The view from the Engine Room

A programmer's ABCs

Several years ago, before blogging, I cons'd up a programmer's ABC for Stephen Hahn's first child, Benjamin.  I'd forgotten about this until Stephen mentioned last week and mailed me a link to the image; I'd lost the original.  It's a little SPARC-centric, but so was I at the time:

A Programmer's ABC

A is for algorithm, patented or not.

B is for break, to jump out of this rot.

C is for continue, to jump to the top of one's loops.

D is for default, the case that handles the oops.

E is for else, the predicate's inversion.

F is for for, of the loops the most popular version.

G is for goto, a jump oft considered dubious.

H is for hardware, for profits salubrious.

I is for if, a conditional statement.

J is for jmpl, an indirect jump causing performance abatement.

K is for thousands in powers of two.

L is for long, whose size recently grew.

M is for membar, whose use can confound.

N is for NOP, which in delay slots often is found.

O is for operator, whose overloading is oft unsupportable.

P is for pragma, with usage unportable.

Q is for quadword, the largest of all.

R is for return, when we make the stack not so tall.

S is for switch, a computed goto for which we all yearn.

T is for trap, from which we may never return.

U is for unsigned, to avoid two's complement extension.

V is for volatile, whose presence incites apprehension.

W is for WSTATE register, for window traps most topical.

X is for XOR, bitwise not logical.

Y is for Y register, deprecated for years.

Z is for zero, whose dereferencing everyone fears.

Posted at 08:52PM Nov 05, 2007 by barts in General  |  Comments[3]