>>> C was basically portable assembly for the original Unix.
>>
>> ...and yet, it doesn't make it especially easy to do low-level stuff.
> 
> It doesn't?

I mean, sure, it has support for twiddling bits and stuff. But you'd 
think if you were doing low-level work, you would have a way to 
explicitly say how many bits you want to use. Yet C provides no such 
facility. Every CPU I know of provides an instruction to check for 
sign-overflow, but C ignores overflows by default, and provides no way 
to check for them if you want to. (Besides manually testing the operands 
before doing the operation.)

> Please don't call me ancient. :P

Ancient. :-P

>>>> - SQL existed 15 years before high-capacity storage devices appeared. 
>>>
>>> My uncle said that back then, they created ad-hoc, file-based 
>>> database management systems by themselves.  People were much bolder 
>>> back then. :)
>>
>> But what did dthey *store* these files on? Punch cards?!
> 
> Magnetic tapes, in the 1970's.  Magnetic tapes, in the form of cassette 
> tapes were also available for home use, as MSX and perhaps C64 owners 
> may remember.

The concept of performing a multi-table join where the tables are all 
stored on magnetic tape scares me. o_O

My God, it could take months...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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