lkml.org 
[lkml]   [2005]   [Oct]   [3]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
/
Date
From
SubjectRe: I request inclusion of SAS Transport Layer and AIC-94xx into the kernel
On Mon, Oct 03, 2005 at 03:56:50PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> For example, Al Viro pointed out privately that the C preprocessor spec
> actually matches what a C preprocessor is supposed to do, and that it was
> easy to generate code from the spec. The reason? The code existed first,
> the spec was written from that. Writing it back into software "just
> works", because the spec really _was_ software to begin with, just
> re-written as a spec.

Not quite, AFAIK. Existing code was a fscking mess of subtly incompatible
implementations; the thing that had helped was simple - the people who
would have to implement the damn thing had a lot of presense in the
committee. So it boiled down to
* observation: attempt to describe it as text transformation leads
to horrors; it really acts on token stream; give up treating it like a text
filter.
* after figuring out what it should do to sequences of tokens they
ended up with a reasonably simple algorithm that matched the existing
behaviour sans the nasty corner cases everyone handled differently.
* _that_ had been turned into spec.
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/

\
 
 \ /
  Last update: 2005-10-04 01:25    [W:0.086 / U:0.280 seconds]
©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site