Manuals, software, programs

Alex Hudson home at alexhudson.com
Tue Feb 14 12:37:28 UTC 2006


On Tue, 2006-02-14 at 11:51 +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> Well, that looks to me like programs for some analogue computers
> would not be programs and some hardware would be software and
> many other fun consequences. I'm sure it'd not be too long
> before other absurdities could be revealed.

Completely as an aside, I'm interested to know why you think those are
absurdities.

I don't see why it's not possible for something to be both hardware and
software, in the same way you could call a postscript file both
documentation and program. 

I can even think of a few examples - eeproms, fpgas, etc. - where a
representation of some software is actually a physical configuration of
a piece of silicon. 

I don't think it's possible to classify any given 'thing', be it object
or file or whatever, into 'hardware', 'program', etc. - but only because
I don't think they're mutually exclusive. 

Cheers,

Alex.




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