Compiler Quotes & Sayings

Memories are forever~ The Giver — Lois Lowry

These were rice paddies before they were parking lots. Rice was the basis for our society. Peasants planted the seeds and had highest status in the Confucian hierarchy. As the Master said, "Let the producers be many and the consumers few.' When the Feed came in from Atlantis, from Nippon, we no longer had to plant, because the rice now came from the matter compiler. It was the destruction of our society. When our society was based upon planting, it could truly be said, as the Master did, "Virtue is the root; wealth is the result.' But under the Western ti, wealth comes not from virtue but from cleverness. So the filial relationships became deranged. Chaos," Dr. X said regretfully, then looked up from his tea and nodded out the window. "Parking lots and chaos. — Neal Stephenson

Both in fighting and in everyday life you should be determined though calm. Meet the situation without tenseness yet not recklessly, your spirit settled yet unbiased. Even when your spirit is calm do not let your body relax, and when your body is relaxed do not let your spirit slacken. Do not let your spirit be influenced by your body, or your body be influenced by your spirit. — Miyamoto Musashi

If you lie to the compiler, it will get its revenge. — Henry Spencer

I'm not doing any vampire lackey stuff."
"Fine."
"I'm only drinking your blood."
That made his smile widen. "Fine."
"That means you're stuck with me." She jutted out her chin. "Try to throw me off for some bimbo and we'll see who's immortal. — Nalini Singh

I had lots of posters on my bedroom wall of players like Zico, many Brazilian and Italian players, not many players in particular but I loved football so much and I especially loved skilful players. — Emmanuel Petit

Generative testing is an approach to testing software that was made popular by the QuickCheck library. Originally written in Haskell and since ported to several other programming languages (Ruby, Python, C, C++, Objective-C, Smalltalk, Java, JavaScript, Erlang, Scala, Clojure...), the QuickCheck library allows the developer to separate test logic from the generation of test cases. This means that, as developers, we can spend less time instructing the compiler how to test our code, and focus instead on what properties we expect our code to have. — Anonymous

The truly great man dwells on what is real and not what is on the surface. — Laozi

When a field is declared volatile, the compiler and runtime are put on notice that this variable is shared and that operations on it should not be reordered with other memory operations. Volatile variables are not cached in registers or in caches where they are hidden from other processors, so a read of a volatile variable always returns the most recent write by any thread. — Brian Goetz

At least for the people who send me mail about a new language that they're designing, the general advice is: do it to learn about how to write a compiler. — Dennis Ritchie

Developing a compiler was a logical move; but in matters like this, you don't run against logic - you run against people who can't change their minds. — Grace Hopper

I believe I can do anything. If I decide I want to be a doctor tomorrow, I'm going to be a doctor. — Amy Jo Johnson

Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types. — Eric S. Raymond

But you weren't born," I tell him. "I wrote an algorithm based on the Linux operating kernel. You're an open-source search engine married to a dialog bot and a video compiler. The program scrubs the Web and archives a person's images and videos and data - everything you say, you've said before." For — Adam Johnson

[kade] Remember that article we read last term? The Thompson hack? He felt Rangan get it instantly. [rangan] Have the compiler inject it ... It'd be in the binary, but gone from the source ... [kade] And have the ModOS compiler inject into the Nexus compiler ... — Ramez Naam

She believes that her daughter was in agony and that she chose not to suffer; she needs to believe that through her death Kim now lives on a higher plane. "Why else are flowers so beautiful?" she says to me. "why is the sky such a perfect shade of blue? There has to be more than the here and now. — Jill Bialosky

Make interfaces programmatic rather than semantic when possible. Each interface consists of a programmatic part and a semantic part. The programmatic part consists of the data types and other attributes of the interface that can be enforced by the compiler. The semantic part of the interface consists of the assumptions about how the interface will be used, which cannot be enforced by the compiler. The semantic interface includes considerations such as "RoutineA must be called before RoutineB" or "RoutineA will crash if dataMember1 isn't initialized before it's passed to RoutineA." The semantic interface should be documented in comments, but try to keep interfaces minimally dependent on documentation. Any aspect of an interface that can't be enforced by the compiler is an aspect that's likely to be misused. Look for ways to convert semantic interface elements to programmatic interface elements by using Asserts or other techniques. — Steve McConnell

Any good software engineer will tell you that a compiler and an interpreter are interchangeable. — Tim Berners-Lee

TeX has found at least one bug in every Pascal compiler it's been run on, I think, and at least two in every C compiler — Donald Knuth

var says, "Let the compiler figure out the type." dynamic says, "Let the runtime figure out the type. — Joseph Albahari

I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic. — Grace Hopper

We need a language that lets us scribble and smudge and smear, not a language where you have to sit with a teacup of types balanced on your knee and make polite conversation with a strict old aunt of a compiler. — Paul Graham

Trying to outsmart a compiler defeats much of the purpose of using one. — Brian Kernighan

When the iPhone app is built, the Xamarin C# compiler generates C# Intermediate Language (IL) as usual, but it then makes use of the Apple compiler on the Mac to generate native iPhone machine code just like the Objective-C compiler. The calls from the app to the iPhone APIs are the same as though the application were written in Objective-C. For the Android app, the Xamarin C# compiler generates IL, which runs on a version of Mono on the device alongside the Java engine, but the API calls from the app are pretty — Charles Petzold

With a sort of mental squint. — Lewis Carroll

I'd rather have a search engine or a compiler on a deserted island than a game. — John Carmack

Many useful and valuable books lie buried in shops and libraries, unknown and unexamined, unless some lucky compiler opens them by chance, and finds an easy spoil of wit and learning. — Samuel Johnson

It's never felt more Canadian to be Canadian than it does now. — Douglas Coupland

An interface is a contract between you, the code developer, and the compiler. — Anonymous

Some people hate lime-green; red has all this emotional baggage. Blue seems to be overall one of the more positive colors, and a little more serious than yellow. — David Carson

The ALGOL compiler was probably one of the nicest pieces of code to come out at that time. I spent hours trying to fix and change the compiler. Working with it so closely affected the way I think about programming and had a profound influence on my style. — Gary Kildall

Armando Iannucci is one of my heroes. As I was growing up, he was probably the most influential comic voice that I had. — John Oliver

When the ANSI C standard was under development, the pragma directive was introduced. Borrowed from Ada, #pragma is used to convey hints to the compiler, such as the desire to expand a particular function in-line or suppress range checks. Not previously seen in C, pragma met with some initial resistance from a gcc implementor, who took the "implementation-defined" effect very literally - in gcc version 1.34, the use of pragma causes the compiler to stop compiling and launch a computer game instead! The gcc manual contained the following: The "#pragma" command is specified in the ANSI standard to have an arbitrary implementation-defined effect. In the GNU C preprocessor, "#pragma" first attempts to run the game "rogue"; if that fails, it tries to run the game "hack"; if that fails, it tries to run GNU Emacs displaying the Tower of Hanoi; if that fails, it reports a fatal error. In any case, preprocessing does not continue. - Manual for version 1.34 of the GNU C compiler — Peter Van Der Linden

Regardless of whether one is dealing with assembly language or compiler language, the number of debugged lines of source code per day is about the same! — Fernando J. Corbato