Being a hobbyist programmer and humanities sort, I can't see the purpose in this and I can not tell if it is a fault of mine or the author's. From my perspective it seems contrived and trying to find something to blog about, but I really have no clue, can anyone translate for a humanities sort?
msla•4mo ago
It's not really a meaningful page, because "lowest level" is ill-defined.
Usually, it means "most similar to what the hardware does" so C is lower than Python (because C makes you worry about manual memory management and gives you access to raw pointers) and assembly is lower than C (because it's a human-readable translation of machine code) and microcode is lower than assembly on processors which have it (because microcode is used to implement machine code).
However, this is mathematical code. It's all abstract. Nothing requires or takes advantage of being closer to or further from the hardware. So I guess lowest-level might mean "least like mathematical notation" or "requiring the most concepts to be defined in order to implement the mathematical notation" but that's a very odd definition. And if they meant that, why not use a language like Maxima or Octave which is designed for mathematical work, just for comparison?
xnx•4mo ago
"PL" is the author's abbreviation for "programming language"
userbinator•4mo ago
Given the title, I was expecting to see a solution written in Asm ...which is easily accomplished with checking the conditions bitwise while iterating through all 256k 18-bit numbers.
ofalkaed•4mo ago
msla•4mo ago
Usually, it means "most similar to what the hardware does" so C is lower than Python (because C makes you worry about manual memory management and gives you access to raw pointers) and assembly is lower than C (because it's a human-readable translation of machine code) and microcode is lower than assembly on processors which have it (because microcode is used to implement machine code).
However, this is mathematical code. It's all abstract. Nothing requires or takes advantage of being closer to or further from the hardware. So I guess lowest-level might mean "least like mathematical notation" or "requiring the most concepts to be defined in order to implement the mathematical notation" but that's a very odd definition. And if they meant that, why not use a language like Maxima or Octave which is designed for mathematical work, just for comparison?