On 28/10/2015 06:51 PM, Stephen wrote:
> On 10/28/2015 6:08 PM, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>
>>
>> I often wonder... like, how much did [famous obsolete computer] actually
>> cost? What did it physically look like? What were its technical
>> capabilities? It's very hard to gather a general overview of this type
>> of data.
>>
> PDP-8 1965 $18,500 12 ~50,000 The smallest and least expensive PDP

Interesting. Now how about the Cray 2, the VAX, UNIAC and all the other 
legendary systems?

To be clear, I'm sure all the data is out there. It's just rather a lot 
of effort to collate it all into a short summary.

>> PostScript. And it wasn't *once*. ;-)

Did I tell you about the time I wrote a text to PostScript converter as 
an MS-DOS batch script?

Actually, the script just concatenates the text file with some 
hand-written PostScript code; the text file itself becomes a giant text 
string in a PostScript program. The program itself is a semi-complete 
formatting engine, which adds a filename, page number and date of 
printing to each page, and scans the characters looking for line breaks. 
It even line-wraps the text and adds little arrows when it does so. (I 
think there *might* be a bug if it line-wraps on the last line on a page 
though...)

Damn, my talents are completely unappreciated! :-(

>> Actually, I did start trying to write a PostScript *interpreter*, to
>> make debugging this stuff easier! It turns out the language has a lot
>> more edge-cases than you'd think though...
>
> One edge-case is more than I ken.
> I would ask what an edge-case is but then you would say that I can't
> Google. :-)

It's simple. An edge-case is where a function is supposed to do XYZ, 
*except* in this one really obscure case where if A, B and C happen 
simultaneously, it does something totally different. Like when you 
configure how many pages you want to print, but if you put in -1 it 
prints *all* the pages. Not -1 pages.

PostScript does some slightly strange things with token parsing. You can 
take a text string and ask the PostScript interpreter to parse out the 
first token, giving you back the token and the remainder of the string. 
But the specification gives some really inconsistent rules for whether 
it should or shouldn't skip spaces...

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