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Debt and Taxes
During the Reagan administration, the U.S. reduced tax rates and increased defense spending. The national debt as a percentage of overall GDP increased from 32.5% to 53.1% (Reagan called this increase in debt the “greatest disappointment” of his presidency). During the first Bush administration, it continued to rise, reaching 66.1%. During the Clinton administration, the…
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DejaGNU
Sorry for the long delay. Anyhow, I wrote that so that I could write this. DejaGNU is the test harness used by gcc, gdb, the GNU binutils, and probably other programs as well. Frankly, it’s a disaster. The documentation is weak, the implementation is complex and confusing, it’s slow, it does not support running tests…
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Tcl
Around 1997 I had did quite a bit of programming in the Tcl language, as part of an IDE project at Cygnus. The project failed, for several reasons, but here I’m going to write about Tcl. I don’t hear much about Tcl these days, although it was fairly popular in its day. Tcl is a…
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Cross-compilation
GCC fully supports cross-compilation: building a program on one machine in order to run it another. However, it’s quite painful to actually build a full cross-toolchain with compiler, tools, and libraries. Many people new to the process have the same reaction: it simply can’t be this hard. But it is. The basic problem is that…
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8 1/2
My favorite movie has long been Fellini’s 8 1/2. It’s a movie which seems designed to appeal to a computer programmer: it’s self-referential and recursive, a movie about the making of itself. It’s also about the difficulties of the creative process, and that is where it resonates most strongly with me. The director in the…