Kevin Cole

547 points
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Washington DC

By day, a consultant for NOVA Web Development. By evening and weekend, he dons his costume (which looks remarkably like the jeans and T-shirts he normally wears), and goes out doing battle against the forces of proprietary software. He was the team contact for the Ubuntu DC "LoCo" and one of the hosts of the former OLPC Learning Club/Sugar Labs DC. (He has also served as a Red Hat Ambassador.)

Authored Comments

I have a GNU FORTRAN T-shirt that I've worn to PyCon... ;-)

The Xerox Sigma-7 with operating system CP-5 (IIRC) had a few different FORTRAN compilers. It had a vanilla FORTRAN, but also included EFORT (pronounced "effort") the Extended FORTRAN compiler, an FLAG, a.k.a. FORTRAN Load and Go. I think it was EFORT that could would take forever to compile but optimized the hell out of the code. In an Assembly Language course, a professor showed us just how much "effort" EFORT would make by creating complex program that did nothing. EFORT analyzed all the variables that were set to constant values and then never changed, did the math wherever such variables were used, looked at the IFs and DOs and eventually came to the conclusion that the IFs were either always false or always true and the DOs would never be executed. So it generated an output file with a file size of zero -- well, maybe not zero, but we saw the generated assembly language and there was essentially nothing there.