6.8. Legacy Culture

Suppose I write a new little language that has to run in two megabytes of memory, for a cell phone or embedded device. To what degree do issues of implementation like that affect the interface level? When a user uses my program, is he or she going to understand some of my design choices, or have we moved away from those types of limitations now?

Brian: I think we're a lot more away from it than we used to be. If you look at the history of early Unix programs, and certainly AWK among them, you can see lots of places where the fact that memory was extremely tight showed up in the language or various pieces of the operating system.