Toolkit

Hey guys, I'm putting together a toolkit of commonly used things that I can plug into programs rather than writing them from scratch every time and I want to know what I should put in it.

So far I've got a stack, doubly-linked list, double-ended queue, and binary search/sort algorithms.

What else does /prog/ think I should put in there?

>>14
7 here. I meant "smaller" in a very vague sense, to do with what psychologists call cognitive load. While individual assembly languages _are_ simple, programs written in them are not. As you identified, scripting languages would also be a good choice for teaching, perhaps not BASIC though :-)

I've no idea about the NT kernel (and you don't either, or else you wouldn't be allowed to say so in public). I am familiar with some Unix-like OSs though (Plan 9, Inferno). They use a tiny amount of assembler (I count about 1KLOC in Inferno) but it isn't for optimisation it's because C can't express some operations on modern processors. Using assembler for speed no longer makes sense because scheduling of separate execution units, delay slots, etc. ensure that compiler output will usually outperform hand-coded assembler.

Oh, and modern firmware (by which I presume you mean BIOS on a PC) is often written in assembler. It has been written in Forth in the past (OpenFirmware on SPARCStations and Macs), but no more AFAIK. LinuxBIOS is written in mostly C, with a little assembler.