believing that. That doesn't mean I think you
know what you're talking about though.

> For example, on an internal GNU mailing list, I complained when GCC
> switched to using C++ because it vastly increases the complexity of the
> simplest compiler that's able to bootstrap it.

It's OK. As long they maintain one of the older gcc versions which
builds a g++ compiler from a C base, there's not much extra work
involved at all.

> The reason is that for a few years now, I've very seriously considered
> dedicating myself to developing a bootstrap procedure that starts with
> raw machine code running on bare metal and ends with a working GNU
> toolchain.

It's a good thing inertia prevailed, because that would have been a
complete and utter waste of time. But tell me, how were you planning
to load the machine code into the memory? Were you going to solder up
a front-panel loader and bootstrap it by setting the address and data
lines and pressing 'WRITE'? I hope you weren't planning to make a
paper tape reader!

> I've also considered more practical approaches such as: lock a
> (preferably older) computer inside a Faraday cage to prevent
> communication with the outside world, thus limiting the intelligence
> that any Thompson virus can have, while I write a very simple and novel
> C compiler that's capable of bootstrapping GCC and the rest of the
> toolchain, and then printing the result to paper in a form that can be
> scanned reliably -- a task I have some experience with, since I led the
> development of the scannable PGP source code books that allowed PGP to
> be legally exported from the US fo the first time, along with the tools
> needed to convert the paper books back into electronic form with modest
> effort.

What is the point of printing it on paper? How  'novel' is your C
compiler going to be once you've distributed it? Was it going to be
Free Software? If it had a bug, would you distribute an update?

> Wow.  Did you try telling that to RMS, who made the same suggestion?

No, because he didn't make it a condition of him reading it: he had
already read it when he made that suggestion.

> I read plenty of PDFs.  They are inconvenient, but I suffer that
> inconvenience on a regular basis, when I have reason to believe that I
> might learn something new from them.  So far, not a single person has
> recommended your paper to me except you,

I don't need people to recommend papers before I read them.

> nor have I learned anything I didn't already know from the emails
> you've written, at least not from the prefixes of those emails that
> I've read before losing interest.

Why did you think I hadn't noticed that?

> I'm not saying that you don't have something to teach me.  Maybe you do,

I don't think I could teach you anything.

> but if so, you must learn the art of capturing the interest of your
> readers long enough to convince them that they should continue reading.

No, I don't need to do that because I'm not selling anything. There's
nothing I need from the Free Software Foundation. The Free Software
Foundation on the other hand, very desperately needs to know what I
know about GNU software.

> At present, you're in the position of having to convince me that you're
> ideas are worth studying, not the other way around, and I suspect I'm
> not alone.  It would help to tell me something I didn't already know, in
> ASCII, as concisely as possible.

I have told you lots, and in a very few words. You just need to
actually think about it. And you will, because, until you understand
that in fact you know NOTHING about what the computer you are using to
read this message is actually doing, there won't pass a single day of
your life that you don't think about what I am telling you now.

Happy hacking, until you learn something about software engineering.

Ian