[TUHS] reviving a bit of WWB

Dave Horsfall dave at horsfall.org
Wed Feb 3 10:11:44 AEST 2021


On Tue, 2 Feb 2021, Larry McVoy wrote:

> I've dealt with this, here is a story of a super computer where native 
> pointers pointed at bits but C pointers pointed at bytes and you can 
> shake your head at the promotion problems:
>
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2017-September/012050.html

Holy smoking inodes!  I'd forgotten that story...  And yes, I really was 
approached by Pr1me, and really did turn them down on the basis that if 
they thought that "1" was prime then what else did they get wrong?[*]

Oh, they went belly-up shortly afterwards, so it was probably just as well 
(plainly the innumerate marketoids were in charge).

[*]
If you assume that "1" is prime then it breaks all sorts of higher (and 
obscure) maths.

-- Dave


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