On Monday, February 25, 2019 at 8:06:33 AM UTC-8, Joerg wrote:
On 2019-02-25 07:29, Ralph Barone wrote:
AMuzi wrote:
https://www.bicycleretailer.com/reca...nd-aftermarket

Mysterious. How the hell did that happen in a design 100+
years old?

They must have improved it.


In German there is the inofficial word "verschlimmbessern". It sums up
the action of "Here we have a working design but let's optimize it
anyhow" and then it all goes to pots. A very common scenario in software
design.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

You hit the nail right on the head. For projects that required very fast response from microprocessors I used to use assembly language. Because of that people started to use assembly language in many projects. The trouble is that assembly language is extremely tedious to program. So they would "improve" it by building libraries of assembly language subroutines. Then in order to use these you didn't know exactly what you had to do so you would save all of the registers and branch to the subroutine, save any necessary data from that and then return and retrieve all of the registers and data to use.

This was what higher level languages did but they usually did it more efficiently by only saving the necessary registers and not saving the returned data but simply passing it back.

This put C and C++ into the position that these higher level languages were actually both more memory efficient but also faster in operation.

This is what happens when people improve things that they don't understand.

Though I'm sure that those who don't know anything about this will have plenty of comments about it.