Hopefully, if I am writing a garbage collector from scratch, it won't be in a context where performance matters. :) I thought the best part of that section was that the garbage collector ran in constant space, which makes sense as a requirement but isn't something I had thought about before.
> Knuth gets accused of being abstruse, but compared to most math books I've read, he's very clear. Moreover, he has a genuine unpretentious fascination with the things about which he's writing, and that enthusiasm comes through in his writing.
I totally agree. I guess the complaints are because where other books just say "see? get it?", TAOCP keeps going, down to measuring the complexity (not the order of complexity, actually counting how many times each instruction gets executed, which I think is why he uses MIX instead of a higher-level language).
. . . Man, now I want to drop Elements of Computing Systems and go back and read volume I again.
> Knuth gets accused of being abstruse, but compared to most math books I've read, he's very clear. Moreover, he has a genuine unpretentious fascination with the things about which he's writing, and that enthusiasm comes through in his writing.
I totally agree. I guess the complaints are because where other books just say "see? get it?", TAOCP keeps going, down to measuring the complexity (not the order of complexity, actually counting how many times each instruction gets executed, which I think is why he uses MIX instead of a higher-level language).
. . . Man, now I want to drop Elements of Computing Systems and go back and read volume I again.