http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html

This is one of the coolest programming articles I've read. I think we can all learn something from Mel.

TL;DR: we all suck, ASM is for n00bs.

makes you think how easy we have it

my fav quotes

Mel didn't approve of compilers.

"If a program can't rewrite its own code", he asked, "what good is it?"

The new computer had a one-plus-one
     addressing scheme,
     in which each machine instruction,
     in addition to the operation code
     and the address of the needed operand,
     had a second address that indicated where, on the revolving drum,
     the next instruction was located.

     In modern parlance,
     every single instruction was followed by a GO TO!
     Put *that* in Pascal's pipe and smoke it

He had located the data he was working on near the top of memory --- the largest locations the instructions could address --- so, after the last datum was handled, incrementing the instruction address would make it overflow. The carry would add one to the operation code, changing it to the next one in the instruction set: a jump instruction. Sure enough, the next program instruction was in address location zero, and the program went happily on its way.

nice read +1

It's a cool story, I read it when I was going through The Jargon File