The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Monday, March 03, 2025

Yelling at clouds

I will admit—these are kneejerk reactions, but they're honestly my reactions to reading the following statements. I know, I know, hanging onions off our belt is long out of style.

And get off my lawn!

Anyway … statment the first:

Think jq, but without having to ask an LLM to write the query for you.

Via Lobsters, A float walks into a gradual type system

So … using jq is so hard you need to use a tool that will confabulate ¼ of the time in order to construct a simple query? Is that what you are saying? That you can't be bothered to use your brain? Just accept the garbage spewed forth by a probabilistic text slinger?

Really?

And did you use an LLM to help write the code? If not, why not?

Sigh.

And statement the second:

… and most importantly, coding can be social and fun again.

Via Lobsters, introducing tangled

If I had known that programming would become a team sport, I, an introvert, would have choosen a different career. Does XXXXX­XX everything have to be social? Why can't it just be fun? I need to be micromanaged as well?

A quirk of the Motorola 6809 assemblers

I just learned an interesting bit of trivia about 6809 assembly language on a Discord server today. When Motorola designed the 6809 assembler, they made a distinction between the use of n,PC and n,PCR in the indexing mode. Both of those make a reference based off the PC register, but in assembly language they defined, using n,PC means use the literal value of n as the distance, whereas n,PCR means generate the distance between n and the current value of the PC register.

I never knew that.

I just looked and all the materials I had on the 6809 use the n,PCR method everywhere, yet when I wrote my assembler, I only support n,PC and it always calculates the distance. I think I forgot that it should have been n,PCR because on the 68000 (which I also programmed, and was also made by Motorola) it always used n,PC.

And I don't think I'll change my assembler as there does exist a method to use an arbitrary value of n as a distance: LDA (*+3)+n,PC. The asterisk evaluates to the address of the current instruction, and by adding 3 you get the address of the next instruction, which in the PC-relative addressing mode, is a distance of 0. Then n will be the actual offset used in the instruction. Yes, it's a bit convoluted, but it's a way to get how Motorola originally defined n,PC.

And apparently, Motorola defined it that way to make up for less intelligent assemblers back in the day due to memory constraints. We are long past those days.

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