In the Matter of Herb Schildt: a Detailed Analysis of "C: The Complete Nonsense"
spinoza1111
For your convenience in making comments, here is the same text in
ASCII format.
In the Matter of Herb Schildt: an Analysis of “C: the Complete
Nonsense”
Let’s now deconstruct Peter Seebach’s document “C: the Complete
Nonsense”, an attack on Herb Schildt’s first edition of “C: the
Complete Reference” which in becoming the sole source of subsequent
claims that Schildt wrote “bad books”, which unfairly damaged his good
name. Let’s examine it, line by line.
Note that the Amazon link to Schildt is not to the first edition
reviewed by Seebach. However, Seebach has failed to update “C: the
Complete Nonsense” to reflect fixes to errata, which is itself
indicative the malice which makes libel, actionable.
“C: The Complete Reference is a popular programming book, marred only
by the fact that it is largely tripe. Herbert Schildt has a knack for
clear, readable text, describing a language subtly but quite
definitely different from C.”
In fact, there was more than one C at the time “C: the Complete
Reference” and “C: the Complete Nonsense” were written and published
(circa 1995), and there remain more than one despite the C99
“standard”. This is because the standard was high jacked by vendors
who did not want to change compilers, since this would mean rehiring
expensive compiler developers. As a result, the standard left
significant parts of C undefined.
For example, because in the “old days” it was easiest for simple “one
pass” compilers (compilers which read the source text once) to emit
instructions to place the actual parameters of a subroutine call on
the stack, you could not expect a(b=0, b) to work like you’d expect it
to in a modern language. Other compilers were able to provide the
expected left to right evaluation. They were supporting different
languages neither with a solid claim to being the lingua franca except
to that sort of amateur folk linguist who knows only his own language,
and demonstrates for an “English only” society. Seebach seems to be
this unpleasant type of person with regards to his favorite languages.
Seebach wanted Schildt to describe the C that Seebach knew.
In addition, Peter Seebach has a knack for unclarity, in his solecism
“clear, readable text”. A careful writer would look up the meaning of
clarity in the dictionary, and finding that it means contributing to
understanding, would qualify “clarity” as “apparent”.
“This page aims to give people a good way to find out what’s wrong
with it.”
…as opposed to letting readers figure that out, as if a book were a
restaurant. This is what Theodore Adorno calls the “culinary”
approach; an only apparently democratic but actually autocratic mode
in which the prospective consumer is warned off a book as if the very
possibility of critical reading has been erased; in a programming
book, trying out code with typos and fixing it.
Furthermore, the document is about the first edition only and has not
been updated, which means that it is egregiously poor as any sort of
guide to people who want to buy Schildt’s fourth edition; because the
market “liked” Schildt, he’s gone to four editions.
“Don’t bother contacting the publisher; they apparently don’t feel
these errors are significant.”
We have learned from Seebach himself on comp.lang.c and
comp.lang.c.moderated that he contacted McGraw-Hill, and that McGraw
Hill actually offered him a temporary tech review job but they failed
to offer him enough money for his tastes. And as we shall see, the
errors are not that significant.
“The following is a partial list [1] of the errors I am aware of [2],
sorted by page number. I am not including everything [3]; just many
[4] of them.”
[1] Contradicts “currently known” below. Like Seebach’s solecism in
the use of “clear”, which means understandable and providing a clear
view of the truth, his slop-English allows him to lie to himself and
others. “Currently known” means in the absence of further
qualification, “these are all the known errors”.
[2] Implies that there are n errors and the list lists m<n. But what
are they? We have no idea.
[3] Why not?
[4] When he says "I am missing several hundred errors", this could
mean that Seebach wants people to join in a deliberate campaign to
destroy Herbert Schildt's reputation (which is civilly liable, that
is, libel) or that he somehow has determined that there are M~=~1000
errors, but he presents N=20. But in this context, N is not "many".
"I am missing several hundred errors [5]. Please write me if you think
you know of any I'm missing. [6] Please also write if you believe one
of these corrections is inadequate or wrong; I'd love to see it."
[5] This is a very disturbing statement, as above. Did he lose them?
Did he forget them? Or did he seek to form a cybernetic mob and gang
up on Herb Schildt?
[6] Very disturbing. Peter currently on comp.lang.c has a track record
of posting awful code as if he’s seeking assistance. Here, he seems to
be Open Sourcing, an Open Season, on Schildt’s reputation.
"Currently known:"
Followed by only 20 errors! So how many are there? Dozens? Hundreds?
20? Nobody knows. But here goes…
Page 19
Schildt: “In general, negative numbers are represented using the two’s
complement approach…”
Seebach: “This is not a C feature. It is a common implementation, but
it is specifically not required. (Binary is, but one’s complement is
not unheard of.)”
Negative numbers are not ALWAYS represented in twos complement
notation: but this is what the head of department said in my graduate
level class on computer architecture, that in general twos complement
is used. This was so students could understand error dumps.
Page 33
Seebach: “The following heading occurs: static Global Variables: no
such thing. A static variable outside of a function has file scope,
which is distinct from global scope.”
The important distinction in computer science is between variables
which are static and have global scope, and variables which are
allocated either at procedure startup or in blocks depending on the
language, and have local scope.
It is more important to learn this in general for all programming
languages so that one can learn new languages. However, Seebach has
boasted, in comp.lang.c, that he has not taken a single computer
science class, at the undergraduate or graduate level. Herb Schildt
has a Master’s in computer science.
p. 53
printf("%f", sizeof f);
printf("%d", sizeof(int));
Seebach: “Clearly wrong; sizeof is not a double or float. It is also
not an int; it is an unsigned integral type, thus, one of unsigned
char, unsigned short,unsigned int, or unsigned long.”
“The only safe way to do this is: printf(“%lu”, (unsigned long)
sizeof(int)); while this is larger, a clear explanation of why it is
required will go a long way towards helping people understand C.”
Although I do not know why Herb used %f and %d format codes, he did
know, as Seebach seems not to, that all ints are floats and all floats
are doubles in well-structured languages. Because at the time and
even, to an extent, now, C was almost as diverse of the languages of
China, Herb used the educated programmer’s maxim, which is to first
code as if the compiler writers and language designers knew at least
as much as the intelligent programmer, and fix problems later.
p. 53
“Seebach: The following code:
/* Write 6 integers to a disk file. */
void put_rec(int rec[6], FILE *fp)
{
int len;
len = fwrite(rec, sizeof rec, 1, fp);
if (len != 1) printf("write error");
}
is described as causing all of rec to be written, no matter what size
of array is being used.”
“Incorrect. As correctly noted elsewhere, when “int rec[6]” is an
argument to a function, it actually specifies a pointer-to-int, not an
array[6]-of-int. sizeof rec is sizeof(int *) here, and this code works
only if sizeof(int *) is precisely 6 times sizeof(int). (Not
impossible, but hardly likely.)”
“Further, who said fp was a disk file? fp could be stdout. (An
admitted nit.)”
The put_rec code was errata. Peter has said on comp.lang.c that McGraw
Hill offered him the chance to work collegially with Herb to fix
errata; he refused, he has said, because they didn’t offer enough
money. Because Schildt’s books were successful, he’s gone to several
editions, and has fixed most of the errata.
Page 59
Schildt: “This shorthand works for all the binary operators.”
Seebach: “No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t work for ‘.’, ‘->’, ‘&&’, or
‘||’. For that matter, it doesn’t work for the function call operator
or the array operator, both of which are, roughly, binary operators.
In college lectures which Seebach confesses he did not attend, “binary
operators” often is a verbal shorthand for “the commonly known binary
arithmetic operators, with logic operators being treated separately”.
The problem here is that adolescents fantasize that there can be
unambiguous language, whereas in what Jurgen Habermas, the German
“critical theorist” calls “civil discourse”, a common and grown-up
search for truth from which competition for gain is excluded, there
occurs a constant search among all participants, not only for
substantive consensus on a truth, but also for support for that common
consensus in the form of a common language, whose micro-rules vary in
a language game…what Wittgenstein said was a form of life, as well.
Put more simply, for the same reason we can use a noun as a verb in
“let me email you the email” and be understood perfectly, the human
brain, as opposed to a computer, has an unparalleled ability to parse
and reparse holistically and rapidly, while searching, not for the
most advantageous parse to the owner of the brain, but for the best
fit.
Therefore, in a college classroom, a teacher like Herb, who has just
introduced the arithmetical binary operators, and who plans to address
logical and other binary operators later, is understood by normal, and
attentive students.
However, Peter Seebach has said on comp.lang.c that he is “attention
disordered”. This would give him rights of charity save for the fact
that he on that forum has called people he doesn’t like “morons” and
“insane”, using a language which even Sarah Palin, of all people,
correctly recognizes as discriminatory and abusive.
Here, Peter, for personal advantage (in fact, I believe, to
dishonestly establish himself to be a clever programmer despite his
lack of academic background in computer science or any evidence of
programming in code swatches he has posted this year on comp.lang.c)
interrupts the flow of civil discourse in a virtual classroom and is
the bane, in fact of computer instructors: the student with a chip on
his shoulder who wants to show off his knowledge.
Page 63
Seebach: “If scanf fails, the variable guess is referenced before it
has been initialized; accessing an uninitialized object introduces
undefined behavior.”
Errata. Seebach was invited to work collegially on the sort of errata
which creeps into computer books when the publishers don’t allow the
authors post-PDF control, and he refused. Most of these errors were
fixed in subsequent editions.
Page 131
Schildt: “Memory allocated by C’s dynamic allocation functions is
obtained from the heap — the region of free memory that lies between
your program and its permanent storage area and the stack.”
Seebach: “C does not specify that there is a stack – only that
functions can call each other. The “heap” is a DOS term, and the
layout is not a part of the C language. It is not atypical for the
layout to be radically different, and certainly, there is no call for
describing a specific choice as ‘what happens’.”
Seebach lays an egg. Like a like a Maoist student during the Cultural
Revolution, he leaps up to admonish the teacher not to talk about
stacks as if it’s even possible to implement C’s runtime, or any
language runtime, without stacks.
He then surpasses this, and says “the ‘heap’ is a DOS term”. The
“heap” is most definitely not a DOS term: Seebach is ignorant of OO
languages which formalize a heap…and a stack. Here is where Seebach’s
lack of education is most obvious.
It is formally impossible, in fact, to implement a runtime with
support for recursive procedures (supported by all C compilers and
runtimes since day one) without a stack, that is, a LIFO data
structure. It is painfully possible to go without a stack, and save
and return general registers in work areas provided by the caller;
this was done on the IBM 360 in BAL in my direct experience. But it
does not work if a procedure calls itself directly or indirectly. Some
sort of LIFO stack, implemented in an unspecified way, is needed.
The only reason why the C99 standard document fails to use the word
“stack” that I can imagine is a long-standing American prejudice
against the stack, which surfaced both in the design of the IBM/360
(whose designers knew about stacks, probably, but used general
registers instead) and much later in the RISC kiddie’s hatred of
stacks.
Page 132
Schildt: “After the assignment, p points to the first 1000 bytes of
free memory.”
Seebach: “No, p points to at least 1000 bytes of allocated space,
which is not free memory. There is also no reason to assume it was the
‘first’ 1000 bytes; top-down allocation is not atypical, and further,
there’s no reason to assume this code fragment runs in isolation.”
Schildt like most good writers, tries to be conversational in
presenting difficult material. “Free” was a minor solecism.
But, far more perniciously, Seebach actually equates negative claims
with positive claims and often prefers, whether writing about Schildt
or C standards, the negative claim as being not only true, but also
easier to defend because harder to disprove by men of good will.
Seebach has blogged in public, circa 2000, his preference for George
Bush. He, like most former Bush supporters, has disclaimed further
support. Nonetheless, his support for Bush is interesting, because for
Bush’s henchman Karl Rove (a college dropout who like Seebach
considers himself a genius autodidact), it was only necessary to claim
that Saddam Hussein, in 2003, had weapons of mass destruction, and let
the (huge) antiwar movement try to “prove a negative”.
Therefore here and elsewhere, Seebach would “teach” C in a faux-Zen
way, beating students who conclude from the behavior of anyone
compiler and runtime that “C” works “this” way. To him, their
knowledge is Sophistry, but as an “expert” his is the larger
Sophistry. This is his false belief that C has been “standardized” by
negative truths to wit that various behaviors (order of evaluation of
actual parameters, when pre and post increment operators are
evaluated) when a language standard must actually be useful and
therefore, deterministic.
Schildt is like a competent high school geometry teacher who uses a
specific triangle with a specific metric to demonstrate the
Pythagorean theorem. Seebach, who isn’t paying attention and may be
autistic, is interrupting the class to ask whether the nonzero width
of the chalk marks should be accounted for.
This would be an intelligent question…in an “advanced” class. But in
computer science, there are no “advanced” classes in being a language
lawyer, since (1) being a language lawyer doesn’t help much in problem
solving for the most part and (2) Seebach is in a language where, even
after standardization and in the standard itself, the “law” is
“unspecified” in too many places.
Page 162
Seebach: “Functions are not of type void; functions are of various
types, called collectively the function types. A function may have a
return of type void, which means that its type is something like
‘function taking (…) and returning void’.”
Mr. Snoid is lost in the void. Herb knows very well that to return
“void” is to return nothing and not return anything. Syntactically, in
a way the student needs to know, the type of a void function is
“void”.
Both Seebach and Schildt are using reifying language, treating our
ideas about what electrons do in a computer as things. Peter would
renarrate the void function as returning something named “void”, which
does not exist, and Schildt’s language is better, since void functions
are something of a special [syntactical] type, which is not returned.
Page 163
Schildt: “You may also declare main() as void if it does not return a
value.”
Seebach: “Specifically untrue. ANSI mandates two declarations for
main, and says that main may have declarations compatible with those.
Both return int.”
C was not standardized at the time this book was written, it existed
in several different dialects. In fact, I discovered (on behalf, as it
happens, of John “A Beautiful Mind” Nash) that the Microsoft compiler,
which many of Schildt’s readers were using, is nonstandard at least as
regards the evaluation of compile-time constant expressions. While it
has become a Shibboleth or Secret Handshake among non-Microsoft
Illuminati that you must declare main as int, it’s actually better
style to make it void unless you have an important message, such as
“up yours!” to the OS.
But this shibboleth has become an article of faith amongst the anti-
Microsoft crowd who compensate for the meaninglessness of their lives
and general incompetence by fantasizing that they are Special, and the
OS gives a hoot.
Page 197
Seebach: “It is redundant to give a size of char in bytes as 1 as an
“assumption” – it’s the definition, sizeof() gives the size in
*chars*.”
Shibboleth. And here, Peter Seebach is here critiquing writing as a
technical editor when he gave evidence in the prologue above that he
can’t write with charity, clarity (the clarity of truth), coherence or
consistency.
Page 247
Seebach: “The stream fp is opened with mode “r”, the mode to open a
text file. Then, fseek is called on fp, with the 2nd argument not a
value returned by a previous call to ftell.”
“ANSI 7.9.9.2: For a text stream, either offset shall be zero, or
offset shall be a value returned by an earlier call to the ftell
function on the same stream and whence shall be SEEK_SET.”
“In other words, this is blatantly invalid.”
Genuine errata of the sort to be expected under deadline pressure.
Pompous and exhibitionist quotation from a standard doesn’t change
this.
Page 253
Schildt: “In most implementations, the operation fails if the file
specified in the open statement does not exist on the disk.”
Seebach: “To the best of my knowledge, POSIX (the standard for the
open() call) documents and requires the functionality of the O_CREAT
flag.”
But, the operation fails if the file does not exist on the disk.
Seebach’s point is “I’m real smart”.
Page 283
Schildt’s code:
#include string.h // corner chars deleted to format
char s1[] = "hello ";
char s2[] = "there.";
void main(void)
{
int p;
p = strcat(s1, s2);
}
Seebach: “It is correctly noted that this generates a warning. Not
mentioned is that it’s invalid; although s1[] is a modifiable array,
it is an array large enough to hold “hello ” (and the terminating null
byte), so it has room for 7 bytes. The strcat overflows the array,
producing undefined behavior.”
“(And, of course, the declaration of main is invalid.)”
Genuine errata. Seebach is not doing so good. Only 2/14 at this point.
Page 284
Seebach: “All of the header files are listed in capitals; the standard
specifies them in lower case. It is not required that a C compiler
reject all-caps, but nor is it required that it accept them.”
“But nor is it required”? A completely illiterate grammatical
solecism. How dare does Seebach pretend to be a tech editor? He was
offered a job finding errors. He found a few.
And furthermore, C should reject all-caps: it would do so if it were a
truly consistent language. But it as a real language in practice it
allows them because of Microsoft’s market power.
Page 314
Schildt: “However, since EOF is a valid integer value, you must use
feof() to check for end-of-file when working with binary files.”
Seebach: “Not merely a little bit untrue, but utterly wrong, and
specifically missing the point of the rule (correctly stated) about
returning the char as ‘unsigned char converted to int’ (actually
stated in the standard in 7.9.7.1, under fgetc()).”
“Since EOF is a negative integral constant, it can never compare equal
to any unsigned char. When you are reading from a binary file, the
values you get willnever compare equal to EOF, until getchar() returns
EOF because the file is empty.”
“This correlates with a mistake made in all of the examples where
loops break on ‘$’, ‘A’, or ‘ ‘ because the return from getchar() is
immediately put into a char variable.”
“This is a more serious flaw than many, because it results in poorly
written, inefficient code.”
“(Couple this with the consistent attempts to use feof() to see if the
next read will fail, when in fact feof() only returns true when the
previous read failed, and you get a completely wrong description of
the standard I/O library.)”
“Also, several of the programs given loop forever if an end of file is
reached, because EOF is not checked for in a loop.”
“(The astute reader will note that he is correct for implementations
in which char and int are the same size; I disregard this because:
This violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the standard. The
implementation he is discussing does not have this problem.”
“In such an environment, the “correct” thing to do is probably to use
fread and check for failure. feof() will still not warn you that your
next read will fail.)”
Probably Herb’s most serious error, but of the sort which creeps into
most computer books, including Seebach’s Apress title as he admits.
Software books disclaim warranty protection for the consumer in the
same way software warranties make this disclaimer.
Page 333
Seebach: “After
char str[80];
sprintf(str,"%s %d %c", "one", 2, 3);
it is asserted that str will contain ‘one 2 3’. This is incorrect; it
would contain “one 2 ^C”. (That’s ‘control C’ in ASCII, or a character
with the value 3)”
Errata. And grandstanding.
Page 348
Schildt: “This program checks each character read from stdin and
reports all uppercase letters:”.
Seebach: “He is wrong.”
#include ctype.h // corner chars deleted to format
#include stdio.h
void main(void)
{
char ch;
for (;;) {
ch = getchar();
if(ch == ' ') break;
if(isupper(ch)) printf("%c is uppercase\n", ch);
}
}
“The code works only if there are no uppercase letters following the
first space in the standard input stream; further, a file consisting
only of the word ‘hello’ will prevent this horribly broken code from
terminating – because it doesn’t check for EOF, only for a space.”
“Once again, even a slight clue about EOF would help a lot here.”
Errata. Most of Seebach’s points about EOF handling are valid, but
what’s broken is the way C, whether “standardized” or not, handles
EOF.
Constant is the tendency to make an inferential leap from error to
ignorance, and from special to general ignorance. It is adolescent.
Page 434
Schildt: “free() must only be called with a pointer that was
previously allocated with one of the dynamic allocation system’s
functions (either malloc(), realloc(), or calloc()).”
Seebach: “Also specifically untrue. ANSI states that free(NULL) is
valid and has no effect. (Also note that it must be called with a
pointer to space previously allocated, not with a pointer previously
allocated, and that the pointer must not have been already freed or
passed to realloc().)”
There is no sensible use for free(NULL) save in code generation with
the preprocessor or other tool: this fact is obscure and shouldn’t be
presented at this point. The latter part of Seebach’s comment is again
a Maoist attempt to prove that he’s smarter than the teacher. Herb is
giving advice that is practical and true which if followed, works.
Page 735
Seebach: “This is spectacularly wrong; the ‘corrected’ “
x = *p * (*p++);
“is EXACTLY equivalent in terms of C; as correctly noted earlier, the
order of evaluation IS NOT SPECIFIED.”
“The code is still invalid (p is used to determine *p on the left of
the *, as well as modified on the right), and the parentheses aren’t
affecting the code at all.”
“In this code, p can be incremented anywhere in the line; the only
requirement would be that the value of (*p++) be the same as the value
of (*p) before the increment. It is not specified whether the other *p
happens before or after the increment.”
“In fact, because the code modifies an object (p) and uses the value
of the object to do something other than determine the new value (The
first “*p”), it is invalid. Completely; a compiler is allowed to
reject the code, and many will produce surprising results from this
operation.”
“This is not merely wrong, it’s wrong while discussing the problem,
which is doubly bad.”
The order of evaluation is indeed specified in the variant behavior of
C compilers, whose writers, as mere programmers, were given no
guidance by the standard.
This was because C standardization occured after the “Reagan
Revolution” empowered private companies and computer thugs to use the
public good for private gain. In the C99 standard, Job One seems to
have been not making vendors rehire compiler developers so that their
stock price was maintained. The standard is useless to mere
programmers, who are considered serfs today.
At this point in “C: the Complete Nonsense”, Peter Seebach has
identified only 5 errata, of the sort that exist in all books unless
the publisher allows the authors to use a system to avoid errata. And
yet he writes at the end:
“There are dozens of others, and I’m sure there’s an effective
drinking game lurking in this book.”
In other words, Seebach Open Sources here an Open Season on Schildt
based on his malice. This is civilly actionable libel.
Seebach needs to remove this document, which is “hit” by Google higher
than Schildt’s book’s fourth edition, which dishonestly misdescribes
the current edition, and which is the source, as far as I can
determine, of all subsequent attacks on Schildt’s output. He needs to
replace it by an apology to Herb.
Seebach appears to me stuck at the level of the vicious adolescent. In
“You Are Not A Gadget”, Jaron Lanier (a musician, computer scientist,
and philosopher) writes that what he calls “drive-by anonymity”, the
marshalling of an assault on a Chosen target by anonymous posters can
indeed scale up, from the personal anguish caused Herb and his family
when his name was transformed, based exclusively on “C: the Complete
Nonsense” to “Bullschildt”, to the death threats received by Java
author Kathy Sierra, to the “tea party” attacks on Obama…and beyond.
But, you may say, Seebach is not anonymous. Lanier, in fact, misses
the social structure of enabling. In the case of Sierra, named, non-
anonymous bloggers at the defunct site www.meankids.org started in on
Sierra. This enabled anonymous bloggers in the same way anonymous
commenters say the most broad and overgeneralized things about all of
Schildt’s books, based on “C: the Complete Nonsense” and documents
which cite CTCN directly or indirectly, the “paper trail” seeming to
ignorant people a vast amount of real evidence.
Hitler was not anonymous; but his followers were, in many cases. And
Mike Godwin is wrong; the probability of comparision to Hitler in
online discussions “converges to unity” not because people are being
shrill and foolish, but because Hitler is our inner troll, as Lanier
calls it. He’s the face in the crowd in Munich in August 1914 baying
for war who yearns to be on the podium, and non-anonymous.
Actually I should have been able to deduce Fascism from the memory of
my childhood. It sent its emissaries there in advance, like a
conqueror into the most distant province, long before it arrived: my
school comrades. If the bourgeois class harbored since time immemorial
the dream of the wild popular community, the oppression of all by all,
then children with first names like Horst and Jürgen and last names
like Bergenroth, Bojunga and Eckhardt, theatrically staged the dream,
before the adults were historically ripe enough to realize it. I felt
the violence of the image of horror they were striving for so clearly,
that all happiness afterwards seemed to be revocable and borrowed. The
outbreak of the Third Reich did indeed surprise my political judgment,
yet not my fearful premonitions. So closely had all the motifs of the
permanent catastrophe brushed against me, so inextinguishably were the
warning signs of the German awakening burned into me, that I
recognized each one all over again in the features of the Hitler
dictatorship: and often it appeared to my foolish horror, as if the
total state had been invented solely against me, in order to inflict
on me what I had been hitherto spared in my childhood, that state’s
prehistory. The five patriots who attacked a single schoolmate, beat
him up and, when he complained to the teacher, defamed him as a
classroom snitch – aren’t they the same ones, who tortured prisoners,
in order to prove the foreigners wrong, who said that torture was
occurring? Whose hullaboo knew no end, when the smartest student made
a mistake – didn’t they surround the Jewish camp prisoner, grinning
and embarrassed, making fun of him, after he all too clumsily sought
to hang himself? Who couldn’t write a single decent sentence, but
found every one of mine too long – didn’t they abolish German
literature and replace it through their scribing [Schrifttum]? Many
covered their chests with mysterious insignia and wanted to become
naval officers in a landlocked country: they declared themselves
leaders of storm troopers and detachments, the legitimizers of
illegitimation. The involuted intelligent ones, who had as little
success in class as the gifted tinkerer without connections under
liberalism; who for that reason curried favor with their parents with
woodsaw work, or indeed drew for their own pleasure on drawing-boards
with colored inks during long afternoon days, helped the Third Reich
to its cruel efficiency and are being betrayed once again. Those
however who always defiantly stirred up trouble against the teacher
and, as one called it, disturbed the lesson, the day – indeed, the
hour – they graduated from high school, they sat down with the same
teachers at the same table with the same beer, as a confederation of
men, who were born followers, rebels, whose impatient blows of the
fist on the table already drummed the worship of the masters. They
need only stay put, to catch up with those who were promoted to the
next class, and revenge themselves on them. Since they, officials and
candidates for death sentences, have stepped visibly out of my dreams
and have expropriated my past life and my language, I don’t need to
dream of them any longer. In Fascism, the nightmare of childhood has
realized itself.
Theodore Wiesengrund Adorno, Minima Moralia, 1948
Ian Bush
> This is what Theodore Adorno calls the “culinary”
> approach;
This is the point that my laughing became out loud. I consider myself
a tolerant person, did I loose it before or after other sane people in
the group?
Ian
Seebs
> On 3 Apr, 19:25, spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> approach;
> This is the point that my laughing became out loud. I consider myself
> a tolerant person, did I loose it before or after other sane people in
> the group?
I didn't actually read it. Is it funny? I could totally go back and
read it, if it's actually funny.
-s
--
Copyright 2010, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / usenet...@seebs.net
http://www.seebs.net/log/ <-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictures
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology) <-- get educated!
Morris Keesan
> On 2010-04-03, Ian Bush <ianbush.thro...@googlemail.com> wrote:
>> On 3 Apr, 19:25, spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>> This is what Theodore Adorno calls the ?culinary?
>>> approach;
>
>> This is the point that my laughing became out loud. I consider myself
>> a tolerant person, did I loose it before or after other sane people in
>> the group?
>
> I didn't actually read it. Is it funny? I could totally go back and
> read it, if it's actually funny.
It's not funny enough to bother reading the whole thing, but here's one
howler:
[regarding the use of %f and %d printf format specifiers for sizeof]
> Although I do not know why Herb used %f and %d format codes, he did
> know, as Seebach seems not to, that all ints are floats and all floats
> are doubles in well-structured languages. Because at the time and
> even, to an extent, now, C was almost as divers of the languages of
> China, Herb used the educated programmer's maxim, which is to first
> code as if the compiler writers and language designers knew at least
> as much as the intelligent programmer, and fix problems later.
I have absolutely no idea what spinoza thinks he's saying here, especially
the part about "all ints are floats and all floats are doubles".
spinoza then, at the end, goes into one of his typical babbling rants
about "I am not a gadget", Hitler, Fascism, etc.
He does make one point which may be valid, if true: according to spinoza,
Schildt's book is in its 4th edition, with some errata fixed, and "C:
The Complete Nonsense" refers to the first edition.
A little research shows that Schildt's website refers to "C: The Complete
Reference" as having been "fully updated for the C99 standard". Schildt's
"Errata" page, however, links to errata for C++, C#, and Java books, but
contains no errata for any editions of any of his C books.
--
Morris Keesan -- mke...@post.harvard.edu
Seebs
> On Sat, 03 Apr 2010 16:34:07 -0400, Seebs <usenet...@seebs.net> wrote:
>> I didn't actually read it. Is it funny? I could totally go back and
>> read it, if it's actually funny.
> It's not funny enough to bother reading the whole thing, but here's one
> howler:
> [regarding the use of %f and %d printf format specifiers for sizeof]
>> Although I do not know why Herb used %f and %d format codes, he did
>> know, as Seebach seems not to, that all ints are floats and all floats
>> are doubles in well-structured languages. Because at the time and
>> even, to an extent, now, C was almost as divers of the languages of
>> China, Herb used the educated programmer's maxim, which is to first
>> code as if the compiler writers and language designers knew at least
>> as much as the intelligent programmer, and fix problems later.
> I have absolutely no idea what spinoza thinks he's saying here, especially
> the part about "all ints are floats and all floats are doubles".
There certainly exist languages in which you can use numeric types and
expect automatic conversions.
The problem is that (and no one, I think, disputes that this design choice
causes some problems), in C, when you're passing stuff to the variadic part
of a variadic function, you don't know what types of objects you get except
insofar as the earlier arguments told you. Thus, passing "%f" and passing
an integer doesn't necessarily cause the integer to get converted to float;
what it does is "undefined behavior", of which the two most common forms
are:
1. You get random stack garbage because floats and integers are passed
differently.
2. You get a float-sized chunk of space which contained part of an integer,
or an integer, or an integer plus some other stuff, depending on their
respective sizes.
Either way, it's garbage.
My guess would be that the actual motivation was "there is a float object,
I'm typing quickly, I'll write %f". Because I've made that mistake; the
difference is that I recognize that it's a mistake and fix it.
Note that "in well-structured languages" is totally irrelevant; according
to Nilges, C is not a well-designed language, and a book purporting to be
about C which then relies on conventions or policies that only exist in other
languages is, as I said: Complete. Nonsense.
I'm glad to see that Nilges is continuing to support my theory that only
sheer madness can make C:TCR 3rd Edition look remotely coherent.
> spinoza then, at the end, goes into one of his typical babbling rants
> about "I am not a gadget", Hitler, Fascism, etc.
> He does make one point which may be valid, if true: according to spinoza,
> Schildt's book is in its 4th edition, with some errata fixed, and "C:
> The Complete Nonsense" refers to the first edition.
No, he's not right. C:TCN is based on the THIRD edition, with I believe
one or two references back to things that have been fixed since the second.
e.g., the famous sizeof() example, in the 2nd edition, used <> instead of
!=. This was fixed in the 3rd edition (and the 4th edition "fixes" the
exercise making it factually correct but completely uninformative. D'oh!)
> A little research shows that Schildt's website refers to "C: The Complete
> Reference" as having been "fully updated for the C99 standard". Schildt's
> "Errata" page, however, links to errata for C++, C#, and Java books, but
> contains no errata for any editions of any of his C books.
I don't really care about errata for the 3rd edition at this point; the 4th
edition is somewhat improved, but still does crazy Pascal-style EOF handling
and in some cases appears to pass EOF to putchar() type functions due to
doing things in the wrong order. (Or possibly the flow is convoluted enough
that it sometimes doesn't. The flow is sufficiently confusing when you try
to use feof() as a loop control as to make it a bit tricky to be sure without
spending more time on it than I've wanted to.)
Richard Heathfield
spinoza1111 wrote:
<snip>
> In the Matter of Herb Schildt: an Analysis of “C: the Complete
> Nonsense”
>
> Let’s now deconstruct Peter Seebach’s document “C: the Complete
> Nonsense”,
Your first error is...
> an attack on Herb Schildt’s first edition of “C: the
> Complete Reference” which in becoming the sole source of subsequent
> claims that Schildt wrote “bad books”, which unfairly damaged his good
> name.
...here. It is not the sole source of subsequent claims that Schildt
wrote bad books. Other sources include, for example, subsequent editions
of "C: The Complete Reference". As for the page being a response to the
first edition, ISTR that it is actually based on the third edition
(perhaps Seebs would clarify this point?).
<snip>
> For example, because in the “old days” it was easiest for simple “one
> pass” compilers (compilers which read the source text once) to emit
> instructions to place the actual parameters of a subroutine call on
> the stack, you could not expect a(b=0, b) to work like you’d expect it
> to in a modern language. Other compilers were able to provide the
> expected left to right evaluation.
Actually, C compilers almost invariably evaluate function parameters
right to left (although there is no requirement on them to do this). You
have been told this before.
<snip>
> Although I do not know why Herb used %f and %d format codes, he did
> know, as Seebach seems not to, that all ints are floats and all floats
> are doubles in well-structured languages.
No int is a float, and no float is a double.
<snip>
>
> The put_rec code was errata.
If by this you mean that it is contained in a published errata list,
please cite the relevant reference to an errata addendum in the book or
a Schildt-sanctioned errata Web page for the book. If you simply mean
Schildt was wrong, well, yes, he was.
> Page 63
>
> Seebach: “If scanf fails, the variable guess is referenced before it
> has been initialized; accessing an uninitialized object introduces
> undefined behavior.”
>
> Errata. Seebach was invited to work collegially on the sort of errata
> which creeps into computer books when the publishers don’t allow the
> authors post-PDF control, and he refused. Most of these errors were
> fixed in subsequent editions.
Please cite the page numbers in those subsequent editions in which these
errors were fixed.
<snip>
>
> Page 162
>
> Seebach: “Functions are not of type void; functions are of various
> types, called collectively the function types. A function may have a
> return of type void, which means that its type is something like
> ‘function taking (…) and returning void’.”
>
>
>
> Mr. Snoid is lost in the void. Herb knows very well that to return
> “void” is to return nothing and not return anything. Syntactically, in
> a way the student needs to know, the type of a void function is
> “void”.
No, a function that returns void has a type that includes "function
returning void" (but that isn't the whole story, since the type also
includes the parameter information).
<snip>
> Page 163
>
> Schildt: “You may also declare main() as void if it does not return a
> value.”
>
> Seebach: “Specifically untrue. ANSI mandates two declarations for
> main, and says that main may have declarations compatible with those.
> Both return int.”
>
> C was not standardized at the time this book was written, it existed
> in several different dialects.
The first edition was published in 1987, when the standardisation effort
was well under way. Note that it was the ANSI C Standard that formally
introduced the type "void" into the language.
<snip>
--
Richard Heathfield <http://www.cpax.org.uk>
Email: -http://www. +rjh@
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999
Sig line vacant - apply within
spinoza1111
> [I've snipped a few hundred lines of the usualspinoza1111nonsense.]
>
> spinoza1111wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> > In the Matter of Herb Schildt: an Analysis of “C: the Complete
> > Nonsense”
>
> > Let’s now deconstruct Peter Seebach’s document “C: the Complete
> > Nonsense”,
>
> Your first error is...
>
> > an attack on Herb Schildt’s first edition of “C: the
> > Complete Reference” which in becoming the sole source of subsequent
> > claims that Schildt wrote “bad books”, which unfairly damaged his good
> > name.
>
> ...here. It is not the sole source of subsequent claims that Schildt
> wrote bad books. Other sources include, for example, subsequent editions
> of "C: The Complete Reference".
This is ridiculous. Perhaps in your country a man can be a witness
against himself? I am really glad you're some sort of temporary
programmer and not in politics, because you'd be a BNP nutcase.
> As for the page being a response to the
> first edition, ISTR that it is actually based on the third edition
> (perhaps Seebs would clarify this point?).
I don't think he will, for part of reputation destruction is creating
confusion. For example, Peter and others like to retail stories about
weird coworkers and form hypotheses about what I might do in order to
pad their case, as Peter, it appears, has padded his resume.
>
> <snip>
>
> > For example, because in the “old days” it was easiest for simple “one
> > pass” compilers (compilers which read the source text once) to emit
> > instructions to place the actual parameters of a subroutine call on
> > the stack, you could not expect a(b=0, b) to work like you’d expect it
> > to in a modern language. Other compilers were able to provide the
> > expected left to right evaluation.
>
> Actually, C compilers almost invariably evaluate function parameters
> right to left (although there is no requirement on them to do this). You
> have been told this before.
...and sensible, well-educated programmers are surprised, because
elsewhere in C the comma is a useful operator for left to right
sequencing. The order of actual parameter evaluation is bizarre and
legacy.
>
> <snip>
>
> > Although I do not know why Herb used %f and %d format codes, he did
> > know, as Seebach seems not to, that all ints are floats and all floats
> > are doubles in well-structured languages.
>
> No int is a float, and no float is a double.
...in C, in which sense is deliberately absent so that stupid people
like you can self-appear as experts.
Please don't play with words. You're not qualified and you'll cut
yourself.
>
> <snip>
>
> > Page 163
>
> > Schildt: “You may also declare main() as void if it does not return a
> > value.”
>
> > Seebach: “Specifically untrue. ANSI mandates two declarations for
> > main, and says that main may have declarations compatible with those.
> > Both return int.”
>
> > C was not standardized at the time this book was written, it existed
> > in several different dialects.
>
> The first edition was published in 1987, when the standardisation effort
> was well under way. Note that it was the ANSI C Standard that formally
> introduced the type "void" into the language.
...however, a major part of McGraw Hill's target demographic was not
using a standard compiler, and nobody was by definition before 1989.
John Nash wasn't using a "standard" compiler in 1992, although after I
switched him to the Borland compiler, his compiler was "more"
standard.
Therefore, it would have been absurd to publish on "standard C"
especially because it was so obvious that the standards effort was
comprised of vendor thugs and incompetent programmers who'd bought a
membership.
Seebs
> On Apr 4, 6:39?am, Richard Heathfield <r...@see.sig.invalid> wrote:
>> As for the page being a response to the
>> first edition, ISTR that it is actually based on the third edition
>> (perhaps Seebs would clarify this point?).
> I don't think he will, for part of reputation destruction is creating
> confusion.
Which is funny, because I already posted a clear answer to that question
some hours ago. It is indeed based on the third edition. The second
had more errors, and I have never seen the first, but I've been told it
was even worse.
spinoza1111
> On 2010-04-03, Morris Keesan <mkee...@post.harvard.edu> wrote:
>
> > On Sat, 03 Apr 2010 16:34:07 -0400, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
> >> I didn't actually read it. Is it funny? I could totally go back and
> >> read it, if it's actually funny.
> > It's not funny enough to bother reading the whole thing, but here's one
> > howler:
> > [regarding the use of %f and %d printf format specifiers for sizeof]
> >> Although I do not know why Herb used %f and %d format codes, he did
> >> know, as Seebach seems not to, that all ints are floats and all floats
> >> are doubles in well-structured languages. Because at the time and
> >> even, to an extent, now, C was almost as divers of the languages of
> >> China, Herb used the educated programmer's maxim, which is to first
> >> code as if the compiler writers and language designers knew at least
> >> as much as the intelligent programmer, and fix problems later.
> > I have absolutely no idea what spinoza thinks he's saying here, especially
> > the part about "all ints are floats and all floats are doubles".
You wouldn't, because you don't know "programming languages"
independent of a set of facts about a specific programming language.
It's as if I'd decided to program all computers as if they were IBM
1401s, and apart from liking Rexx (which is based in part on the
legacy and internal IBM belief that all computers should support
decimal arithmetic with unlimited precision), I didn't.
If you like to learn from books, please read "Programming Language
Pragmatics" by Michael L. Scott (Morgan Kauffman). You need to learn
theoretic constructs such as the fact that in sensible programming
languages, numbers form a nested set down from double to short or
byte. You also need to learn that competent programmers try to write
sensible code based on these constructs, adapting their language to
their model rather than celebrating its mistakes.
>
> There certainly exist languages in which you can use numeric types and
> expect automatic conversions.
>
Correct.
> The problem is that (and no one, I think, disputes that this design choice
Correct.
> causes some problems), in C, when you're passing stuff to the variadic part
> of a variadic function, you don't know what types of objects you get except
> insofar as the earlier arguments told you. Thus, passing "%f" and passing
> an integer doesn't necessarily cause the integer to get converted to float;
> what it does is "undefined behavior", of which the two most common forms
> are:
>
> 1. You get random stack garbage because floats and integers are passed
> differently.
> 2. You get a float-sized chunk of space which contained part of an integer,
> or an integer, or an integer plus some other stuff, depending on their
> respective sizes.
>
> Either way, it's garbage.
Point taken. 6 errata out of 20 points but note that the maximum
number of errata will still be only 20, and you haven't addressed the
contradictory language at the beginning of the post.
>
> My guess would be that the actual motivation was "there is a float object,
> I'm typing quickly, I'll write %f". Because I've made that mistake; the
> difference is that I recognize that it's a mistake and fix it.
But our experience is that you DON'T fix or see trivial errors such as
off by one. However, it seems that here, and at most 20 other place
(and, probably more like 6), Herb ran out of time to test code which
was in the process of being transformed into a hard-to-change PDF.
This is common in software publishing, and it's why computer books
disclaim warranty.
>
> Note that "in well-structured languages" is totally irrelevant; according
> to Nilges, C is not a well-designed language, and a book purporting to be
> about C which then relies on conventions or policies that only exist in other
> languages is, as I said: Complete. Nonsense.
No, using a poorly structured language makes the search for good
structure even more important. This is why I developed "virtually
structured programming" for assembler and Fortran, and it is a point
made long ago by Brian Kernighan in The Elements of Programming Style.
My suspicion of any programmer who uses the mistakes of a language to
use his own poor practice is covering up his incompetence, and this
has been confirmed, for me, by your code here.
>
> I'm glad to see that Nilges is continuing to support my theory that only
> sheer madness can make C:TCR 3rd Edition look remotely coherent.
Petitio principii:
1. Nilges is mad
2. Therefore anything he says is wrong (a questionable assumption on
two bases: on the monkey/typewriter model, approximately 50% of what I
say is true, and on a Romantic basis, I might have special insight)
3. He thinks C:TCR is coherent
4. Therefore he's mad
Dweebach, CTCR is not at issue here: CTCN has to stand on its own
merits. It may be incoherent. I noticed long ago that many computer
books are semi-coherent, and I learned why: computer book publishing
is a business, not "truth".
But CTCN fails to make your case. It's self-contradictory, misuses
words such as "clarity", and is completely disorganized. To make your
case, you would have had to list the "hundreds" or "dozens" of errors
you refer to in CTCN. It is illogical to reason from 20 to 24 or 100.
>
> > spinoza then, at the end, goes into one of his typical babbling rants
> > about "I am not a gadget", Hitler, Fascism, etc.
> > He does make one point which may be valid, if true: according to spinoza,
> > Schildt's book is in its 4th edition, with some errata fixed, and "C:
> > The Complete Nonsense" refers to the first edition.
>
> No, he's not right. C:TCN is based on the THIRD edition, with I believe
> one or two references back to things that have been fixed since the second.
The book is in its fourth edition. Therefore, you are dishonest,
because you're telling people about the flaws, with page numbers, in
an edition that is out of print. Dishonest enough to believe that in
the above, you may be lying, and that CTCN is based on the first
edition. This is verifiable by checking page numbers.
It in fact appears that you posted a response to the first edition,
and failed to keep it up to date. You may have changed it (recently,
perhaps, in response to this thread) but you're still basically
dishonest. You were asked, and offered money, to be a tech editor and
have a real shot at accomplishing something (which my son accomplished
wrt to Stroustrup's book on C++ at the age of 13) but you refused.
This is because you are grandiose. You couldn't take trigonometry and
had to take calculus, and you wouldn't take computer science. There's
a disturbing pattern.
>
> e.g., the famous sizeof() example, in the 2nd edition, used <> instead of
> !=. This was fixed in the 3rd edition (and the 4th edition "fixes" the
> exercise making it factually correct but completely uninformative. D'oh!)
>
> > A little research shows that Schildt's website refers to "C: The Complete
> > Reference" as having been "fully updated for the C99 standard". Schildt's
> > "Errata" page, however, links to errata for C++, C#, and Java books, but
> > contains no errata for any editions of any of his C books.
>
> I don't really care about errata for the 3rd edition at this point; the 4th
> edition is somewhat improved, but still does crazy Pascal-style EOF handling
> and in some cases appears to pass EOF to putchar() type functions due to
> doing things in the wrong order. (Or possibly the flow is convoluted enough
> that it sometimes doesn't. The flow is sufficiently confusing when you try
> to use feof() as a loop control as to make it a bit tricky to be sure without
> spending more time on it than I've wanted to.)
For each edition, you needed to inventory every error. Then, you
needed to form some sort of explanatory theory. Mine is that Microsoft
C is different and nonstandard, because C, if standardized would be a
new language.
You'd be laughed at since most computer books have under disclaimer of
warranty any number of errors, and you have said that your OWN book
will have errors. This is why you prefer the McCarthyite (and Fascist)
conspiracy theory that Schildt's books contain "hundreds" of errors
and their was a plot.
But you preferred a drive-by.
>
> -s
> --
> Copyright 2010, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / usenet-nos...@seebs.nethttp://www.seebs.net/log/<-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictureshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology) <-- get educated!
spinoza1111
wrote:
Your illiteracy is causing me to "loose" it. The fact is that Adorno
saw things which I saw emerge in computing, including subhumanity, and
the "culinary" belief that the consumer (or hive mind) has any
artistic, or here scientific, wisdom.
> the group?
>
> Ian
Richard Heathfield
> On Apr 4, 6:39 am, Richard Heathfield <r...@see.sig.invalid> wrote:
>> [I've snipped a few hundred lines of the usualspinoza1111nonsense.]
>>
>>
>>> an attack on Herb Schildt’s first edition of “C: the
>>> Complete Reference” which in becoming the sole source of subsequent
>>> claims that Schildt wrote “bad books”, which unfairly damaged his good
>>> name.
>> ...here. It is not the sole source of subsequent claims that Schildt
>> wrote bad books. Other sources include, for example, subsequent editions
>> of "C: The Complete Reference".
>
> This is ridiculous. Perhaps in your country a man can be a witness
> against himself?
Sure, if he wants to. Anyone can prove that they're an idiot, if they
try hard enough.
> I am really glad you're some sort of temporary
> programmer and not in politics, because you'd be a BNP nutcase.
As usual, you're 100% wrong. In this case, you manage to be 100% wrong
four times in a single sentence.
>
>> As for the page being a response to the
>> first edition, ISTR that it is actually based on the third edition
>> (perhaps Seebs would clarify this point?).
>
> I don't think he will, for part of reputation destruction is creating
> confusion.
You're 100% wrong. He posted an article a few hours ago (after I posted
the above) in which he did indeed say that his article was based on the
third edition, which makes you 100% wrong again.
> For example, Peter and others like to retail stories about
> weird coworkers and form hypotheses about what I might do in order to
> pad their case, as Peter, it appears, has padded his resume.
I doubt that very much. Almost certainly he has to trim his CV
mercilessly to keep it down to a reasonable length. I know I do. There
is simply no room for padding.
<snip>
>>> Errata. Seebach was invited to work collegially on the sort of errata
>>> which creeps into computer books when the publishers don’t allow the
>>> authors post-PDF control, and he refused. Most of these errors were
>>> fixed in subsequent editions.
>> Please cite the page numbers in those subsequent editions in which these
>> errors were fixed.
[no response from EGN]
Nilges was invited to provide evidence to support his wildly spurious
claim, but he refused.
>>> Page 162
>>> Seebach: “Functions are not of type void; functions are of various
>>> types, called collectively the function types. A function may have a
>>> return of type void, which means that its type is something like
>>> ‘function taking (…) and returning void’.”
>>> Mr. Snoid is lost in the void. Herb knows very well that to return
>>> “void” is to return nothing and not return anything. Syntactically, in
>>> a way the student needs to know, the type of a void function is
>>> “void”.
>> No, a function that returns void has a type that includes "function
>> returning void" (but that isn't the whole story, since the type also
>> includes the parameter information).
>
> Please don't play with words. You're not qualified and you'll cut
> yourself.
Actually, I /am/ qualified to play with words. Odd, that. Even now
you're 100% wrong.
Let me spell it out for you.
typename functionname(parameterlist) means that functionname is a
function that has the type "function taking parameterlist and returning
typename". It does not mean that functionname has the type typename. To
say that it does mean that is, at best, a spurious and ill-considered
shortcut and, at worst, ghastlily wrong.
>
>> <snip>
>>
>>> Page 163
>>> Schildt: “You may also declare main() as void if it does not return a
>>> value.”
>>> Seebach: “Specifically untrue. ANSI mandates two declarations for
>>> main, and says that main may have declarations compatible with those.
>>> Both return int.”
>>> C was not standardized at the time this book was written, it existed
>>> in several different dialects.
>> The first edition was published in 1987, when the standardisation effort
>> was well under way. Note that it was the ANSI C Standard that formally
>> introduced the type "void" into the language.
>
> ....however, a major part of McGraw Hill's target demographic was not
> using a standard compiler, and nobody was by definition before 1989.
By the time the 3rd edition was published, however, practically
everybody was using a standard-conforming compiler, because all the
compiler writers were working hard on conformance whilst the Standard
was still in development. And it was the 3rd edition on which C:TCN was
based. Note, too, that it was ANSI C that introduced the "void" type
into the language.
> John Nash wasn't using a "standard" compiler in 1992, although after I
> switched him to the Borland compiler, his compiler was "more"
> standard.
ISTR your claiming that he was using Microsoft C prior to your alleged
and probably flawed recommendation that he switch to Borland C. In 1992,
Microsoft's compiler was, I believe, at version 5.00A (or subsequent),
and it most definitely claimed ANSI C conformance.
>
> Therefore, it would have been absurd to publish on "standard C"
On the contrary, it would have been absurd not to.
Seebs
> spinoza1111 wrote:
>> For example, Peter and others like to retail stories about
>> weird coworkers and form hypotheses about what I might do in order to
>> pad their case, as Peter, it appears, has padded his resume.
> I doubt that very much. Almost certainly he has to trim his CV
> mercilessly to keep it down to a reasonable length. I know I do. There
> is simply no room for padding.
Actually, for once, Nilges is entirely correct (though almost certainly
by coincidence).
I have maintained for some time a padded resume.
http://www.seebs.net/res-p.html
As the parent page says:
I was once told you can't get hired if you don't have a padded
resume. Here's mine.
Example listings:
Apple Computer
Product Tester (1988-present)
* Tested products after shipment.
* Funded company.
As you might expect, literally true...
> Nilges was invited to provide evidence to support his wildly spurious
> claim, but he refused.
Actually, it is the case that several of the errors cited were indeed
corrected in the 4th edition. I don't have any reason to believe that
Nilges has a copy of the 4th edition on which to base his claim, but
he happens to be right.
> typename functionname(parameterlist) means that functionname is a
> function that has the type "function taking parameterlist and returning
> typename". It does not mean that functionname has the type typename. To
> say that it does mean that is, at best, a spurious and ill-considered
> shortcut and, at worst, ghastlily wrong.
Ayup.
>> Therefore, it would have been absurd to publish on "standard C"
> On the contrary, it would have been absurd not to.
We can resolve this easily.
From the front cover of C:TCR 3rd Edition:
The One "Must Have"
Book on C --
A Comprehensive
Desktop Reference
Covers ANSI C
The spine says, in big letters (about the same size as the text "the
complete reference", but written in white-on-red to make it more
visible) "covers ANSI C". The back cover likewise asserts that the
book "Covers ANSI C".
The copyright date is 1995. According to the Preface:
When the second edition [of this book] was prepared, the ANSI C
standard had just been adopted. Today, standard C code is
simply a given. (And, with standardization the promise of truly
portable C code was finally fulfilled.)
The book claims repeatedly to cover, and focus on, ANSI C.
Whether it should or not, or whether it lives up to those claims, are
separate questions. However, as usual, Nilges is utterly and delusionally
wrong -- he has mistaken his own prejudices for those of his idol. In
fact, the C standard had been in widespread use for nearly six years
when the third edition was written.
-s
--
spinoza1111
> On 2010-04-04, Richard Heathfield <r...@see.sig.invalid> wrote:
>
> >spinoza1111wrote:
> >> For example, Peter and others like to retail stories about
> >> weird coworkers and form hypotheses about what I might do in order to
> >> pad their case, as Peter, it appears, has padded his resume.
> > I doubt that very much. Almost certainly he has to trim his CV
> > mercilessly to keep it down to a reasonable length. I know I do. There
> > is simply no room for padding.
>
> Actually, for once, Nilges is entirely correct (though almost certainly
> by coincidence).
>
> I have maintained for some time a padded resume.
>
> http://www.seebs.net/res-p.html
>
> As the parent page says:
>
> I was once told you can't get hired if you don't have a padded
> resume. Here's mine.
>
> Example listings:
>
> Apple Computer
> Product Tester (1988-present)
> * Tested products after shipment.
> * Funded company.
>
> As you might expect, literally true...
This is quite a level of dishonesty. You might think you're fucking
around, and were your resume only to damage corporations, I wouldn't
necessarily have a problem with it.
However, people who padded their resumes at Bell-Northern Research
when I was there from 1981 to 1986 had of necessity to backstab
coworkers, such as a highly skilled programmer-manager whose reports
ganged up on her because she not only expected them to be on time, but
to submit structured code (which would not include switch statements
with fallthrough).
Listen, at 40, you need to grow up. You're damaging people and abusing
clc and clcm to pad your resume, and this harms people who are all I
care about. This situation is escalating; I have contacted Apress and
will take further steps as needed. You can END IT at any time by
removing "C: the Complete Nonsense" and replacing it with an apology.
>
> > Nilges was invited to provide evidence to support his wildly spurious
> > claim, but he refused.
>
> Actually, it is the case that several of the errors cited were indeed
> corrected in the 4th edition. I don't have any reason to believe that
> Nilges has a copy of the 4th edition on which to base his claim, but
> he happens to be right.
Which is all the more reason for you to remove the web page. You need
to redo it for the fourth edition, and this time, we need to see all
of what you claim to be errors. If as you say the page was intended to
be a service to prospective buyers, they need you to do your homework
this time.
Furthermore, your new Web page must be a wiki or blog with open
comments because you simply do not know how to separate your opinions
from facts.
I understand that this is a lot of work. Alternatively, simply post an
apology at the original page site. If the site is pulled and an
apology is posted, I will no longer discuss this issue.
>
> > typename functionname(parameterlist) means that functionname is a
> > function that has the type "function taking parameterlist and returning
> > typename". It does not mean that functionname has the type typename. To
> > say that it does mean that is, at best, a spurious and ill-considered
> > shortcut and, at worst, ghastlily wrong.
>
> Ayup.
Wow, someone who can make an adverb out of ghastly telling Schildt how
to write. Ghastly.
>
> >> Therefore, it would have been absurd to publish on "standard C"
> > On the contrary, it would have been absurd not to.
>
> We can resolve this easily.
>
> From the front cover of C:TCR 3rd Edition:
> The One "Must Have"
> Book on C --
> A Comprehensive
> Desktop Reference
> Covers ANSI C
>
> The spine says, in big letters (about the same size as the text "the
> complete reference", but written in white-on-red to make it more
> visible) "covers ANSI C". The back cover likewise asserts that the
> book "Covers ANSI C".
>
> The copyright date is 1995. According to the Preface:
> When the second edition [of this book] was prepared, the ANSI C
> standard had just been adopted. Today, standard C code is
> simply a given. (And, with standardization the promise of truly
> portable C code was finally fulfilled.)
>
> The book claims repeatedly to cover, and focus on, ANSI C.
>
> Whether it should or not, or whether it lives up to those claims, are
> separate questions. However, as usual, Nilges is utterly and delusionally
> wrong -- he has mistaken his own prejudices for those of his idol. In
> fact, the C standard had been in widespread use for nearly six years
> when the third edition was written.
The book jacket was not under Herb's control, and it means partial
coverage because in 1995 C existed (and it exists today) in multiple
dialects.
You don't understand how a proper standard would work. It would not
have introduced "sequence points" nor would it have left actual
parameter evaluation undefined because then the standard is as a non-
deterministic finite automaton with respect to a DFA. Interesting from
a theoretical viewpoint but useless in practice.
It's like taking the mathematical union of English and Chinese such
that your language is "the set of all statements valid in English or
Chinese". This would be called "Chinglish" but for the fact that that
already names a creole with the vocabulary of English and the grammar
of Chinese. It's a useless definition in practice, a mathematical
stunt valid only in formal language theory.
I have no brief here for McGraw Hill's marketers who stamped "ansi" on
a lot of books to sell them, without getting author feedback, any more
for the treatment of authors by such companies and SAMS, which jailed
a friend of mine for setting up a critical web site. The issue is the
personal harm to Schildt, his reputation, and his family.
>
> -s
> --
spinoza1111
> On 2010-04-04,spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > On Apr 4, 6:39?am, Richard Heathfield <r...@see.sig.invalid> wrote:
> >> As for the page being a response to the
> >> first edition, ISTR that it is actually based on the third edition
> >> (perhaps Seebs would clarify this point?).
> > I don't think he will, for part of reputation destruction is creating
> > confusion.
>
> Which is funny, because I already posted a clear answer to that question
> some hours ago. It is indeed based on the third edition. The second
> had more errors, and I have never seen the first, but I've been told it
> was even worse.
Lack of diligence+malice+harm == libel.
>
> -s
> --
spinoza1111
>
> > spinoza1111 wrote:
> >> For example, Peter and others like to retail stories about
> >> weird coworkers and form hypotheses about what I might do in order to
> >> pad their case, as Peter, it appears, has padded his resume.
> > I doubt that very much. Almost certainly he has to trim his CV
> > mercilessly to keep it down to a reasonable length. I know I do. There
> > is simply no room for padding.
>
> Actually, for once, Nilges is entirely correct (though almost certainly
> by coincidence).
>
> I have maintained for some time a padded resume.
>
> http://www.seebs.net/res-p.html
>
> As the parent page says:
>
> I was once told you can't get hired if you don't have a padded
> resume. Here's mine.
>
> Example listings:
>
> Apple Computer
> Product Tester (1988-present)
> * Tested products after shipment.
> * Funded company.
>
> As you might expect, literally true...
Hmm:
* It's OK for you to so obviously pad. I mean, ha ha, we all "get"
it: you've bought and used Apple computers and you've bought stock.
All of us in the in-group grok it.
* But it's also OK for you to waste, not the time of corporations (I
don't give a fuck about corporations) but of HR people who are
punished for not finding enough candidates...who don't walk in like
you would walk in I'd hasard, in a dirty T-shirt, to fail a simple
(but o so flawed in your superior mind) test in C.
* It's also OK for you on the job to cover up for your lack of
programming skill to backstab coworkers.
OK, so my fat pal Adorno is off-topic. Jaron Lanier is a modern
computer scientist, and he charges clowns like you with a completely
exaggerated notion of your intellects coupled with what he calls the
ideology of VIOLATION.
What is the "ideology of violation"?
It is the belief of people who are, or in your case think they are, of
such "superior intellect" that they can play tricks on people who are
(often for racist reasons) considered by them to be of "inferior
intellect".
Jig's up, ASSHOLE. This situation is escalating. End.it.now. Remove
CTCN and post an apology for the harm you have done.
spinoza1111
> On Apr 4, 4:15 pm, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
This matter has become very time consuming, perhaps for all concerned.
Therefore, unilaterally, I'm going to declare a temporary "cease fire"
in order for people to have time to study my document and let cooler
heads prevail.
I will stop posting and reading until Sunday 11 April China time.
I still propose that Peter Seebach undertake to remove "C: the
Complete Nonsense" based on its lack of valid and sufficient content
in proportion to the damage it has done, and to replace it with an
apology for the considerable misunderstanding it has created. I waive
his having to apologize to me for the considerable harm he has done
me.
If Seebach undertakes to do both before 11 April, I would appreciate
his notifying me of this decision and undertaking by email to
spino...@yahoo.com.
If this is not done, I will have to continue this matter, with
escalation to the next level.
Edward G. Nilges
Richard Heathfield
> On Apr 4, 6:01 pm, spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> On Apr 4, 4:15 pm, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
>
> This matter has become very time consuming, perhaps for all concerned.
Not for me. It took me a couple of hours last night to catch up with
about 400 clc articles posted over this last week or so, and a few
minutes to reply to a few of them.
> Therefore, unilaterally, I'm going to declare a temporary "cease fire"
You're not supposed to be shooting in the first place, bozo - you're
supposed to be learning.
> in order for people to have time to study my document
I don't see why anyone would want to do that. It's nonsense, and a waste
of time.
> I will stop posting and reading until Sunday 11 April China time.
I doubt that very much.
<nonsense snipped>
Seebs
> spinoza1111 wrote:
> You're not supposed to be shooting in the first place, bozo - you're
> supposed to be learning.
Well, yes. But since he's the only person attacking, he's the only person
who can declare a "cease fire".
>> in order for people to have time to study my document
> I don't see why anyone would want to do that. It's nonsense, and a waste
> of time.
Exactly. It's not something anyone's going to bother "studying", because
even the first casual glance reveals it to be utter nonsense. It walks a
fine line between "wrong" and "not even wrong".
>> I will stop posting and reading until Sunday 11 April China time.
> I doubt that very much.
Yeah, the guy who floods SRQ with garbage does the same thing, announces
that he's stopping for a while, then decides that he has to start posting
again anyway.
-s
--
John Bode
> On 2010-04-04, spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > On Apr 4, 6:39?am, Richard Heathfield <r...@see.sig.invalid> wrote:
> >> As for the page being a response to the
> >> first edition, ISTR that it is actually based on the third edition
> >> (perhaps Seebs would clarify this point?).
> > I don't think he will, for part of reputation destruction is creating
> > confusion.
>
> Which is funny, because I already posted a clear answer to that question
> some hours ago. It is indeed based on the third edition. The second
> had more errors, and I have never seen the first, but I've been told it
> was even worse.
>
I had a copy of the 1st edition; it went into the trash by the end of
the semester. The main problem I had with it was that half of the
examples wouldn't compile, and half of the ones that did compile had
runtime problems. I asked one of my professors if the problem was me
or the book; he agreed that the book was the problem, and, in his
words, that Schildt didn't know the language half as well as he
claimed.
Part of the problem was that the book was *extremely* DOS-centric (I
was working on VMS, so of course CC would bail as soon as it saw
#include <conio.h>), but there were problems beyond that.
Shortly after that I got Harbison & Steele, 2nd edition, and even
though I couldn't immediately understand all of it, it quickly became
my primary reference.
I've thumbed through the 4th edition of C:TCR in bookstores; I haven't
found the kinds of egregious errors that riddled the 1st edition, but
that's not exactly a ringing endorsement.
blm...@myrealbox.com
spinoza1111 <spino...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> The text is on wordpress at
>
> http://spinoza1111.wordpress.com/2010/04/03/in-the-matter-of-herb-schildt-an-analysis-of-c-the-complete-nonsense/
>
> For your convenience in making comments, here is the same text in
> ASCII format.
FSVO "ASCII" (i.e., not the 7-bit version).
> In the Matter of Herb Schildt: an Analysis of "C: the Complete
> Nonsense
>
> Let's now deconstruct Peter Seebach's document "C: the Complete
> Nonsense", an attack on Herb Schildt's first edition of "C: the
> Complete Reference" which in becoming the sole source of subsequent
> claims that Schildt wrote "bad books", which unfairly damaged his good
> name. Let's examine it, line by line.
Others have commented on various parts of critique. I'll try to
address only points that I don't think have been made already.
[ snip ]
> p. 53
>
> printf("%f", sizeof f);
> printf("%d", sizeof(int));
>
> Seebach: "Clearly wrong; sizeof is not a double or float. It is also
> not an int; it is an unsigned integral type, thus, one of unsigned
> char, unsigned short,unsigned int, or unsigned long."
>
> "The only safe way to do this is: printf("%lu", (unsigned long)
> sizeof(int)); while this is larger, a clear explanation of why it is
> required will go a long way towards helping people understand C."
>
> Although I do not know why Herb used %f and %d format codes, he did
> know, as Seebach seems not to, that all ints are floats and all floats
> are doubles in well-structured languages.
On many systems, of course, integers and floating-point values
are represented differently. In that sense, ints are *not*
floats, and even a claim that any int can be represented as,
or converted to, a float depends on the relative sizes of the
two types; if they are the same (as for example they are in Java
[*]), there will be some values that can be exactly represented
as ints but not as floats.
[*] Whether Java meets your criteria for "well-structured language" --
<shrug>
[ snip ]
> Page 163
>
> Schildt: "You may also declare main() as void if it does not return a
> value."
>
> Seebach: "Specifically untrue. ANSI mandates two declarations for
> main, and says that main may have declarations compatible with those.
> Both return int."
>
> C was not standardized at the time this book was written, it existed
> in several different dialects. In fact, I discovered (on behalf, as it
> happens, of John "A Beautiful Mind" Nash) that the Microsoft compiler,
> which many of Schildt's readers were using, is nonstandard at least as
> regards the evaluation of compile-time constant expressions. While it
> has become a Shibboleth or Secret Handshake among non-Microsoft
> Illuminati that you must declare main as int, it's actually better
> style to make it void unless you have an important message, such as
> "up yours!" to the OS.
>
> But this shibboleth has become an article of faith amongst the anti-
> Microsoft crowd who compensate for the meaninglessness of their lives
> and general incompetence by fantasizing that they are Special, and the
> OS gives a hoot.
It may be that all(?) of the ways of invoking a program in a
Windows environment ignore its return value. This is not the
case in all operating systems:
Command shells for UNIX-like systems may (usually do?) provide
access to the return value via an environment variable, and some
shell scripts make use of it. Other mechanisms for invoking
programs (e.g., fork/exec*/waitpid) also provide access to the
return code.
And didn't JCL for the venerable IBM OS/VS operating system(s) use
the value returned by a called program to control execution flow?
That's how I remember it anyway.
To me it seems like good practice to write code that complies with
the requirements of as many environments as possible. <shrug>
[ snip ]
> Hitler was not anonymous; but his followers were, in many cases. And
> Mike Godwin is wrong; the probability of comparision to Hitler in
> online discussions "converges to unity" not because people are being
> shrill and foolish, but because Hitler is our inner troll, as Lanier
> calls it. He's the face in the crowd in Munich in August 1914 baying
> for war who yearns to be on the podium, and non-anonymous.
>
> Actually I should have been able to deduce Fascism from the memory of
> my childhood.
Your childhood? my, you must be older than I thought ....
[ snip ]
> occurring?
but you remembered to double the "r" this time ....
[ snip ]
> embarrassed
and here
[ snip ]
> In Fascism, the nightmare of childhood has
> realized itself.
>
> Theodore Wiesengrund Adorno, Minima Moralia, 1948
*OH!* Those weren't your words, were they? Well, perhaps there
were quotation marks, or indentation, or something identifying this
text as a quotation in the version of this review posted at wordpress.
--
B. L. Massingill
ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.
John Bode
[snip]
>
> p. 53
>
> printf("%f", sizeof f);
> printf("%d", sizeof(int));
>
> Seebach: “Clearly wrong; sizeof is not a double or float. It is also
> not an int; it is an unsigned integral type, thus, one of unsigned
> char, unsigned short,unsigned int, or unsigned long.”
>
> “The only safe way to do this is: printf(“%lu”, (unsigned long)
> sizeof(int)); while this is larger, a clear explanation of why it is
> required will go a long way towards helping people understand C.”
>
> Although I do not know why Herb used %f and %d format codes, he did
> know, as Seebach seems not to, that all ints are floats and all floats
> are doubles in well-structured languages.
It's not a matter of whether ints are subsets of floats. It's a matter
of how the printf() function expects conversion specifiers and the
types of the corresponding arguments to match. If you tell printf()
you're going to pass it a value of one type but actually pass a value
of a different type (with a different size and/or representation),
then you're not going to get the correct output.
> Because at the time and
> even, to an extent, now, C was almost as diverse of the languages of
> China, Herb used the educated programmer’s maxim, which is to first
> code as if the compiler writers and language designers knew at least
> as much as the intelligent programmer, and fix problems later.
>
Don't waste the energy trying to defend this snippet; you'll hurt
yourself. This kind of error is just plain sloppiness/carelessness on
Schildt's part. Even at their most fractured (which was nowhere near
what you suggest), the various implementations of C defined the same
interface for printf(). printf("%f", sizeof f) wasn't going to work
*anywhere*.
This was an honest-to-God mistake on Schildt's part. Deal with it and
move on.
spinoza1111
> On 2010-04-04, Richard Heathfield <r...@see.sig.invalid> wrote:
>
> > spinoza1111 wrote:
> >> Therefore, unilaterally, I'm going to declare a temporary "cease fire"
> > You're not supposed to be shooting in the first place, bozo - you're
> > supposed to be learning.
>
> Well, yes. But since he's the only person attacking, he's the only person
> who can declare a "cease fire".
No, I have agreement on the essentials from two others here.
Keep in mind that you and Heathfield et al. are of cardinality
approximately equal to 10e1 and that your consensus is for this reason
statistically meaningless.
>
> >> in order for people to have time to study my document
> > I don't see why anyone would want to do that. It's nonsense, and a waste
> > of time.
>
> Exactly. It's not something anyone's going to bother "studying", because
> even the first casual glance reveals it to be utter nonsense. It walks a
> fine line between "wrong" and "not even wrong".
That makes no sense. Is this why you failed to take computer science?
Did you take a first casual glance at the big textbook for CS101 and
decide it was nonsense?
Peter, I've done you the real courtesy you should have done Schildt,
of a thorough analysis of CTCN. If you felt as strongly as you do that
Schildt was in error in a special, extraordinary way, then like me,
you needed to post, in place of what you posted, a line by line, error
by error analysis. But it appears to me that you have a habit of
making "snap" judgements about people and books.
>
> >> I will stop posting and reading until Sunday 11 April China time.
> > I doubt that very much.
>
> Yeah, the guy who floods SRQ with garbage does the same thing, announces
> that he's stopping for a while, then decides that he has to start posting
> again anyway.
Indeed, I have rejoined the discussion a little early to prevent
attacks on McClean and Navia, who have taken a position that software
and book authors shouldn't have to deal with trivial and poorly
written attacks.
And, once again: people who cannot make valid arguments on the Net
typically start raving about SOME OTHER poster or coworker. This is a
new form of the logical fallacy of argument from false analogy.
You can end this by removing CTCN and replacing it with an apology.
>
> -s
> --
spinoza1111
> spinoza1111 wrote:
> > On Apr 4, 6:01 pm, spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >> On Apr 4, 4:15 pm, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
>
> > This matter has become very time consuming, perhaps for all concerned.
>
> Not for me. It took me a couple of hours last night to catch up with
> about 400 clc articles posted over this last week or so, and a few
> minutes to reply to a few of them.
>
> > Therefore, unilaterally, I'm going to declare a temporary "cease fire"
>
> You're not supposed to be shooting in the first place, bozo - you're
> supposed to be learning.
>
> > in order for people to have time to study my document
>
> I don't see why anyone would want to do that. It's nonsense, and a waste
> of time.
>
> > I will stop posting and reading until Sunday 11 April China time.
>
> I doubt that very much.
I was surprised to find a buy in so quickly from McClean and Navia,
and I would like to defend their good names as well as that of Schildt
and me.
spinoza1111
> On Apr 4, 6:01 pm, spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > On Apr 4, 4:15 pm, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
>
> This matter has become very time consuming, perhaps for all concerned.
> Therefore, unilaterally, I'm going to declare a temporary "cease fire"
> in order for people to have time to study my document and let cooler
> heads prevail.
>
> I will stop posting and reading until Sunday 11 April China time.
>
> I still propose that Peter Seebach undertake to remove "C: the
> Complete Nonsense" based on its lack of valid and sufficient content
> in proportion to the damage it has done, and to replace it with an
> apology for the considerable misunderstanding it has created. I waive
> his having to apologize to me for the considerable harm he has done
> me.
>
> If Seebach undertakes to do both before 11 April, I would appreciate
> his notifying me of this decision and undertaking by email to
>
> If this is not done, I will have to continue this matter, with
> escalation to the next level.
>
> Edward G. Nilges
Countermanding this, because otherwise Malcolm and Navia will
unnecessarily fight a separate battle, alone. And this IS a battle,
albeit metaphorically. It started to be a war when Peter attacked
Schildt's first edition, probably without reading it. It's not about
Schildt; it is about a whole attitude of incompetent programmers, one
of dull hostility towards language.
spinoza1111
Yes, it was, but this isn't about Schildt. It is about CTCN which has
a higher density of errors than Schildt's large book, errors which
aren't typos or errata but which betray:
* Lack of education in at least English and computer science (clear
but wrong a solecism, the "heap" is not a DOS term)
* A dull and savage hostility towards the written word
Peter, your errors in CTCN approach unity.
spinoza1111
> In article <f68bd6a2-795b-4d8b-92b1-dbfb8a3a0...@r18g2000yqd.googlegroups.com>,> >http://spinoza1111.wordpress.com/2010/04/03/in-the-matter-of-herb-sch...
>
> > For your convenience in making comments, here is the same text in
> > ASCII format.
>
> FSVO "ASCII" (i.e., not the 7-bit version).
At this point, blm, you are grasping at straws.
That is correct. However, a competent programmer will treat the
mathematical relationship of integer to real number as having
precedence over implementations where there can be integer RESULTS
(not, as you claim, integers) that cannot be represented as floats.
Also, I am afraid that a "competent" programmer in America means
someone like Stallman, Ted Nelson, or myself. I do not class myself
with such geniuses except in one regard. This is that each of us
learned mathematics before we had access to a computer, and this
taught the absolute lexical priority of mathematics (and human needs)
over the limitations of computers, including bit precision.
This is possibly why, today, most American programmers are incompetent
and are no longer permitted, in many organizations, to actually code
real software, and must instead content themselves, as Peter seems to,
with writing unneeded scripts and inappropriately making modifications
to existing software out of vanity.
Whereas many seasoned, even young, Indian developers had no access to
computers until recently.
In this case, Herb seems to have remembered something more important
than that which was forgotten. Sure, the example is wrong, but de
minimis.
This is the best explanation I've seen of the main() quibble, but it
remains a quibble.
It is true that it would be great to expect that ANY C program with a
main() (eg., most) would return something that could be trusted by ANY
shell script to mean failure or success...in the unix and linux world,
based as that world is on plugging together reusable software
components.
However, not all of us regard unix-linux as the zenith of
accomplishment. In fact, Jaron "You Are Not a Gadget" Lanier is quite
amusing on this subject.
He points out two related facts based on wide experience, wider and
deeper than anyone's here including my own:
* Since 1990 all Pop music is retro. There's a Sixties "sound", a
Seventies "sound" (get down!) and even an Eighties "sound", but today
to have a distinct "sound" is "lame" and "sucks" because as here,
people are afraid to try to live outside what Lanier calls the "hive
mind".
* The two most notable achievements of the coder kiddies of this same
era? Linux and wikipedia. And what is Linux? Uh, a rewrite of unix
based on a 1989 textbook on something called minix, which I used to
own. And what is Wikipedia? An encyclopedia which is trustworthy only
on hard science and which is based on the theft of intellectual
property of virtual and unwitting slaves, edited by convenience store
clerks, which may be tax fraud.
Therefore, I don't think that a language such as C should be designed
around the needs of an out of date OS. Furthermore, it's bad practice
to assume without good reason that the main() return means anything at
all.
>
> [ snip ]
>
> > Hitler was not anonymous; but his followers were, in many cases. And
> > Mike Godwin is wrong; the probability of comparision to Hitler in
> > online discussions "converges to unity" not because people are being
> > shrill and foolish, but because Hitler is our inner troll, as Lanier
> > calls it. He's the face in the crowd in Munich in August 1914 baying
> > for war who yearns to be on the podium, and non-anonymous.
>
> > Actually I should have been able to deduce Fascism from the memory of
> > my childhood.
>
> Your childhood? my, you must be older than I thought ....
Sorry. I italicised the Adorno quote at wordpress as you now know. But
my ex wife calls me an "old soul", and Adorno was an early instance of
the former academic who gets a white collar job, since Hitler
destroyed his academic career and he had to join a "radio research
project" to survive. His statements on Fascism are eerily appropriate,
because Fascism arises in the white collar lower middle class.
>
> [ snip ]
>
> > occurring?
>
> but you remembered to double the "r" this time ....
Do me the courtesy of not patronizing me, dear blm. You are nothing
more than a low level computer instructor as I was, but your literacy
has the usual low upper bound. You are posting dishonestly as is
Julienne because you're afraid to take an unpopular view in a
newsgroup which turns upon and brutalizes women posters when they
disagree with the normalized deviance of the ng.
>
> [ snip ]
>
> > embarrassed
>
> and here
>
> [ snip ]
>
> > In Fascism, the nightmare of childhood has
> > realized itself.
>
> > Theodore Wiesengrund Adorno, Minima Moralia, 1948
>
> *OH!* Those weren't your words, were they? Well, perhaps there
> were quotation marks, or indentation, or something identifying this
> text as a quotation in the version of this review posted at wordpress.
Also, do me the courtesy of focusing more carefully on what Adorno
says.
Richard Heathfield
<snip>
> It started to be a war when Peter attacked
> Schildt's first edition,
We have evidence that he has criticised the third edition (and with
ample justification). What evidence do you have that he has "attacked"
the first edition?
Seebs
> spinoza1111 wrote:
>> Schildt's first edition,
> We have evidence that he has criticised the third edition (and with
> ample justification). What evidence do you have that he has "attacked"
> the first edition?
The page is 100% unambiguous as to which edition is attacked. Admittedly
the evidence for this was not embedded intentionally, but!
The example cited as page 53 on the existing page CANNOT be from any
other edition.
* In the 2nd edition, the test is written using "<>" rather than "!=".
* In the 4th edition, the sizeof() operator is used differently.
What probably happened is that Nilges saw an observation that the page was
based on the previous edition, and then his natural tendency to reimagine
events to make other people seem worse, and himself seem better, took over;
after a couple of months, he'd persuaded himself that it was actually the
first edition, rather than the third, and no amount of correction, even with
100% unambiguous evidence, will change his mind. (Consider how long it took
him to sort of almost pretend to grant that, in fact, he'd been mistaken*
all along when claiming that I was not a professional programmer, but some
sort of "clerk".)
-s
[*] Normally, when someone continually reasserts a disproven claim
despite having demonstrated that he's seen the disproofs, we call it
"lying", but Nilges gives every sign of being sufficiently entrapped
by his layers of self-deception that he is, in fact, being completely
sincere in claiming these ridiculous things. As such, it is probably
not supportable to call it "lying", it's just a sort of devoted and
persistant refusal to stop being wrong. Totally different, I'm sure.
--
blm...@myrealbox.com
spinoza1111 <spino...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Apr 6, 12:27 am, blm...@myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
> > In article <f68bd6a2-795b-4d8b-92b1-dbfb8a3a0...@r18g2000yqd.googlegroups.com>,
> >
> > spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > > The text is on wordpress at
> >
> > >http://spinoza1111.wordpress.com/2010/04/03/in-the-matter-of-herb-sch...
> >
> > > For your convenience in making comments, here is the same text in
> > > ASCII format.
> >
> > FSVO "ASCII" (i.e., not the 7-bit version).
>
> At this point, blm, you are grasping at straws.
No, just nitpicking. I do that. <shrug>
[ snip ]
> > > p. 53
> >
> > > printf("%f", sizeof f);
> > > printf("%d", sizeof(int));
> >
> > > Seebach: "Clearly wrong; sizeof is not a double or float. It is also
> > > not an int; it is an unsigned integral type, thus, one of unsigned
> > > char, unsigned short,unsigned int, or unsigned long."
> >
> > > "The only safe way to do this is: printf("%lu", (unsigned long)
> > > sizeof(int)); while this is larger, a clear explanation of why it is
> > > required will go a long way towards helping people understand C."
> >
> > > Although I do not know why Herb used %f and %d format codes, he did
> > > know, as Seebach seems not to, that all ints are floats and all floats
> > > are doubles in well-structured languages.
> >
> > On many systems, of course, integers and floating-point values
> > are represented differently. In that sense, ints are *not*
> > floats, and even a claim that any int can be represented as,
> > or converted to, a float depends on the relative sizes of the
> > two types; if they are the same (as for example they are in Java
> > [*]), there will be some values that can be exactly represented
> > as ints but not as floats.
>
> That is correct. However, a competent programmer will treat the
> mathematical relationship of integer to real number as having
> precedence over implementations where there can be integer RESULTS
> (not, as you claim, integers) that cannot be represented as floats.
I have no idea what distinction you're trying to make here (between
"integer RESULTS" and "integers"). Of course I'm aware that in the
world of mathematics the integers are a subset of the real numbers.
However, when I write "int" I do not mean an integer as it exists
in the world of mathematics, but an instance of the C data type
"int", and when I write "float" I do not mean a real number,
but an instance of the C data type "float".
Competent programmers will be aware of the ways in which numeric
types in programming languages differ from numbers as they exist
in the world of mathematics. There *may* be some programming
languages in which there are no important differences, but there
are also many programming languages in which the differences
are significant. For example, beginners are often startled by
the behavior of the following C code:
float f;
for (f = 0.0; f != 1.0; f += 0.1) {
printf("%g\n", f);
}
Similar code can be written in Java, and it behaves similarly.
> Also, I am afraid that a "competent" programmer in America means
> someone like Stallman, Ted Nelson, or myself. I do not class myself
> with such geniuses except in one regard. This is that each of us
> learned mathematics before we had access to a computer, and this
> taught the absolute lexical priority of mathematics (and human needs)
> over the limitations of computers, including bit precision.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean here, but ignoring the very
real (ha) differences between numbers as they exist in mathematics
and numbers as they are represented in computer hardware does
not strike me as consistent with being a competent programmer.
(For what it's worth, I also learned most of what I know about
mathematics before having access to a computer. I'm not sure
whether I'd be a better programmer, or a worse one, if that had
not been the case.)
[ snip ]
> > > Page 163
> >
> > > Schildt: "You may also declare main() as void if it does not return a
> > > value."
> >
> > > Seebach: "Specifically untrue. ANSI mandates two declarations for
> > > main, and says that main may have declarations compatible with those.
> > > Both return int."
[ snip ]
Are you quoting here, or paraphrasing? Not that it matters much,
I suppose.
> Therefore, I don't think that a language such as C should be designed
> around the needs of an out of date OS.
Whatever you think of the design of C, or of the design of UNIX (and I
would not claim that either represents the last word in its domain),
it seems to me that a book that claims to be a reference on C should
describe the language as it actually exists, including whatever the
standard says about the return value from main().
> Furthermore, it's bad practice
> to assume without good reason that the main() return means anything at
> all.
Well, I suppose it's bad practice in general to assume that all programs
were written by competent programmers. Other than that, what's your
point?
[ snip ]
> Sorry. I italicised the Adorno quote at wordpress as you now know.
Only by your saying so here. I have not followed the link to the
version of your critique posted there.
[ snip ]
> > [ snip ]
> >
> > > occurring?
> >
> > but you remembered to double the "r" this time ....
>
> Do me the courtesy of not patronizing me, dear blm.
Not so much patronizing [*] as describing how I first started to
suspect that this might not be your writing.
[*] Snide, maybe. Fair cop.
> You are nothing
> more than a low level computer instructor as I was,
Am I? I've been deliberately cagy about my actual job title [*],
so why assume that it's the lowest one that would allow me to
say truthfully that I teach undergraduate CS classes?
[*] For reasons that seem good to me, some of which can perhaps
be inferred from my signature below, particularly the part about
not speaking for my employers.
> but your literacy
> has the usual low upper bound. You are posting dishonestly as is
> Julienne because you're afraid to take an unpopular view in a
> newsgroup which turns upon and brutalizes women posters when they
> disagree with the normalized deviance of the ng.
Does this have something to do with the current discussion? (Yes,
I'm being a bit snide here too.)
As for being afraid -- I have not observed women posters being
"brutalized" in this newsgroup [*], but I *have* observed you
proposing to escalate disagreements here beyond the bounds of Usenet.
[*] Admittedly I don't read all posts, so I suppose I could have
missed occurrences of this supposed phenomenon.
> > > Theodore Wiesengrund Adorno, Minima Moralia, 1948
> >
> > *OH!* Those weren't your words, were they? Well, perhaps there
> > were quotation marks, or indentation, or something identifying this
> > text as a quotation in the version of this review posted at wordpress.
>
> Also, do me the courtesy of focusing more carefully on what Adorno
> says.
My point, insofar as I had one, was that I was rather surprised that
someone who has been quick to take others to task for not making it
clear which words were their own and which were quoted would make the
same mistake himself -- even if it was an oversight.
That I don't read carefully all quoted material -- eh. That's not
why I spend some of my 168 hours a week reading posts here. <shrug>
spinoza1111
> In article <deded072-7ce6-4d74-9db4-c3a0d81a5...@10g2000yqq.googlegroups.com>,
snipola
> I have no idea what distinction you're trying to make here (between
> "integer RESULTS" and "integers"). Of course I'm aware that in the
> world of mathematics the integers are a subset of the real numbers.
> However, when I write "int" I do not mean an integer as it exists
> in the world of mathematics, but an instance of the C data type
> "int", and when I write "float" I do not mean a real number,
> but an instance of the C data type "float".
Then you're not a very good programmer, for your code is not connected
with reality. You need to code what you mean, and what you mean has to
be something human in a way mathematics is, and computers are not. If
you don't do this, then your code probably resembles Seebach's.
Even within coding, in cleaned up systems, the integers are indeed a
subset of the reals in the sense that all ints in C Sharp, as a matter
of a REAL standard (ECMA), can be converted without error to doubles.
And note that Microsoft had to go outside ANSI to get a usable and
trustworthy standard for C Sharp, because ANSI has been so privatized
in a way that the Euro standard has not.`
Truly competent programmers WANT to program in the best languages
available, and do not think using an inferior language is a mark of
genius. When I used machine language, I wanted an assembler. When I
got assembler (later on in my first computer science class) I debugged
a Fortran compiler in machine language. When I got Fortran and later
Cobol, I wanted Pascal. When I got Pascal, I wanted C in order to
short-circuit. And when I got C I realized I needed OO, so I got OO
VB .Net. When I got that, I wanted a C like syntax and so I got C
Sharp and Java. In other words, I don't sit around with my head up my
ass.
>
> Competent programmers will be aware of the ways in which numeric
> types in programming languages differ from numbers as they exist
> in the world of mathematics. There *may* be some programming
> languages in which there are no important differences, but there
> are also many programming languages in which the differences
> are significant. For example, beginners are often startled by
> the behavior of the following C code:
>
> float f;
> for (f = 0.0; f != 1.0; f += 0.1) {
> printf("%g\n", f);
>
> }
>
> Similar code can be written in Java, and it behaves similarly.
We all know this. But you celebrate it as if a mistake or here, a
necessary (?) limitation in bit length is human knowledge. No, while
we learn from our mistakes and the limitations of our tools, those
aporias are not first-class knowledge. They are cautionary tales.
>
> > Also, I am afraid that a "competent" programmer in America means
> > someone like Stallman, Ted Nelson, or myself. I do not class myself
> > with such geniuses except in one regard. This is that each of us
> > learned mathematics before we had access to a computer, and this
> > taught the absolute lexical priority of mathematics (and human needs)
> > over the limitations of computers, including bit precision.
>
> I'm not sure I understand what you mean here, but ignoring the very
> real (ha) differences between numbers as they exist in mathematics
> and numbers as they are represented in computer hardware does
> not strike me as consistent with being a competent programmer.
I did not say we ignore it. Instead, we separate concerns; read
Dijkstra. He was actually told much the same thing, that it was a
fault of him not to understand the time and cost limitations on the
IBM 1620 designers that caused them to fail to support more than one
level of subroutine call, as if (again) mistakes and limitations are
knowledge.
But: Kant (who Dijkstra probably had to learn in school) addressed
this in Kant's essay "On the Old Saw". Science already accounts in
principle for the limitations of the real world. Kant, in writing Zum
Ewigen Frieden, his tract on how to bring about universal peace (which
was one of the sources of the EU constitution), had of necessity to
take the "practical limitations" of diplomacy into account, but his
enemies claimed, falsely, that he had not.
But this implies something that neither Kant nor Dijkstra ever
believed, but in my experience is a self-serving article of faith
amongst MBA types. This is the false proposition that once "science"
as such is finished, there can be an additional layer of monkeyshines
and rules of thumb concerning its application...a layer which if
investigated is almost always sheer fraud, exhibit A being the so-
called "rocket science" of Wall Street, which has turned out since
2008 to be nothing more than a lot of bad code which sucks and which
has destroyed what was left of the American middle class.
"We must store the return address of the subroutine in a fixed
register" on the IBM 1620, or "all things must be done with line by
line commands" in unix are what Kant called the "saws" of practical
men which want the authority and power of Science but simply don't
deserve it. The first "we must" is actually a self-referential, and
self-serving, assertion of the actual 1620 designers who today as
codgers are being unjustly celebrated at the Computer Museum in
California in such a way that we cannot treat their mistakes as
cautionary tales but must use them as precedent for further mistakes
(such as over use of "global variables").
In other fields, this treatment of saws as an additional and
controlling layer of science gets people killed. Lord David Owen used
saws in the failed "cantonizing" of Bosnia-Hercegovina in 1992 and the
result was the Srebenica massacre. In the Columbia disaster, the saw
that "if it's on our power points it is under control" killed the
first and so far only Indian woman astronaut. Donald Rumsfeld used
saws in waging the disastrous Iraq war; when confronted with the
chaos in Baghdad in 2003, chaos that US Marines were willing and able
to end if martial law was declared (as it should have been according
to the Geneva convention, part of the "science" of international
relations), Rumsfeld came up with a truly creepy saw, one that made
the skin to crawl. "Shit happens".
>
> (For what it's worth, I also learned most of what I know about
> mathematics before having access to a computer. I'm not sure
> whether I'd be a better programmer, or a worse one, if that had
> not been the case.)
Pity you're a counterexample, then.
>
> [ snip ]
snip yourself
> > * The two most notable achievements of the coder kiddies of this same
> > era? Linux and wikipedia. And what is Linux? Uh, a rewrite of unix
> > based on a 1989 textbook on something called minix, which I used to
> > own. And what is Wikipedia? An encyclopedia which is trustworthy only
> > on hard science and which is based on the theft of intellectual
> > property of virtual and unwitting slaves, edited by convenience store
> > clerks, which may be tax fraud.
>
> Are you quoting here, or paraphrasing? Not that it matters much,
> I suppose.
Paraphrasing, dear heart.
>
> > Therefore, I don't think that a language such as C should be designed
> > around the needs of an out of date OS.
>
> Whatever you think of the design of C, or of the design of UNIX (and I
> would not claim that either represents the last word in its domain),
> it seems to me that a book that claims to be a reference on C should
> describe the language as it actually exists, including whatever the
> standard says about the return value from main().
No useful standard says anything useful about this. Instead, a good
unix or linux programmer will try to return int so his code can be
useful in shell procedures. SEPARATION OF CONCERNS means that this
should NOT be part of the programming language. Why? Because we would
like to use C on Microsoft and embedded platforms, and we don't all
want to use linux. Why recreate the world of the 1984 Apple ad?
>
> > Furthermore, it's bad practice
> > to assume without good reason that the main() return means anything at
> > all.
>
> Well, I suppose it's bad practice in general to assume that all programs
> were written by competent programmers. Other than that, what's your
> point?
I fail to see yours. In Windows we generally don't want to use the
return code. Therefore it is an excrescence to return anything and as
Herb says, void is the best style here.
>
> [ snip ]
>
> > Sorry. I italicised the Adorno quote at wordpress as you now know.
>
> Only by your saying so here. I have not followed the link to the
> version of your critique posted there.
Do your homework.
>
> [ snip ]
>
> > > [ snip ]
>
> > > > occurring?
>
> > > but you remembered to double the "r" this time ....
>
> > Do me the courtesy of not patronizing me, dear blm.
>
> Not so much patronizing [*] as describing how I first started to
> suspect that this might not be your writing.
Don't start. I am more literate and better read than you, that's
plain. No corporate checklist approach will change this fact. Ooooooh
a spelling error is Human Resources thinking.
>
> [*] Snide, maybe. Fair cop.
>
> > You are nothing
> > more than a low level computer instructor as I was,
>
> Am I? I've been deliberately cagy about my actual job title [*],
> so why assume that it's the lowest one that would allow me to
> say truthfully that I teach undergraduate CS classes?
Litera scripta manet, dear heart. Nothing in your writing conveys
anything more than a middling level of intelligence or literacy.
>
> [*] For reasons that seem good to me, some of which can perhaps
> be inferred from my signature below, particularly the part about
> not speaking for my employers.
>
> > but your literacy
> > has the usual low upper bound. You are posting dishonestly as is
> > Julienne because you're afraid to take an unpopular view in a
> > newsgroup which turns upon and brutalizes women posters when they
> > disagree with the normalized deviance of the ng.
>
> Does this have something to do with the current discussion? (Yes,
> I'm being a bit snide here too.)
>
> As for being afraid -- I have not observed women posters being
> "brutalized" in this newsgroup [*], but I *have* observed you
> proposing to escalate disagreements here beyond the bounds of Usenet.
In response to brutalization, I will do so. And you weren't here in
the 1980s when women with brains and courage were driven out of here
and out of programming positions. I'm not making this shit up, luv.
The New York Times did a followup circa 1997 of the Princeton computer
science fe-male contingent class of '87 to find that all of them had
been driven by the pressure of working with assholes like Seebach and
Heathfield, into teaching and other skirt occupations. This has caused
the quality of code produced in America to significantly decline to
the point of Seebach's horrors, in my direct experience.
>
> [*] Admittedly I don't read all posts, so I suppose I could have
> missed occurrences of this supposed phenomenon.
>
> > > > Theodore Wiesengrund Adorno, Minima Moralia, 1948
>
> > > *OH!* Those weren't your words, were they? Well, perhaps there
> > > were quotation marks, or indentation, or something identifying this
> > > text as a quotation in the version of this review posted at wordpress.
>
> > Also, do me the courtesy of focusing more carefully on what Adorno
> > says.
>
> My point, insofar as I had one, was that I was rather surprised that
> someone who has been quick to take others to task for not making it
> clear which words were their own and which were quoted would make the
> same mistake himself -- even if it was an oversight.
Tu quoque is the favorite argument of criminals, and Women Who Love
and Enable Criminals Because They Don't Want to Be Bitch-Slapped
Online. But you can forget it. I refuse to be classed with anyone
here. I simply have more experience and knowledge inside and outside
of computing. No, I'm not as smart as Nash, nor Kernighan. But apart
from Kenny, McClean, Navia, Willem, the late Dik Winter, and to a
certain extent Bacarisse and Harter, the regs here are extraordinarily
and malevolently stupid, because they've drank a toxic corporate Kool-
Ade which they actually think is scientific asceticism and wisdom.
spinoza1111
> On 2010-04-06, Richard Heathfield <r...@see.sig.invalid> wrote:
>
> > spinoza1111 wrote:
> >> It started to be a war when Peter attacked
> >> Schildt's first edition,
> > We have evidence that he has criticised the third edition (and with
> > ample justification). What evidence do you have that he has "attacked"
> > the first edition?
>
> The page is 100% unambiguous as to which edition is attacked. Admittedly
> the evidence for this was not embedded intentionally, but!
Actually, you've given us ANOTHER deliberate error, amounting to
another lie. Yes, you fail, don't you, to identify the edition you are
referencing.
Wow. Not one, not two, but many smoking guns with your fingerprints.
This is one for the red file. I am going to ADD this to my
deconstruction on wordpress.
YOU DON'T EVEN SPECIFY THE EDITION. Your reader probably won't have
the edition you're referencing. But what the fuck do YOU care,
asshole? The damage to a reputation has been done. And this was your
malicious purpose: to appear as a professional programmer because you
hope that your readers will conclude that you are the one who is
vastly more qualified on C...when not one of your code examples here
that I have seen are of acceptable quality!
>
> The example cited as page 53 on the existing page CANNOT be from any
> other edition.
This is absurd! Your reader would have to have a stack of three
editions to confirm this!
It would have been a simple matter for you to clarify which edition
you were talking about. You did not do so, because you were committing
a malicious libel.
>
> * In the 2nd edition, the test is written using "<>" rather than "!=".
> * In the 4th edition, the sizeof() operator is used differently.
>
> What probably happened is that Nilges saw an observation that the page was
> based on the previous edition, and then his natural tendency to reimagine
> events to make other people seem worse, and himself seem better, took over;
> after a couple of months, he'd persuaded himself that it was actually the
> first edition, rather than the third, and no amount of correction, even with
> 100% unambiguous evidence, will change his mind. (Consider how long it took
> him to sort of almost pretend to grant that, in fact, he'd been mistaken*
> all along when claiming that I was not a professional programmer, but some
> sort of "clerk".)
You're lying. I have not once backed down from my conclusion that
you're not a qualified programmer: quite the opposite. I THOUGHT last
year that you were well-qualified because of your affiliation with C
standards. Then you spoiled my illusion when you said that you paid
your way onto the committee and on that committee did not contribute
but were there to learn. Then you spoiled it even further when in
January you published your silly %s example. Then one morning I logged
on to find that your strlen was off by one, and I was the one to
report this to the group. Then I read your queue.c code.
But above all, you have told us that you find errors in a compiler and
report same. Peter, this is not a programming job.
>
> -s
> [*] Normally, when someone continually reasserts a disproven claim
> despite having demonstrated that he's seen the disproofs, we call it
> "lying", but Nilges gives every sign of being sufficiently entrapped
> by his layers of self-deception that he is, in fact, being completely
> sincere in claiming these ridiculous things. As such, it is probably
> not supportable to call it "lying", it's just a sort of devoted and
> persistant refusal to stop being wrong. Totally different, I'm sure.
You keep posting content-free claims that I'm mad when you run out of
arguments or ways to establish credibility and your going to find
yourself in escalating trouble owing to them.
I noticed that you started posting your Coding Horrors here only after
questions arose about your competence and credibility. The first was a
routine you'd been assigned at work because, like many people who are
basically computer operators and not full-time professional
programmers, you occasionally find opportunities to program. This is a
laudable thing in most cases; when my job title at uni was "keypunch
operator for the Registrar" I wrote a lot of assembler code for the
IBM 1401 to make my job easier and have fun.
But alarmingly, none of them exhibit any competence whatsoever,
especially given your claim to have been in the field so many years.
Professional programmers either don't use strchr to find %s, or if
they do so for time pressures, they don't brag about it on
comp.lang.c. Professional programmers don't code off by one bugs in
one line of code, and they use structured programming, not switch
fallthrough. They don't leave variables undefined without assigning
null in the declaration/definition. They don't think that copyleft and
copyright can both apply.
> --
blm...@myrealbox.com
spinoza1111 <spino...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Apr 6, 7:34 pm, blm...@myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
> > In article <deded072-7ce6-4d74-9db4-c3a0d81a5...@10g2000yqq.googlegroups.com>,
>
> snipola
>
> > I have no idea what distinction you're trying to make here (between
> > "integer RESULTS" and "integers"). Of course I'm aware that in the
> > world of mathematics the integers are a subset of the real numbers.
> > However, when I write "int" I do not mean an integer as it exists
> > in the world of mathematics, but an instance of the C data type
> > "int", and when I write "float" I do not mean a real number,
> > but an instance of the C data type "float".
>
> Then you're not a very good programmer, for your code is not connected
> with reality. You need to code what you mean, and what you mean has to
> be something human in a way mathematics is, and computers are not.
I'm guessing that by "code what you mean" you mean ....
Oh. I was going to guess that you mean "declare variables with
types that correspond to their intended use rather than based on
implementation-specific details", but perhaps you mean to also require
that the variable names follow your scheme, or a similar scheme,
for indicating the type of data they're meant to contain. ?
> If
> you don't do this, then your code probably resembles Seebach's.
The string-replacement-and-test-framework code I posted in message
<7u7ltq...@mid.individual.net>
is a fairly representative sample, if you want to judge for yourself
(about whether it resembles Seebs's) rather than speculating. If I
were going to polish it, I'd review the comments and probably add a bit
to at least some of them, but as best I can tell from a quick skim it's
not something I'm particularly embarrassed about, with two exceptions:
(*) It was an oversight not to make it clearer that the correctness
tests were yours (indeed, I think originally I didn't plan to
post them at all, and somehow in the flurry of combining various
files into a single post included more than I had intended).
But I've already apologized for that.
(*) The function to obtain the time of day with (fairly) high
resolution doesn't even try to be portable. But as far as I
know it's not possible to write such a function in portable C,
and the comments are pretty clear about this code needing to be
reviewed for platforms other than the one I developed on.
> Even within coding, in cleaned up systems, the integers are indeed a
> subset of the reals in the sense that all ints in C Sharp, as a matter
> of a REAL standard (ECMA), can be converted without error to doubles.
I don't know C#, but the same thing is true in Java -- but the
ints are *NOT* a subset of the floats in Java.
And if we're talking about doubles rather than floats, there are
almost surely many implementations of C in which all ints can be
converted without loss of precision to doubles.
> And note that Microsoft had to go outside ANSI to get a usable and
> trustworthy standard for C Sharp, because ANSI has been so privatized
> in a way that the Euro standard has not.`
>
> Truly competent programmers WANT to program in the best languages
> available, and do not think using an inferior language is a mark of
> genius. When I used machine language, I wanted an assembler. When I
> got assembler (later on in my first computer science class) I debugged
> a Fortran compiler in machine language. When I got Fortran and later
> Cobol, I wanted Pascal. When I got Pascal, I wanted C in order to
> short-circuit. And when I got C I realized I needed OO, so I got OO
> VB .Net. When I got that, I wanted a C like syntax and so I got C
> Sharp and Java. In other words, I don't sit around with my head up my
> ass.
In my opinion, truly competent programmers try to choose the best
tool for the job, where "best" is determined by a number of factors.
I'd be unlikely to choose C for developing a new application-level
program, but there are other purposes for which I think it's a
reasonable choice.
> > Competent programmers will be aware of the ways in which numeric
> > types in programming languages differ from numbers as they exist
> > in the world of mathematics. There *may* be some programming
> > languages in which there are no important differences, but there
> > are also many programming languages in which the differences
> > are significant. For example, beginners are often startled by
> > the behavior of the following C code:
> >
> > float f;
> > for (f = 0.0; f != 1.0; f += 0.1) {
> > printf("%g\n", f);
> >
> > }
> >
> > Similar code can be written in Java, and it behaves similarly.
>
> We all know this.
I do. You say you do. Beginners often don't, and the evidence
suggests that many drop-in participants in this newsgroup, and
other newsgroups I follow, also do not.
> But you celebrate it as if a mistake or here, a
> necessary (?) limitation in bit length is human knowledge.
The difficulty here is not that one has finitely many bits to work
with. People who don't know what the real problem is are apt to
think that representing currency amounts as doubles is a good idea.
Perhaps you wouldn't make this mistake, but many people do.
> No, while
> we learn from our mistakes and the limitations of our tools, those
> aporias are not first-class knowledge. They are cautionary tales.
I don't understand what distinction you're making here; to me it
seems obvious that one cannot claim to be a competent programmer
without understanding that most (all?) tools have limitations,
and a prudent programmer informs himself, or herself ....
> > > Also, I am afraid that a "competent" programmer in America means
> > > someone like Stallman, Ted Nelson, or myself. I do not class myself
> > > with such geniuses except in one regard. This is that each of us
> > > learned mathematics before we had access to a computer, and this
> > > taught the absolute lexical priority of mathematics (and human needs)
> > > over the limitations of computers, including bit precision.
> >
> > I'm not sure I understand what you mean here, but ignoring the very
> > real (ha) differences between numbers as they exist in mathematics
> > and numbers as they are represented in computer hardware does
> > not strike me as consistent with being a competent programmer.
>
> I did not say we ignore it.
Not in so many words, no. If I misunderstood you -- ah well.
> Instead, we separate concerns; read
> Dijkstra. He was actually told much the same thing, that it was a
> fault of him not to understand the time and cost limitations on the
> IBM 1620 designers that caused them to fail to support more than one
> level of subroutine call, as if (again) mistakes and limitations are
> knowledge.
[ snip ]
> > > Therefore, I don't think that a language such as C should be designed
> > > around the needs of an out of date OS.
> >
> > Whatever you think of the design of C, or of the design of UNIX (and I
> > would not claim that either represents the last word in its domain),
> > it seems to me that a book that claims to be a reference on C should
> > describe the language as it actually exists, including whatever the
> > standard says about the return value from main().
>
> No useful standard says anything useful about this. Instead, a good
> unix or linux programmer will try to return int so his code can be
> useful in shell procedures. SEPARATION OF CONCERNS means that this
> should NOT be part of the programming language. Why? Because we would
> like to use C on Microsoft and embedded platforms, and we don't all
> want to use linux. Why recreate the world of the 1984 Apple ad?
You seem to be saying that one should not bother to write code as
portably as possible. I don't agree. But even if I did -- again,
I'm not arguing for or against the specifics of the C standard, but
instead arguing that *given that it is what it is*, good programmers
work with it, rather than against it, when they reasonably can.
Oh, and that comment about writing code for embedded systems --
aren't there different rules (about the signature of main()) for
free-standing and hosted implementations anyway?
> > > Furthermore, it's bad practice
> > > to assume without good reason that the main() return means anything at
> > > all.
> >
> > Well, I suppose it's bad practice in general to assume that all programs
> > were written by competent programmers. Other than that, what's your
> > point?
>
> I fail to see yours. In Windows we generally don't want to use the
> return code. Therefore it is an excrescence to return anything and as
> Herb says, void is the best style here.
I don't agree. It's one more thing that would have to be changed if
one ever wanted to port the code to a platform on which the return
value mattered.
> > [ snip ]
> >
> > > Sorry. I italicised the Adorno quote at wordpress as you now know.
> >
> > Only by your saying so here. I have not followed the link to the
> > version of your critique posted there.
>
> Do your homework.
Why? Isn't it more polite to take your word for it that you got it
right at wordpress, even though you got it wrong here?
> > [ snip ]
> >
> > > > [ snip ]
> >
> > > > > occurring?
> >
> > > > but you remembered to double the "r" this time ....
> >
> > > Do me the courtesy of not patronizing me, dear blm.
> >
> > Not so much patronizing [*] as describing how I first started to
> > suspect that this might not be your writing.
>
> Don't start. I am more literate and better read than you, that's
> plain. No corporate checklist approach will change this fact. Ooooooh
> a spelling error is Human Resources thinking.
It's not so much that it's an error as that it's one you seem to make
often, hence an additional clue that this might be quoted text.
Again -- I really don't care that much about spelling errors, though
I usually do notice them. I've explained elsethread why I initially
mentioned yours.
The thing that's amusing here, or ironic, or something, is that
for me the fact that your writing is for the most part free of the
more obvious kinds of errors lends it a credibility it otherwise
might not have.
> > [*] Snide, maybe. Fair cop.
> >
> > > You are nothing
> > > more than a low level computer instructor as I was,
> >
> > Am I? I've been deliberately cagy about my actual job title [*],
> > so why assume that it's the lowest one that would allow me to
> > say truthfully that I teach undergraduate CS classes?
>
> Litera scripta manet, dear heart. Nothing in your writing conveys
> anything more than a middling level of intelligence or literacy.
Well, you never know. One thing I figured out a long time ago is
that some people come across as being smarter than they actually
are, by virtue of being articulate and self-confident, while others
who are actually very bright fly under the radar, so to speak.
Which group I'm in -- oh, I think it's all relative anyway.
Certainly I've worked with people who are intellectually out of my
league, and with others who are probably no smarter but somehow get
more done. I've also on occasion worked with people about whom I
think "how is it possible for anyone to be this dim?" <shrug>
I do find it amusing to speculate about what you would make of my
educational and other credentials, given that you seem to regard
your good grades and Schildt's degrees as reliable indicators of --
something. But since I'm not willing to post them here, for reasons
that seem good to me, it's a moot point, I guess.
> > [*] For reasons that seem good to me, some of which can perhaps
> > be inferred from my signature below, particularly the part about
> > not speaking for my employers.
> >
> > > but your literacy
> > > has the usual low upper bound. You are posting dishonestly as is
> > > Julienne because you're afraid to take an unpopular view in a
> > > newsgroup which turns upon and brutalizes women posters when they
> > > disagree with the normalized deviance of the ng.
> >
> > Does this have something to do with the current discussion? (Yes,
> > I'm being a bit snide here too.)
> >
> > As for being afraid -- I have not observed women posters being
> > "brutalized" in this newsgroup [*], but I *have* observed you
> > proposing to escalate disagreements here beyond the bounds of Usenet.
>
> In response to brutalization, I will do so. And you weren't here in
> the 1980s when women with brains and courage were driven out of here
> and out of programming positions.
"Here" .... If you mean Usenet, my recollection is that I discovered
it in the late 1980s.
I'm guessing, though, that you mean something along the lines of
"computing as a profession", and if so, for the record:
My rather peculiar career path includes about a decade's worth of
jobs with titles including the word "programmer", starting in
the late 1970s. Certainly I have heard very unhappy stories about
women being treated unfairly in such jobs, but I don't think
I witnessed any of that myself. Just sayin', maybe.
> I'm not making this shit up, luv.
Again with the patronizing forms of address .... Knock it off,
would you?
> The New York Times did a followup circa 1997 of the Princeton computer
> science fe-male
Okay, I guess I'm going to ask -- why the hyphen?
> contingent class of '87 to find that all of them had
> been driven by the pressure of working with assholes like Seebach and
> Heathfield, into teaching and other skirt occupations.
The _Times_ mentioned Seebach and Heathfield? Wow. (Yes, yes, you
almost surely didn't mean to imply that -- or at least not that they
did so by name.)
I can believe that things have gotten worse in the years since I
left "industry" to pursue an advanced degree. For what it's worth,
my decision to do that had nothing to do with the kind of people
I was working with at the time, though -- they were almost without
exception both capable and collegial. Again, it's probable that I
was lucky in that regard. Just sayin', maybe. As for why I took
a teaching job rather than going back to industry -- I thought I'd
enjoy teaching, and the academic-job lifestyle, and on the whole
I have.
> This has caused
> the quality of code produced in America to significantly decline to
> the point of Seebach's horrors, in my direct experience.
[ snip ]
> > My point, insofar as I had one, was that I was rather surprised that
> > someone who has been quick to take others to task for not making it
> > clear which words were their own and which were quoted would make the
> > same mistake himself -- even if it was an oversight.
>
> Tu quoque is the favorite argument of criminals,
I don't agree that I'm making a "tu quoque" argument; I'm making
a point about what I perceive as -- oh, "hypocrisy" is too strong
a word, I suppose, but I can't think of a milder one.
> and Women Who Love
> and Enable Criminals Because They Don't Want to Be Bitch-Slapped
> Online. But you can forget it. I refuse to be classed with anyone
> here. I simply have more experience and knowledge inside and outside
> of computing. No, I'm not as smart as Nash, nor Kernighan. But apart
> from Kenny, McClean, Navia, Willem, the late Dik Winter, and to a
> certain extent Bacarisse and Harter, the regs here are extraordinarily
> and malevolently stupid, because they've drank a toxic corporate Kool-
> Ade which they actually think is scientific asceticism and wisdom.
--
Mark Bluemel
> On Apr 4, 6:01 pm, spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> I will stop posting and reading until Sunday 11 April China time.
Spinoza's calendar is obviously base 5 and orders days differently to
mine.
Mark Bluemel
> If this is not done, I will have to continue this matter, with
> escalation to the next level.
CAPITAL LETTERS AND MULTIPLE EXCLAMATION MARKS!!!!!!!!!!!!
blm...@myrealbox.com
blm...@myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
> In article <b9f6b787-6364-4105...@h27g2000yqm.googlegroups.com>,
> spinoza1111 <spino...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > On Apr 6, 7:34 pm, blm...@myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
> > > In article
> <deded072-7ce6-4d74-9db4-c3a0d81a5...@10g2000yqq.googlegroups.com>,
> >
> > snipola
[ snip ]
> > > Competent programmers will be aware of the ways in which numeric
> > > types in programming languages differ from numbers as they exist
> > > in the world of mathematics. There *may* be some programming
> > > languages in which there are no important differences, but there
> > > are also many programming languages in which the differences
> > > are significant. For example, beginners are often startled by
> > > the behavior of the following C code:
> > >
> > > float f;
> > > for (f = 0.0; f != 1.0; f += 0.1) {
> > > printf("%g\n", f);
> > >
> > > }
> > >
> > > Similar code can be written in Java, and it behaves similarly.
> >
> > We all know this.
>
> I do. You say you do. Beginners often don't, and the evidence
> suggests that many drop-in participants in this newsgroup, and
> other newsgroups I follow, also do not.
>
> > But you celebrate it as if a mistake or here, a
> > necessary (?) limitation in bit length is human knowledge.
>
> The difficulty here is not that one has finitely many bits to work
> with.
Oops. Actually that's *exactly* what the problem is. What I meant
to write was "the difficulty is not that one has a limited number
of bits to work with". Why oh why does are some errors apparently
invisible until the post has been dispatched ....
> People who don't know what the real problem is are apt to
> think that representing currency amounts as doubles is a good idea.
> Perhaps you wouldn't make this mistake, but many people do.
[ snip ]
> > Don't start. I am more literate and better read than you, that's
> > plain. No corporate checklist approach will change this fact. Ooooooh
> > a spelling error is Human Resources thinking.
>
> It's not so much that it's an error as that it's one you seem to make
> often, hence an additional clue that this might be quoted text.
>
> Again -- I really don't care that much about spelling errors, though
> I usually do notice them. I've explained elsethread why I initially
> mentioned yours.
>
> The thing that's amusing here, or ironic, or something, is that
> for me the fact that your writing is for the most part free of the
> more obvious kinds of errors lends it a credibility it otherwise
> might not have.
FSVO "credibility". (Yes, I guess that's a bit snide. <shrug> )
[ snip ]
Nick Keighley
> On Apr 4, 6:15 am, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
> > On 2010-04-03, Morris Keesan <mkee...@post.harvard.edu> wrote:
> > > On Sat, 03 Apr 2010 16:34:07 -0400, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
> > >> I didn't actually read it. Is it funny? I could totally go back and
> > >> read it, if it's actually funny.
it isn't
> > > It's not funny enough to bother reading the whole thing, but here's one
> > > howler:
>
> > > [regarding the use of %f and %d printf format specifiers for sizeof]
>
> > >> Although I do not know why Herb used %f and %d format codes, he did
> > >> know, as Seebach seems not to, that all ints are floats and all floats
> > >> are doubles in well-structured languages.
such as? Languages like scheme do such slippery promotions but they
don't have crude things as floats and doubles.
> > >> Because at the time and
> > >> even, to an extent, now, C was almost as divers of the languages of
> > >> China, Herb used the educated programmer's maxim, which is to first
> > >> code as if the compiler writers and language designers knew at least
> > >> as much as the intelligent programmer, and fix problems later.
>
> > > I have absolutely no idea what spinoza thinks he's saying here, especially
> > > the part about "all ints are floats and all floats are doubles".
>
> You wouldn't, because you don't know "programming languages"
> independent of a set of facts about a specific programming language.
> [...]
>
> If you like to learn from books, please read "Programming Language
> Pragmatics" by Michael L. Scott (Morgan Kauffman).
any good? Nice thengs get said about it on Amazon and it sounds
interesting.
> You need to learn
> theoretic constructs such as the fact that in sensible programming
> languages, numbers form a nested set down from double to short or
> byte.
really? Which languages do this?
> You also need to learn that competent programmers try to write
> sensible code based on these constructs, adapting their language to
> their model rather than celebrating its mistakes.
I tend to think in a slightly higher level language than C (and I've
been trying to raise this thinking level language) but I still use C
idioms like assigning and testing in an if statemnt and fall-thru case
statements. I probably do this less than many C programmers though. I
don't know if this necessarily is the only way to program.
Just because you can write Fortran in any language doesn't mean you
should.
<snip>
> > My guess would be that the actual motivation was "there is a float object,
> > I'm typing quickly, I'll write %f". Because I've made that mistake; the
> > difference is that I recognize that it's a mistake and fix it.
>
> But our [spinoza's] experience is that you DON'T fix or see trivial errors such as
> off by one. However, it seems that here, and at most 20 other place
> (and, probably more like 6), Herb ran out of time to test code which
> was in the process of being transformed into a hard-to-change PDF.
> This is common in software publishing, and it's why computer books
> disclaim warranty.
how do you know this? Have you spoken to him? There seem to be a *lot*
of errors and many of them don't look like typos.
> > Note that "in well-structured languages" is totally irrelevant; according
> > to Nilges, C is not a well-designed language, and a book purporting to be
> > about C which then relies on conventions or policies that only exist in other
> > languages is, as I said: Complete. Nonsense.
>
> No, using a poorly structured language makes the search for good
> structure even more important.
yes. I have to be pretty structured if I write assembler (but it's a
while since I did that).
> This is why I developed "virtually
> structured programming" for assembler and Fortran, and it is a point
> made long ago by Brian Kernighan in The Elements of Programming Style.
the problem is you can miss the languages natural paradigm. I'm
learning scheme (Lisp) but my scheme tends to look like C. I have to
fight quite hard note to code in C.
> My suspicion of any programmer who uses the mistakes of a language to
> use his own poor practice is covering up his incompetence, and this
> has been confirmed, for me, by your code here.
who descides what the mistakes of the language are? If it isn't Pascal
it's a mistake?
> > I'm glad to see that Nilges is continuing to support my theory that only
> > sheer madness can make C:TCR 3rd Edition look remotely coherent.
its certainly getting tougher
> Petitio principii:
>
> 1. Nilges is mad
>
> 2. Therefore anything he says is wrong (a questionable assumption on
> two bases: on the monkey/typewriter model, approximately 50% of what I
> say is true,
only if you confine yourself to predicates. And probably not even
then. The space of wrong statements is *much* larger than the space of
right statements. Oh, and whichever one of you implied it- mad people
aren't stupid.
> and on a Romantic basis, I might have special insight)
sounds like crap
This is the Rainman Hypothesis is it? If I can't understand him he
must have special insight?
> 3. He thinks C:TCR is coherent
>
> 4. Therefore he's mad
>
> Dweebach, CTCR is not at issue here: CTCN has to stand on its own
> merits.
I don't think you can seperate them. Hell, I'm sure you can't. It
actually matters if Seebach's critcisms are correct or not. This isn't
poetry we're reviewing or a nineteeth century novel. It purports to be
a technical book. It can be wrong.
> It may be incoherent. I noticed long ago that many computer
> books are semi-coherent, and I learned why: computer book publishing
> is a business, not "truth".
wow. If only I'd known. Except I expect my technical books to be
technically accurate.
> But CTCN fails to make your case. It's self-contradictory, misuses
> words such as "clarity",
ie. uses the dictionary definition instead of yours. It's stuff like
this that leads people to call you mad. You can't back off. You can't
see that "oh yes you're right I got hold of the wrong end of the stick
there" is sometimes far more sensible than "Standing By My
Principles".
> and is completely disorganized. To make your
> case, you would have had to list the "hundreds" or "dozens" of errors
> you refer to in CTCN. It is illogical to reason from 20 to 24 or 100.
what do you think of the "random page program"?
Sampling can be a valid statistical technique.
> > > spinoza then, at the end, goes into one of his typical babbling rants
> > > about "I am not a gadget", Hitler, Fascism, etc.
> > > He does make one point which may be valid, if true: according to spinoza,
> > > Schildt's book is in its 4th edition, with some errata fixed, and "C:
> > > The Complete Nonsense" refers to the first edition.
>
> > No, he's not right. C:TCN is based on the THIRD edition, with I believe
> > one or two references back to things that have been fixed since the second.
>
> The book is in its fourth edition. Therefore, you are dishonest,
> because you're telling people about the flaws, with page numbers, in
> an edition that is out of print. Dishonest enough to believe that in
> the above, you may be lying, and that CTCN is based on the first
> edition. This is verifiable by checking page numbers.
well you chose to dig up a 15 year old document
<snip>
--
"A clear statement is a statement to which the opposite is either true
or false. A deep statement is a statement to which the opposite is
another
deep statement." Niels Bohr
Seebs
> The _Times_ mentioned Seebach and Heathfield? Wow. (Yes, yes, you
> almost surely didn't mean to imply that -- or at least not that they
> did so by name.)
Heh.
Mostly it's just weird that he makes this stuff up. I have consistently
been told, both directly and indirectly, that my coworkers like me and do
not consider me at all abusive or hostile. I'm actually famed for being
calm, polite, and extremely difficult to anger, and I'm consistently quick
to credit others for successes, and quick to take responsibility for
failures. I was taught these skills early on by good managers (they exist,
really!), and I've stuck with them. I have no interest in trying to fool
people into thinking I'm better than I am; I want my coworkers to have an
accurate picture of what I can, and can't, do. I don't want to be one of
those assholes who wrecks the workplace; I want to do what I can to make
coming in to work something interesting and fun to look forward to.
It turns out that these are very useful traits in creating a work environment
where no one feels particularly harassed, "brutalized", or bullied.
-s
--
spinoza1111
> On 2010-04-07, blmblm myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
>
> > The _Times_ mentioned Seebach and Heathfield? Wow. (Yes, yes, you
> > almost surely didn't mean to imply that -- or at least not that they
> > did so by name.)
>
> Heh.
>
> Mostly it's just weird that he makes this stuff up. I have consistently
> been told, both directly and indirectly, that my coworkers like me and do
> not consider me at all abusive or hostile. I'm actually famed for being
> calm, polite, and extremely difficult to anger, and I'm consistently quick
> to credit others for successes, and quick to take responsibility for
> failures. I was taught these skills early on by good managers (they exist,
> really!), and I've stuck with them. I have no interest in trying to fool
> people into thinking I'm better than I am; I want my coworkers to have an
> accurate picture of what I can, and can't, do. I don't want to be one of
> those assholes who wrecks the workplace; I want to do what I can to make
> coming in to work something interesting and fun to look forward to.
That's wonderful, Peter. In fact, I read your blog on workplace
bullying and I completely agree with it.
But this just makes it more troubling that you come in here and call
me "insane" and a "moron", doesn't it?
Kind of like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, or Ted Bundy, wouldn't you say?
I am well aware that modern software offices are places where people
conduct themselves, *most of the time* respectfully. But I'm afraid
that compensatory to the in fact unrealistically high standards of
such offices, where the delights of the offices I worked in my
twenties (smoking on the job, hot girls at the old Xerox machine
winking at me because I looked so sweet and innocent) have passed
away, the gentility of the modern workplace takes place inside a very
bright line.
Homeless people can't come in to get warm in these offices on a
subzero day, no, not even mothers with children. And when someone is
fired, even if it's because some little dweeb of an incompetent
programmer back-stabbed him, people look away as that person is
escorted out by security (a former boss of mine in North Carolina got
into trouble for deliberately getting up to hug an African American
coworker who was being laid off since, the CEO said, his behavior was
"inappropriate").
I suggest you take a long, hard look at yourself, Seebach. I suggest
you are certainly no bully in your office because you're a physical
coward, afraid of physical confrontation, but here you have no such
fear, so you bully Schildt, you bully Navia, you shit on our visitors
from mainland China, and you bully me. You lie about people
continuously; you make unsupported inferences about Schildt and claim
I don't know switch when it's clear I do. I suggest with the best of
intentions, you won't understand bullying until you've read "The
Authoritarian Personality" by TW Adorno.
>
> It turns out that these are very useful traits in creating a work environment
> where no one feels particularly harassed, "brutalized", or bullied.
...then you go home and shit on this newsgroup.
>
> -s
> --
spinoza1111
wrote:
Poetry can be wrong, too. It can go
Off the rails, off the side of the black road
This is something that only poets know
Oh heavy is the poet's gravid load.
Whereas to write about technology
Which to the simple hath such referent
Is recreational...science fiction and fantasy
About which geeks are...over-reverent.
They create a fable, and into it they climb
Being unable to deal with people
There to while away a weary time
By onanizing themselves with imaginary sheeple.
Whereas poetry is truer than true itself is true
Truer, surely, than me or you.
>
> > It may be incoherent. I noticed long ago that many computer
> > books are semi-coherent, and I learned why: computer book publishing
> > is a business, not "truth".
>
> wow. If only I'd known. Except I expect my technical books to be
> technically accurate.
Actually, since they describe man-made artifacts that are so easily
changed, simulated, or interfaced in such a way that they can appear
under Turing's results to be something else, you're dealing not with a
real, resistant world but with a pornographic fantasy, and arguably
it's less important than books be "technically accurate" (although
this is important) and more that they make you a fit denizen for the
orgy.
>
> > But CTCN fails to make your case. It's self-contradictory, misuses
> > words such as "clarity",
>
> ie. uses the dictionary definition instead of yours. It's stuff like
Sorry, we've been through this. The Compact Oxford English Dictionary
defines clarity as conducive to understanding and understanding to
knowledge, and knowledge to justified true belief.
> this that leads people to call you mad. You can't back off. You can't
I'd suggest that the collectively mad can't not refrain from joining a
cybernetic mob, but wtf.
> see that "oh yes you're right I got hold of the wrong end of the stick
> there" is sometimes far more sensible than "Standing By My
> Principles".
>
> > and is completely disorganized. To make your
> > case, you would have had to list the "hundreds" or "dozens" of errors
> > you refer to in CTCN. It is illogical to reason from 20 to 24 or 100.
>
> what do you think of the "random page program"?
>
> Sampling can be a valid statistical technique.
And you're an idiot. Sampling noise, not text.
>
> > > > spinoza then, at the end, goes into one of his typical babbling rants
> > > > about "I am not a gadget", Hitler, Fascism, etc.
> > > > He does make one point which may be valid, if true: according to spinoza,
> > > > Schildt's book is in its 4th edition, with some errata fixed, and "C:
> > > > The Complete Nonsense" refers to the first edition.
>
> > > No, he's not right. C:TCN is based on the THIRD edition, with I believe
> > > one or two references back to things that have been fixed since the second.
>
> > The book is in its fourth edition. Therefore, you are dishonest,
> > because you're telling people about the flaws, with page numbers, in
> > an edition that is out of print. Dishonest enough to believe that in
> > the above, you may be lying, and that CTCN is based on the first
> > edition. This is verifiable by checking page numbers.
>
> well you chose to dig up a 15 year old document
...because a recent article on wikipedia, which is still in violation
of Biographies of Living Persons, referenced this out of date
document, which fails to specify which edition it is about. Peter
Seebach chose not to maintain that document, and it is massively
incorrect. For example, it claims that "the heap is a DOS term" and
that all C programmers must return an int to main, and both of these
statements are incorrect.
spinoza1111
snippety snip
>
> (*) The function to obtain the time of day with (fairly) high
> resolution doesn't even try to be portable. But as far as I
> know it's not possible to write such a function in portable C,
> and the comments are pretty clear about this code needing to be
> reviewed for platforms other than the one I developed on.
I need a full link; this has ellipses. I look forward, quite
seriously, to reading your code.
snipola
>
> I don't know C#, but the same thing is true in Java -- but the
> ints are *NOT* a subset of the floats in Java.
That is correct. But I'd hasard they are a subset of the doubles. Most
competent C Sharp programmers, who use a mental model derived
independently of the mistakes of geeks, prefer doubles to floats for
this reason.
> > Truly competent programmers WANT to program in the best languages
> > available, and do not think using an inferior language is a mark of
> > genius. When I used machine language, I wanted an assembler. When I
> > got assembler (later on in my first computer science class) I debugged
> > a Fortran compiler in machine language. When I got Fortran and later
> > Cobol, I wanted Pascal. When I got Pascal, I wanted C in order to
> > short-circuit. And when I got C I realized I needed OO, so I got OO
> > VB .Net. When I got that, I wanted a C like syntax and so I got C
> > Sharp and Java. In other words, I don't sit around with my head up my
> > ass.
>
> In my opinion, truly competent programmers try to choose the best
> tool for the job, where "best" is determined by a number of factors.
No, "best" is determined by correctness, the programming manifestation
of truth. Whereas "a number of factors" usually includes peer group
and management pressure to conform to a normalized deviance. The
pretense is that this is a form of engineering, but if it is, it's
self-reflexive, which means that the "skilled" programmer in such a
milieu is the least ethical, and the most willing to act in ways that
are either self-destructive (as in the frequent phenomenon of
excessive hours) or destructive to others (as in the case of Peter
Seebach, who manages to lie about people, frequently).
>
> I do. You say you do. Beginners often don't, and the evidence
Snide, as always, in the passive aggressive corporate register. This
just in, honey. In a "civil" conversation, phrases which imply
dishonesty (such as "you say you do") cross the line, and are an
invitation, sugar, to end the civil, Habermasian conversation. As
such, they are far worse than the usual corporate suspects, such as
"sexism", babe.
>
> The difficulty here is not that one has finitely many bits to work
> with. People who don't know what the real problem is are apt to
> think that representing currency amounts as doubles is a good idea.
> Perhaps you wouldn't make this mistake, but many people do.
(Sigh) (Eye roll) (Crotch grab)
> I don't understand what distinction you're making here; to me it
> seems obvious that one cannot claim to be a competent programmer
> without understanding that most (all?) tools have limitations,
> and a prudent programmer informs himself, or herself ....
I'm tired of the tool metaphor, and paraprogrammers who rise out of
the mechanical sort and who overuse the "software as tool" or
"computer as car" metaphor. These people shouldn't do serious
development and shouldn't waste my time.
If I were in charge of the world, and ain'tcha glad I am not, my
examination for prospective programmers would resemble the Imperial
(Chinese) civil service examination. I would expect the candidates to
be able to write poetry. I get more and more serious and less and less
humorous about this as the years go by.
>
> Not in so many words, no. If I misunderstood you -- ah well.
Shit happens, right, doll?
>
> You seem to be saying that one should not bother to write code as
> portably as possible. I don't agree. But even if I did -- again,
Quite the opposite, I'd say. Why code for Linux all the time? It's
basically (cf Lanier's book) just a copy of unix, based on the work of
an author other than the millionaire Torvaldys whose work was stolen
by Torvaldys much as MS-DOS was stolen. The same sleaze and inferior
praxis occurs in both communities.
> Oh, and that comment about writing code for embedded systems --
> aren't there different rules (about the signature of main()) for
> free-standing and hosted implementations anyway?
Which means, of course, that the Linux expectation should not control,
get it yet?
>
> I don't agree. It's one more thing that would have to be changed if
> one ever wanted to port the code to a platform on which the return
> value mattered.
Which exposes the main() return bullshit for what it is (why is it not
permitted on the Internet to say "fuck" and "shit" but it's ok to make
a foul, if misspelled, word out of Herb's patronym? Have human beings
ceased to matter? Fuck me if I know.)
It is the false belief, powered in fact by a corporation which remains
one of the most powerful, if most obscure, forces on the planet: good
old IBM, which continues to maintain control of computers that really,
really matter (vast server farms and secret data bases), that we can,
after all, force all the technopeasants into one tribe dominated by
Linux and wikipedia.
Back to 1984...
<snip>
> Why? Isn't it more polite to take your word for it that you got it
> right at wordpress, even though you got it wrong here?
Point taken.
<snip>
>
> It's not so much that it's an error as that it's one you seem to make
> often, hence an additional clue that this might be quoted text.
Is it an error? And, of course, orthography and pronunciation, as
opposed to grammar and style, are the usual refuge of the half-
literate.
>
> Again -- I really don't care that much about spelling errors, though
> I usually do notice them. I've explained elsethread why I initially
> mentioned yours.
You care enough to keep bothering me.
>
> The thing that's amusing here, or ironic, or something, is that
> for me the fact that your writing is for the most part free of the
> more obvious kinds of errors lends it a credibility it otherwise
> might not have.
The meaning of my literacy is that more more intelligent and more
decent than most people here. In fact, this has been pointed out in
numerous "performance reviews" in which the subtle message was that my
intelligence was out of scale in the dumbed-down corporate world, as
was my outspokenness and even decency. My female coworker at Bell
Northern Research was told that she was "too good" for the "dog eat
dog corporate world".
<snip>
>
> Well, you never know. One thing I figured out a long time ago is
> that some people come across as being smarter than they actually
> are, by virtue of being articulate and self-confident, while others
> who are actually very bright fly under the radar, so to speak.
This is an urban legend. In fact, Dijkstra's test for programming
competence included a degree of literacy which most Americans, even
formally educated ones, no longer have. Corporations, however, select
for low but acceptable literacy because highly literate people tend to
get uppity.
You can't be mute and unsung, and a Milton, all your life. Sooner or
later, it's time to fuck or walk. I'd be the first to applaud Peter if
he ever said anything truly intelligent.
> Which group I'm in -- oh, I think it's all relative anyway.
> Certainly I've worked with people who are intellectually out of my
> league, and with others who are probably no smarter but somehow get
> more done. I've also on occasion worked with people about whom I
> think "how is it possible for anyone to be this dim?" <shrug>
>
> I do find it amusing to speculate about what you would make of my
> educational and other credentials, given that you seem to regard
> your good grades and Schildt's degrees as reliable indicators of --
> something. But since I'm not willing to post them here, for reasons
> that seem good to me, it's a moot point, I guess.
In the absence of other information, "good grades" and Schildt's MSCS
are in fact all that separates us from the barbarism of *les ancien
regimes*, in which careers were not open to talents, and in which
people were beaten for even thinking of speaking out. I've had it up
to here with the Populism of claiming that one's own poor grades
indicate in themselves that it is "the system" which is at fault,
because white programmers like Seebach use poor school performance or
the absence of coursework so consistently paradoxically as to make
their gesture meaningless. They mean that they are of the race
expected to do well and that any information or any failure to the
contrary is a conspiracy against their Genius.
As a result, a new *ancien regime* is formed of people with money and
their henchmen selected according to class background and race by
"human resources" departments, and careers are once more closed to
talents.
If Seebach manifested Ben Bacarisse's talent, I would be the first to
waive my expectations as an MA was waived on my behalf in 1973 and I
taught logic at university level. But he does not, and this realigns
the evidence against him.
<snip>
>
> > I'm not making this shit up, luv.
>
> Again with the patronizing forms of address .... Knock it off,
> would you?
Not until you start showing more solidarity with the victims of the
cybernetic mobs that so frequently form in this newsgroup owing to
enabling language expressed in dulcet tones, hon.
"Patronizing forms of address" are not a matter of syntax, but of
intent, and it is a form of fashionable autism to judge another's
sexism by means of keywords alone. I refuse to allow you to make any
inferences about my sexism for essentially the same reason I refuse to
allow Seebach to make inferences about what Schildt knows based on his
own, very limited and very biased, knowledge.
Language, in this and many other newsgroups, is used so often
ironically by chattering ape-men who in a truly bizarre fashion have a
cargo cult theory that words mean single things. They use it to lie
and then they hold others to the truth.
My sexism is ironic. Real malice, of the sort shown Kenny, Navia,
Schildt, Chinese visitors and myself, as well as competent female
programmers, is my concern here.
>
> > The New York Times did a followup circa 1997 of the Princeton computer
> > science fe-male
>
> Okay, I guess I'm going to ask -- why the hyphen?
A deliberate affectation.
>
> > contingent class of '87 to find that all of them had
> > been driven by the pressure of working with assholes like Seebach and
> > Heathfield, into teaching and other skirt occupations.
>
> The _Times_ mentioned Seebach and Heathfield? Wow. (Yes, yes, you
> almost surely didn't mean to imply that -- or at least not that they
> did so by name.)
Finding Dumb and Dumber interpretations as a way of critiquing writing
is a poor way of improving anyone's writing.
>
> I can believe that things have gotten worse in the years since I
> left "industry" to pursue an advanced degree. For what it's worth,
> my decision to do that had nothing to do with the kind of people
> I was working with at the time, though -- they were almost without
> exception both capable and collegial. Again, it's probable that I
> was lucky in that regard. Just sayin', maybe. As for why I took
> a teaching job rather than going back to industry -- I thought I'd
> enjoy teaching, and the academic-job lifestyle, and on the whole
> I have.
I am not saying that Seebach at his worksite is not collegial and
capable in proportion to expectations which have been dumbed-down. In
fact, he has a nice blogpost on how not to be an asshole at work.
The problem is that "work" is so obviously a laager, which is marked
off, and that outside this line (as in my examples elsethread of what
happens to the laid-off, and Seebach's somewhat Ted Bundy like
persona) the artificial constraints on expression at work issue in
deviance, here out of control bullying.
<snip>
> > Tu quoque is the favorite argument of criminals,
>
> I don't agree that I'm making a "tu quoque" argument; I'm making
> a point about what I perceive as -- oh, "hypocrisy" is too strong
> a word, I suppose, but I can't think of a milder one.
Well how about "I like making tu quoque arguments?"
>
<snip>
rigs
>
> read more »
Who knew the Frankfurt School offered degrees in Internet Kookery?
Eric Sosman
> spinoza1111 wrote:
>>
>> I will stop posting and reading until Sunday 11 April China time.
>
Your doubt was well-founded.
--
Eric Sosman
eso...@ieee-dot-org.invalid
Seebs
> On 4/4/2010 9:13 AM, Richard Heathfield wrote:
>> spinoza1111 wrote:
>>> I will stop posting and reading until Sunday 11 April China time.
>> I doubt that very much.
> Your doubt was well-founded.
Yeah. Never assume that something a narcissist says is going to stay true
if it would prevent him from being the center of attention.
FWIW, I unkillfiled him briefly to see if he'd gotten any closer to lucidity.
He hadn't.
I've addressed what tiny fragmentary legitimate criticism there was over the
older version of C:TCN, and I think I've now adequately established that the
4th edition of C:TCR is still badly written, glossing over or ignoring core
functionality, littered with errors, and just plain not a good book from
which to learn C. I think I'm done with this stuff, unless someone has
something really interesting to bring up.
-s
--
spinoza1111
> On 2010-04-09, Eric Sosman <esos...@ieee-dot-org.invalid> wrote:
>
> > On 4/4/2010 9:13 AM, Richard Heathfield wrote:
> >>spinoza1111wrote:
> >>> I will stop posting and reading until Sunday 11 April China time.
> >> I doubt that very much.
> > Your doubt was well-founded.
>
> Yeah. Never assume that something a narcissist says is going to stay true
> if it would prevent him from being the center of attention.
>
> FWIW, I unkillfiled him briefly to see if he'd gotten any closer to lucidity.
> He hadn't.
>
> I've addressed what tiny fragmentary legitimate criticism there was over the
> older version of C:TCN, and I think I've now adequately established that the
> 4th edition of C:TCR is still badly written, glossing over or ignoring core
> functionality, littered with errors, and just plain not a good book from
> which to learn C. I think I'm done with this stuff, unless someone has
> something really interesting to bring up.
How about one sweet hell of a lawsuit in civil libel for a malicious
attack on a private person containing falsehood?
Or a PROFESSIONALLY moderated post in risks to the public in computing
systems describing your behavior as exemplary of Digital Maoism?
Or a detail deconstruction of CTCN-4?
Sorry: you stalked Schildt for 15 years. Your behavior's consequences
aren't going away.
>
> -s
> --
blm...@myrealbox.com
spinoza1111 <spino...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Apr 7, 8:24 pm, blm...@myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
> snippety snip
> >
> > (*) The function to obtain the time of day with (fairly) high
> > resolution doesn't even try to be portable. But as far as I
> > know it's not possible to write such a function in portable C,
> > and the comments are pretty clear about this code needing to be
> > reviewed for platforms other than the one I developed on.
>
> I need a full link; this has ellipses.
Digression:
"This"? presumably you mean the message ID in my post? I don't
want to discourage you from making some attempt to prune quoted
text, but aren't you supposed to leave in enough that people can
make sense of your reply just on the basis of what's quoted?
Well, moving on, and ignoring whether it should be "ellipses"
or "ellipsis" ....
What I sent out, and what I got back from my news server, was
something with what I believe to be a correct message ID, one
that did not contain anything of the form "...".
I forgot, however, that you post via Google Groups, and they
apparently play some tricks in displaying any text that looks
like an e-mail address [*], and a message ID containing a "@"
apparently falls into that category.
[*] In the HTML-marked-up version, part of such text is replaced
with "...", and there's a clickable link that, if clicked on, will
eventually show you the actual text once you pass one of those
CAPTCHA things. The version billed as "Show original" just has
the altered text. (Google's idea of "original" in this context
is apparently different from mine.) Why do they do this ....
I can't be bothered to check what if anything they're currently
saying about this alteration, but if I remember right they've
previously claimed that they're trying to hide addresses from
potential spammers, which I suppose is commendable enough but
does have some unfortunate effects.
Whether having the message ID in the form in which I sent it out
would help you .... The Google Groups "advanced search" page has
an option to look up a specific message ID. It doesn't seem to
be entirely reliable, however; when I started composing this post
yesterday, it wasn't working, but now it appears to be. Sigh.
I'm grateful that Google is at least trying to maintain an archive
of Usenet posts and make it available, but -- oh well, maybe it's
more difficult than I imagine to get it right.
End of digression.
Anyway, here is a URL that works for me:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/msg/f86ace21f0dd9892?hl=en&dmode=source
I don't have a lot of confidence that it's going to work for you too,
but it's the best I can do.
I also noticed, in the process of trying to come up with a usable
URL, that there's rather a lot of code, and at least some of it is
not especially polished, so I'm not sure it's really worth your
time to try to wade through. But it's a fairly representative
example of the kind of code I write for my own use -- not the
best, not the worst, but fairly representative. For code to be
shown to students I'm apt to put in more comments. <shrug>
> I look forward, quite
> seriously, to reading your code.
That sounds collegial enough. (Maybe. I can think of another
interpretation.)
> snipola
> >
> > I don't know C#, but the same thing is true in Java -- but the
> > ints are *NOT* a subset of the floats in Java.
>
> That is correct. But I'd hasard they are a subset of the doubles.
Yes, that's what I meant when I said "the same thing is true in
Java" -- I was referring to your claim that
"all ints in C Sharp [ .... ] can be converted without error
to doubles."
[ snip ]
> > In my opinion, truly competent programmers try to choose the best
> > tool for the job, where "best" is determined by a number of factors.
>
> No, "best" is determined by correctness, the programming manifestation
> of truth. Whereas "a number of factors" usually includes peer group
> and management pressure to conform to a normalized deviance. The
> pretense is that this is a form of engineering, but if it is, it's
> self-reflexive, which means that the "skilled" programmer in such a
> milieu is the least ethical, and the most willing to act in ways that
> are either self-destructive (as in the frequent phenomenon of
> excessive hours) or destructive to others (as in the case of Peter
> Seebach, who manages to lie about people, frequently).
I'm not really sure what point you're making here (no surprise).
The factors I had in mind included, oh, affinity between the
language and the problem domain (e.g., APL is apparently very
good for problems that can expressed in terms of working on arrays
or lists), suitability for the target hardware/software platform,
the programmer's background and interests, and probably some others
I'm not thinking of right now.
> > I do. You say you do. Beginners often don't, and the evidence
>
> Snide, as always, in the passive aggressive corporate register.
I have no idea how "corporate" found its way into that sentence.
But whatever.
You might also consider that if I had wanted to be really snide,
I'd have emphasized "say" (e.g, "*say*"). I can't know what's
in your head and therefore felt that to say "you do" would be --
not right. <shrug>
> This
> just in, honey. In a "civil" conversation, phrases which imply
> dishonesty (such as "you say you do") cross the line, and are an
> invitation, sugar, to end the civil, Habermasian conversation. As
> such, they are far worse than the usual corporate suspects, such as
> "sexism", babe.
Whatever.
> > The difficulty here is not that one has finitely many bits to work
> > with. People who don't know what the real problem is are apt to
> > think that representing currency amounts as doubles is a good idea.
> > Perhaps you wouldn't make this mistake, but many people do.
>
> (Sigh) (Eye roll) (Crotch grab)
Did you have a point to make here, or is this just a demonstration
that you're just as willing to be vulgar when conversing(?) with a
woman as with a man?
[ snip ]
> > You seem to be saying that one should not bother to write code as
> > portably as possible. I don't agree. But even if I did -- again,
>
> Quite the opposite, I'd say. Why code for Linux all the time?
Is there some reason you can't break into quoted text at a sentence
break rather than a line break, as you did here? especially if
you're not going to quote the rest of the sentence later? Well,
whatever.
I'll admit to a preference for UNIX-like environments -- but the
thing is, declaring main() to return an int is compliant with the
C standard for what it calls "hosted environments" and presumably
will work on platforms that don't care about the return value as well
as those that do. So to me this is the more portable choice and
therefore the better one.
It might be worth asking whether anyone knows which form is preferred
for (Mac) OS X -- I mean, supposedly it's "UNIX under the hood", and
certainly in my limited experience it has a text-mode interface that
feels very much like other UNIX systems I've used, aside from the
fact that the default filesystem setup is apparently case-insensitive.
> It's
> basically (cf Lanier's book) just a copy of unix, based on the work of
> an author other than the millionaire Torvaldys whose work was stolen
> by Torvaldys much as MS-DOS was stolen. The same sleaze and inferior
> praxis occurs in both communities.
I don't quite understand who you're saying stole from whom here,
but whatever. (I'm also not sure why you spell the Linux
originator's name with a y, when no one else seems to, but
"whatever" on that too.)
> > Oh, and that comment about writing code for embedded systems --
> > aren't there different rules (about the signature of main()) for
> > free-standing and hosted implementations anyway?
>
> Which means, of course, that the Linux expectation should not control,
> get it yet?
If it were only Linux, maybe not -- but it's not, as discussed
previously.
Further, if I understand the standard correctly, a freestanding
implementation can make its own rules about the signature of the
"main" program, including calling it something other than main(),
and it isn't required to provide all the libraries required for
a hosted environment, so it's not clear that it makes sense
to try to write complete programs that are portable across the
freestanding/hosted divide. Writing programs that work in any
hosted environment seems like a more tractable problem, and worth
doing when one can.
> > I don't agree. It's one more thing that would have to be changed if
> > one ever wanted to port the code to a platform on which the return
> > value mattered.
>
> Which exposes the main() return bullshit for what it is (why is it not
> permitted on the Internet to say "fuck" and "shit" but it's ok to make
> a foul, if misspelled, word out of Herb's patronym? Have human beings
> ceased to matter? Fuck me if I know.)
>
> It is the false belief, powered in fact by a corporation which remains
> one of the most powerful, if most obscure, forces on the planet: good
> old IBM, which continues to maintain control of computers that really,
> really matter (vast server farms and secret data bases), that we can,
> after all, force all the technopeasants into one tribe dominated by
> Linux and wikipedia.
>
> Back to 1984...
Instead you want us all to conform to the expectations of a
platform defined and owned by another corporate entity (Microsoft)
whose reputation is not exactly spotless?
Now that I think about it, I'm rather surprised by this apparent
preference of yours for Windows, given its corporate associations.
But whatever.
[ snip ]
> > The thing that's amusing here, or ironic, or something, is that
> > for me the fact that your writing is for the most part free of the
> > more obvious kinds of errors lends it a credibility it otherwise
> > might not have.
>
> The meaning of my literacy is that more more intelligent and more
> decent than most people here.
I can't parse that sentence, sorry.
[ snip ]
> > Well, you never know. One thing I figured out a long time ago is
> > that some people come across as being smarter than they actually
> > are, by virtue of being articulate and self-confident, while others
> > who are actually very bright fly under the radar, so to speak.
>
> This is an urban legend.
You do realize that when I said "I figured out" I meant that
I, well, figured it out, based on my own experiences, rather
than simply believing something I was told, right? I guess it's
possible that someone else did draw my attention to it, but if
so I believed it because it accorded with my own experience.
[ snip ]
> > Which group I'm in -- oh, I think it's all relative anyway.
> > Certainly I've worked with people who are intellectually out of my
> > league, and with others who are probably no smarter but somehow get
> > more done. I've also on occasion worked with people about whom I
> > think "how is it possible for anyone to be this dim?" <shrug>
> >
> > I do find it amusing to speculate about what you would make of my
> > educational and other credentials, given that you seem to regard
> > your good grades and Schildt's degrees as reliable indicators of --
> > something. But since I'm not willing to post them here, for reasons
> > that seem good to me, it's a moot point, I guess.
>
> In the absence of other information, "good grades" and Schildt's MSCS
> are in fact all that separates us from the barbarism of *les ancien
> regimes*, in which careers were not open to talents, and in which
> people were beaten for even thinking of speaking out. I've had it up
> to here with the Populism of claiming that one's own poor grades
> indicate in themselves that it is "the system" which is at fault,
> because white programmers like Seebach use poor school performance or
> the absence of coursework so consistently paradoxically as to make
> their gesture meaningless. They mean that they are of the race
> expected to do well and that any information or any failure to the
> contrary is a conspiracy against their Genius.
I don't quite get how this is a response to what I said, but
whatever.
My own thinking is that academic credentials are a useful screening
mechanism in the absence of other information about a person,
but the correlation between them and genuine qualifications is
not 100%. Indeed, I strongly suspect you'd claim that you're
more qualified than your academic credentials might imply, no?
[ snip ]
> > > I'm not making this shit up, luv.
> >
> > Again with the patronizing forms of address .... Knock it off,
> > would you?
>
> Not until you start showing more solidarity with the victims of the
> cybernetic mobs that so frequently form in this newsgroup owing to
> enabling language expressed in dulcet tones, hon.
Duly noted. I doubt it will change my behavior.
> "Patronizing forms of address" are not a matter of syntax, but of
> intent, and it is a form of fashionable autism to judge another's
> sexism by means of keywords alone. I refuse to allow you to make any
> inferences about my sexism for essentially the same reason I refuse to
> allow Seebach to make inferences about what Schildt knows based on his
> own, very limited and very biased, knowledge.
Refuse all you want. I've drawn a tentative conclusion about
your attitudes based on the many posts of yours I've read over
the years. That this conclusion is somewhat at odds with your
claims above is -- no surprise. <shrug>
> Language, in this and many other newsgroups, is used so often
> ironically by chattering ape-men who in a truly bizarre fashion have a
> cargo cult theory that words mean single things. They use it to lie
> and then they hold others to the truth.
>
> My sexism is ironic. Real malice, of the sort shown Kenny, Navia,
> Schildt, Chinese visitors and myself, as well as competent female
> programmers, is my concern here.
I have no idea what "ironic" means here.
> > > The New York Times did a followup circa 1997 of the Princeton computer
> > > science fe-male
> >
> > Okay, I guess I'm going to ask -- why the hyphen?
>
> A deliberate affectation.
No idea what this means either.
[ snip ]
> > > Tu quoque is the favorite argument of criminals,
> >
> > I don't agree that I'm making a "tu quoque" argument; I'm making
> > a point about what I perceive as -- oh, "hypocrisy" is too strong
> > a word, I suppose, but I can't think of a milder one.
>
> Well how about "I like making tu quoque arguments?"
Milder but in no way expressive of my intended meaning.
I would be mildly interested in an explanation of how anything I've
said constitutes a tu quoque argument.
blm...@myrealbox.com
rigs <rigo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Apr 8, 5:23 am, spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > On Apr 7, 8:24 pm, blm...@myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
[ snip ]
> Who knew the Frankfurt School offered degrees in Internet Kookery?
Say what? Often GIM[*]F, but not in this instance. ?
[*] My.
Seebs
> It might be worth asking whether anyone knows which form is preferred
> for (Mac) OS X -- I mean, supposedly it's "UNIX under the hood", and
> certainly in my limited experience it has a text-mode interface that
> feels very much like other UNIX systems I've used, aside from the
> fact that the default filesystem setup is apparently case-insensitive.
Under the hood:
* OS X is plain old UNIX for such purposes.
* Actually, the default filesystem is case-preserving, which is subtly
different.
* OS 9 did, in fact, have at least one kind of application which did not
have any capacity for a meaningful return value. When targeting such
applications, it was a "freestanding implementation", since it did not
provide relevant hooks for a large number of standard library features;
if you wanted a hosted implementation, you could also get one, and in
that, main() returned int just like everywhere else.
> I don't quite understand who you're saying stole from whom here,
> but whatever. (I'm also not sure why you spell the Linux
> originator's name with a y, when no one else seems to, but
> "whatever" on that too.)
I think it's just that he can't spell.
> If it were only Linux, maybe not -- but it's not, as discussed
> previously.
Most significantly, it's also DOS. DOS batch files can depend on the
values returned from programs. Programs which don't return a value tend
to produce arbitrary results.
>> My sexism is ironic. Real malice, of the sort shown Kenny, Navia,
>> Schildt, Chinese visitors and myself, as well as competent female
>> programmers, is my concern here.
> I have no idea what "ironic" means here.
It means "ha ha only serious". (See the Jargon file.)
-s
--
Seebs
> rigs <rigo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Apr 8, 5:23 am, spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> > On Apr 7, 8:24 pm, blm...@myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
>> Who knew the Frankfurt School offered degrees in Internet Kookery?
> Say what? Often GIM[*]F, but not in this instance. ?
> [*] My.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School
Accurate enough summary, I think. :P
rigs
> *various lulzy threats of litigation*
Talk is cheap. The civil filing fee is US$322.
Put up or shut up.
Keith Thompson
Yes, I'm sure that after 283 people have taunted spinoza1111 for his
empty threats of lawsuits, the 284th taunt will have better results.
It's time to stop feeding the troll. (Cue spinoza1111's usual rant
claiming that the word "troll" is racist.)
--
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) ks...@mib.org <http://www.ghoti.net/~kst>
Nokia
"We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this."
-- Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, "Yes Minister"
Seebs
>> Put up or shut up.
> Yes, I'm sure that after 283 people have taunted spinoza1111 for his
> empty threats of lawsuits, the 284th taunt will have better results.
The difference being, that *particular* taunt comes from someone who
has represented me in court in the past. :)
... Not that this difference will make Nilges suddenly actually do any
of the things he threatens to do that would give him any kind of real
exposure. My guess is that he's quite realistic enough to realize
that any kind of actual lawsuit would leave him open to court orders
to pay costs...
-s
--
blm...@myrealbox.com
Seebs <usenet...@seebs.net> wrote:
> On 2010-04-10, blmblm myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
> > It might be worth asking whether anyone knows which form is preferred
> > for (Mac) OS X -- I mean, supposedly it's "UNIX under the hood", and
> > certainly in my limited experience it has a text-mode interface that
> > feels very much like other UNIX systems I've used, aside from the
> > fact that the default filesystem setup is apparently case-insensitive.
>
> Under the hood:
> * OS X is plain old UNIX for such purposes.
And for other purposes -- not so much?
But yeah, nice to have agreement here.
What I *have* noticed is that the OS X systems I've worked with
sometimes have the BSD versions of particular tools rather than
than the GNU versions, and sometimes that matters, and that they
don't have Linux-specific tools, and sometimes *that* matters.
But then, that's UNIX for you, right? Multiple different versions,
all *more or less* the same, but sometimes subtly different. :-)?
or maybe it's a :-(.
> * Actually, the default filesystem is case-preserving, which is subtly
> different.
That *is* a better term for how I understand things to work --
case is *preserved* in filenames, but ignored in deciding whether
two names refer to the same file (e.g., one can't have both a
"Foo" and a "foo" in the same directory). This can make things
interesting when one tries to copy files in bulk from a "real UNIX"
filesystem to an OS X filesystem.
> * OS 9 did, in fact, have at least one kind of application which did not
> have any capacity for a meaningful return value. When targeting such
> applications, it was a "freestanding implementation", since it did not
> provide relevant hooks for a large number of standard library features;
> if you wanted a hosted implementation, you could also get one, and in
> that, main() returned int just like everywhere else.
Interesting data point.
> > I don't quite understand who you're saying stole from whom here,
> > but whatever. (I'm also not sure why you spell the Linux
> > originator's name with a y, when no one else seems to, but
> > "whatever" on that too.)
>
> I think it's just that he can't spell.
But it doesn't matter! because orthography is not .... Yeah,
yeah, sorry. Well, I guess it's not uncommon to think that the
things we do well are important, while the things we do less
well aren't.
> > If it were only Linux, maybe not -- but it's not, as discussed
> > previously.
>
> Most significantly, it's also DOS. DOS batch files can depend on the
> values returned from programs. Programs which don't return a value tend
> to produce arbitrary results.
Another interesting data point, and as you say more significant.
> >> My sexism is ironic. Real malice, of the sort shown Kenny, Navia,
> >> Schildt, Chinese visitors and myself, as well as competent female
> >> programmers, is my concern here.
>
> > I have no idea what "ironic" means here.
>
> It means "ha ha only serious". (See the Jargon file.)
In case it wasn't clear -- I wasn't asking what "ironic" means in
general (I know that!) but how it applies in this context. Does
that change your answer .... <shrug>
blm...@myrealbox.com
Seebs <usenet...@seebs.net> wrote:
> On 2010-04-10, blmblm myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
> > In article <165bc196-c803-4a16...@x20g2000yqb.googlegroups.com>,
> > rigs <rigo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> On Apr 8, 5:23 am, spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >> > On Apr 7, 8:24 pm, blm...@myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
> >> Who knew the Frankfurt School offered degrees in Internet Kookery?
>
> > Say what? Often GIM[*]F, but not in this instance. ?
>
> > [*] My.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School
I wonder why I didn't find that myself. (Could Google somehow
know that sometimes I criticize, however mildly, their GG
archive-searching and Usenet-posting services?! Nah, sheer
paranoia .... :-)? )
> Accurate enough summary, I think. :P
If you say so! I admit I found the first few paragraphs slow
enough going that I bailed out, though I did recognize some names.
Maybe I'll try again at some point. Apparently some of the
enthusiasm I had for non-STEM subjects as an undergraduate has
evaporated over the years. :-(
Nick
> It may be that all(?) of the ways of invoking a program in a
> Windows environment ignore its return value. This is not the
> case in all operating systems:
It isn't - you can use "errorlevel" in a batch file to check the return
value.
> And didn't JCL for the venerable IBM OS/VS operating system(s) use
> the value returned by a called program to control execution flow?
> That's how I remember it anyway.
I'm pretty sure you're right here.
--
Online waterways route planner | http://canalplan.eu
Plan trips, see photos, check facilities | http://canalplan.org.uk
Seebs
> But then, that's UNIX for you, right? Multiple different versions,
> all *more or less* the same, but sometimes subtly different. :-)?
> or maybe it's a :-(.
I use Unix the same way I use C -- by primarily writing in the standardized
land, such that I don't have to know whether something is GNU, BSD, or SysV.
(It is no accident that my published book is on "portable shell scripting".)
> That *is* a better term for how I understand things to work --
> case is *preserved* in filenames, but ignored in deciding whether
> two names refer to the same file (e.g., one can't have both a
> "Foo" and a "foo" in the same directory). This can make things
> interesting when one tries to copy files in bulk from a "real UNIX"
> filesystem to an OS X filesystem.
Yes, it can, which is one of the reasons they provide a case-sensitive
alternative.
>> > I have no idea what "ironic" means here.
>> It means "ha ha only serious". (See the Jargon file.)
> In case it wasn't clear -- I wasn't asking what "ironic" means in
> general (I know that!) but how it applies in this context. Does
> that change your answer .... <shrug>
That is exactly the question I was answering. I hate to take liberties,
but I did simply take for granted that you knew the word "ironic", noticed
that it didn't seem to apply to his posts, and wished to know how to
understand it in this particular context.
spinoza1111
> In article <slrnhs1d71.qt9.usenet-nos...@guild.seebs.net>,
>
> Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
> > On 2010-04-10, blmblm myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
> > > rigs <rigor...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >> On Apr 8, 5:23 am,spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > >> > On Apr 7, 8:24 pm, blm...@myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
> > >> Who knew the Frankfurt School offered degrees in Internet Kookery?
>
> > > Say what? Often GIM[*]F, but not in this instance. ?
>
> > > [*] My.
>
> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School
>
> I wonder why I didn't find that myself. (Could Google somehow
> know that sometimes I criticize, however mildly, their GG
> archive-searching and Usenet-posting services?! Nah, sheer
> paranoia .... :-)? )
>
> > Accurate enough summary, I think. :P
>
> If you say so! I admit I found the first few paragraphs slow
> enough going that I bailed out, though I did recognize some names.
> Maybe I'll try again at some point. Apparently some of the
> enthusiasm I had for non-STEM subjects as an undergraduate has
> evaporated over the years. :-(
Pity. My own experience is that reading ability declines both in the
corporation and in those parts of universities (such as computer
science departments) which are dominated by the corporation.
I started studying "critical theory" after leaving Bell-Northern
Research and starting at Princeton, since I saw the structured
programming "revolution" destroyed even though it had two effects: it
introduced common decency into data processing, and increased
productivity.
I gave a paper on my findings for the first time in 1988.
spinoza1111
> On 2010-04-11, Keith Thompson <ks...@mib.org> wrote:
>
> >> Talk is cheap. The civil filing fee is US$322.
> >> Put up or shut up.
> > empty threats of lawsuits, the 284th taunt will have better results.
>
> The difference being, that *particular* taunt comes from someone who
> has represented me in court in the past. :)
>
> ... Not that this difference will make Nilges suddenly actually do any
> of the things he threatens to do that would give him any kind of real
> exposure. My guess is that he's quite realistic enough to realize
> that any kind of actual lawsuit would leave him open to court orders
> to pay costs...
A lawsuit is only one of my options. Another has been started, and
this is to show that the article on Schildt in wikipedia is in
violation of wikipedia's policy on "biographies of living persons" in
such a way as to get its creators banned, since it was created to
trash Schildt. As its primary source, your NNPOV article puts you
under suspicion.
Another option would be to submit an outline to Apress for a book on
cyberbullying by chronological adults. In that book, you'd be
anonymous but in a major case study. It will make the case that far
from being a marginal deviance, cyberbullying is used by management to
enforce control.
But as it is, you need now to start studying my case with more
diligence. Based on your replies, you seem to think that this is some
sort of game. It is not. Having been cyber-stalked and bullied, the
best way for me to heal is to defend another for no compensation pro
bono publico, and establish that cyberstalking can be ended.
Why don't you just replace both CTCN-3 and CTCN-4 with apologies, or a
blank page if you're not man enough to admit your stalking Herb?
>
> -s
> --
blm...@myrealbox.com
Seebs <usenet...@seebs.net> wrote:
> On 2010-04-11, blmblm myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
> > But then, that's UNIX for you, right? Multiple different versions,
> > all *more or less* the same, but sometimes subtly different. :-)?
> > or maybe it's a :-(.
>
> I use Unix the same way I use C -- by primarily writing in the standardized
> land, such that I don't have to know whether something is GNU, BSD, or SysV.
And as with C it can be difficult to get right, and trying to learn
how things work by experiment only goes so far and is as likely as not
to produce non-portable results ....
> (It is no accident that my published book is on "portable shell scripting".)
I may need to acquire a copy of this book. :-)
> > That *is* a better term for how I understand things to work --
> > case is *preserved* in filenames, but ignored in deciding whether
> > two names refer to the same file (e.g., one can't have both a
> > "Foo" and a "foo" in the same directory). This can make things
> > interesting when one tries to copy files in bulk from a "real UNIX"
> > filesystem to an OS X filesystem.
>
> Yes, it can, which is one of the reasons they provide a case-sensitive
> alternative.
And very helpful that is, too.
> >> > I have no idea what "ironic" means here.
>
> >> It means "ha ha only serious". (See the Jargon file.)
>
> > In case it wasn't clear -- I wasn't asking what "ironic" means in
> > general (I know that!) but how it applies in this context. Does
> > that change your answer .... <shrug>
>
> That is exactly the question I was answering. I hate to take liberties,
> but I did simply take for granted that you knew the word "ironic", noticed
> that it didn't seem to apply to his posts, and wished to know how to
> understand it in this particular context.
Okay. Well, I guess I put two (my interpretation of your reply) and
two (my understanding of autism-related disorders) together and got,
um, five. Or six. Or something. Sorry about that.
How "ironic" applies in context is still a mystery to me, but --
whatever, maybe.
spinoza1111
>
> Digression:
>
> "This"? presumably you mean the message ID in my post? I don't
> want to discourage you from making some attempt to prune quoted
> text, but aren't you supposed to leave in enough that people can
> make sense of your reply just on the basis of what's quoted?
> Well, moving on, and ignoring whether it should be "ellipses"
> or "ellipsis" ....
>
Unabridged OED confirms "ellipses" for the plural. In general,
literate people tend to spell Greek words that end in -is with -es
following the Greek rule. I used plural because I am referring to
three dots. I am not certain whether that latter microdecision was
correct.
<snip>
>
> Anyway, here is a URL that works for me:
>
> http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/msg/f86ace21f0dd9892?hl=en...
for (count = 0, t = strstr(target, in); t && *t; t = strstr(t, in)) {
++count;
t += inlen;
}
(1) Apples and oranges. My code was intended not to count occurences
but to replace them.
(2) Your code uses string.h. My purpose was to avoid it.
(3) Your code does not, as far as I can see, count overlapping
occurences such as in the two occurences of 123123 in 123123123.
>
> I don't have a lot of confidence that it's going to work for you too,
> but it's the best I can do.
You claim simplicity as the virtue of your code but you didn't do a
"requirements" study imo.
>
> I also noticed, in the process of trying to come up with a usable
> URL, that there's rather a lot of code, and at least some of it is
> not especially polished, so I'm not sure it's really worth your
> time to try to wade through. But it's a fairly representative
> example of the kind of code I write for my own use -- not the
> best, not the worst, but fairly representative. For code to be
> shown to students I'm apt to put in more comments. <shrug>
>
> > I look forward, quite
> > seriously, to reading your code.
>
> That sounds collegial enough. (Maybe. I can think of another
> interpretation.)
No, if you're Hunting for a Snark, see friend Seebach.
>
> > snipola
<snip>
>
> The factors I had in mind included, oh, affinity between the
> language and the problem domain (e.g., APL is apparently very
> good for problems that can expressed in terms of working on arrays
> or lists), suitability for the target hardware/software platform,
> the programmer's background and interests, and probably some others
> I'm not thinking of right now.
But phrasing this as an engineering problem means you're basically
abusing human beings. It's one thing to be a civil engineer and master
Nature. It's quite another to distort yourself and your perceptions in
order to meet corporate programming expectations. For example, if the
flavor du jour is a false "simplicity" it's a disservice to subtly
change the requirements and to even unintentionally try to make
someone who's met requirements look "wrong".
<snip>
> Did you have a point to make here, or is this just a demonstration
> that you're just as willing to be vulgar when conversing(?) with a
> woman as with a man?
Yes. It is that compared to stalking Schildt, the constant verbal
assaults on unpopular posters including Kenny, Navia and myself, and
the disagreeable manners shown mainland Chinese posters, ironic sexism
is pretty small potatoes.
Charges of "sexism" have become in fact the equivalent to the Catholic
rules on jerking off that I grew up with. It's a set of rules that
have become detached from any foundational notion of not harming
another human being. If I genuinely thought my metaphorical/symbolic
crotch grabs created, for you, a sexist environment worse, for you,
than the toxic environment created here for male posters, I'd be the
first to desist. But I don't.
<snip>
> I'll admit to a preference for UNIX-like environments -- but the
> thing is, declaring main() to return an int is compliant with the
> C standard for what it calls "hosted environments" and presumably
> will work on platforms that don't care about the return value as well
> as those that do. So to me this is the more portable choice and
> therefore the better one.
I think that part of this talk about "portability" is grandiose, a
programmer fantasy that "my code is so great that generations yet
unborn will want to port it".
The fact is that C is not portable. Because it is possible to make
things subtly dependent on hardware, any port needs a great deal of
diligence. The fact that this diligence isn't manifest doesn't change
this.
If you want to write portable code, it is folly to int main(). Use
Java or C Sharp. Connected to the grandiosity of portability is the
Fear of the Senior Programmer that his lack of formal education in
computer science will be exposed in trying to learn a new language.
This is not your fear, but I think Seebach has it.
<snip>
> > It's
> > basically (cf Lanier's book) just a copy of unix, based on the work of
> > an author other than the millionaire Torvaldys whose work was stolen
> > by Torvaldys much as MS-DOS was stolen. The same sleaze and inferior
> > praxis occurs in both communities.
>
> I don't quite understand who you're saying stole from whom here,
> but whatever. (I'm also not sure why you spell the Linux
> originator's name with a y, when no one else seems to, but
> "whatever" on that too.)
An infinite number of spelling flames will not establish a higher
level of literacy.
>
> > > Oh, and that comment about writing code for embedded systems --
> > > aren't there different rules (about the signature of main()) for
> > > free-standing and hosted implementations anyway?
>
> > Which means, of course, that the Linux expectation should not control,
> > get it yet?
>
> If it were only Linux, maybe not -- but it's not, as discussed
> previously.
Sure, it's a...command line limitation...from Linux, unix and MS-DOS.
Not exactly cuttin' edge.
>
> Further, if I understand the standard correctly, a freestanding
> implementation can make its own rules about the signature of the
> "main" program, including calling it something other than main(),
> and it isn't required to provide all the libraries required for
> a hosted environment, so it's not clear that it makes sense
> to try to write complete programs that are portable across the
> freestanding/hosted divide. Writing programs that work in any
> hosted environment seems like a more tractable problem, and worth
> doing when one can.
But as I said, this is grandiosity relative to the normal problem,
which is to write for a specific environment. In the diligence that is
required even for "portable" code which might have tricks in it given
that C permits them, it's easy enough to change the main.
>
<snip>
> > Back to 1984...
>
> Instead you want us all to conform to the expectations of a
> platform defined and owned by another corporate entity (Microsoft)
> whose reputation is not exactly spotless?
This is associative thinking, where if one's affiliated with Microsoft
in some way the inference is made, rather childishly based on Lucas'
myths in Star Wars etc., that one's gone over to the Dark Side.
Whereas merely using Linux, a copy of unix, which could be considered
a considerably improved MS-DOS since MS-DOS was a misunderstood unix,
and all three are based on Western Union Teletypewriter IO, is
supposed to make one one of the Shining Ones, even if one works for an
Israeli firm, say, that deliberately mistranslates Iranian government
statements in order to deceive the Americans.
At least Microsoft pays its developers. Furthermore, minorities need
to learn it and I prefer working at campuses like DeVry where people
show up for classes and major in what they plan to profess.
>
> Now that I think about it, I'm rather surprised by this apparent
> preference of yours for Windows, given its corporate associations.
> But whatever.
>
> [ snip ]
>
> > > The thing that's amusing here, or ironic, or something, is that
> > > for me the fact that your writing is for the most part free of the
> > > more obvious kinds of errors lends it a credibility it otherwise
> > > might not have.
>
> > The meaning of my literacy is that more more intelligent and more
> > decent than most people here.
>
> I can't parse that sentence, sorry.
Replace the "more" by "I'm". I think in fact highly enough of your
reading skills to wonder if the lady doth feign.
The Lady doth feign,
She's playing a game
Of pretending not to understand
The thought she can't stand
>
> [ snip ]
>
> > > Well, you never know. One thing I figured out a long time ago is
> > > that some people come across as being smarter than they actually
> > > are, by virtue of being articulate and self-confident, while others
> > > who are actually very bright fly under the radar, so to speak.
>
> > This is an urban legend.
>
> You do realize that when I said "I figured out" I meant that
> I, well, figured it out, based on my own experiences, rather
> than simply believing something I was told, right? I guess it's
> possible that someone else did draw my attention to it, but if
> so I believed it because it accorded with my own experience.
It remains a data processing myth which has created several software
crises, because it's more convenient to the corporation to celebrate
idiot savants than men and women.
<snip>
> My own thinking is that academic credentials are a useful screening
> mechanism in the absence of other information about a person,
> but the correlation between them and genuine qualifications is
> not 100%. Indeed, I strongly suspect you'd claim that you're
> more qualified than your academic credentials might imply, no?
Yes, but in Seebach's case the lack has real consequences. I did take
the classes and worked for the grades: he did not. The final
credential is what's missing in my case, but it appears that Seebach
didn't leave the starting gate.
Furthermore, anyone with any respect for learning would never (and I
mean never) reduce university attendance as opposed to final
credentials to a "useful screening mechanism".
>
> [ snip ]
>
> > > > I'm not making this shit up, luv.
>
> > > Again with the patronizing forms of address .... Knock it off,
> > > would you?
>
> > Not until you start showing more solidarity with the victims of the
> > cybernetic mobs that so frequently form in this newsgroup owing to
> > enabling language expressed in dulcet tones, hon.
>
> Duly noted. I doubt it will change my behavior.
>
> > "Patronizing forms of address" are not a matter of syntax, but of
> > intent, and it is a form of fashionable autism to judge another's
> > sexism by means of keywords alone. I refuse to allow you to make any
> > inferences about my sexism for essentially the same reason I refuse to
> > allow Seebach to make inferences about what Schildt knows based on his
> > own, very limited and very biased, knowledge.
>
> Refuse all you want. I've drawn a tentative conclusion about
> your attitudes based on the many posts of yours I've read over
> the years. That this conclusion is somewhat at odds with your
> claims above is -- no surprise. <shrug>
You sure you don't work for Human Resources? The abstract rejection
for the sake of rejection and then the shrug.
>
> > Language, in this and many other newsgroups, is used so often
> > ironically by chattering ape-men who in a truly bizarre fashion have a
> > cargo cult theory that words mean single things. They use it to lie
> > and then they hold others to the truth.
>
> > My sexism is ironic. Real malice, of the sort shown Kenny, Navia,
> > Schildt, Chinese visitors and myself, as well as competent female
> > programmers, is my concern here.
>
> I have no idea what "ironic" means here.
It means I'm pulling your leg.
>
> > > > The New York Times did a followup circa 1997 of the Princeton computer
> > > > science fe-male
>
> > > Okay, I guess I'm going to ask -- why the hyphen?
>
> > A deliberate affectation.
>
> No idea what this means either.
OED: An ostentatious fondness for something; a studied display
>
> [ snip ]
>
> > > > Tu quoque is the favorite argument of criminals,
>
> > > I don't agree that I'm making a "tu quoque" argument; I'm making
> > > a point about what I perceive as -- oh, "hypocrisy" is too strong
> > > a word, I suppose, but I can't think of a milder one.
>
> > Well how about "I like making tu quoque arguments?"
>
> Milder but in no way expressive of my intended meaning.
>
> I would be mildly interested in an explanation of how anything I've
> said constitutes a tu quoque argument.
Each spelling flame is one, since you want to disprove my claim that
I'm more literate by bringing down to the level of normalized
deviance. You will fail.
blm...@myrealbox.com
spinoza1111 <spino...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Apr 10, 9:47 pm, blm...@myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
> <snip>
> >
> > > I need a full link; this has ellipses.
> >
> > Digression:
> >
> > "This"? presumably you mean the message ID in my post? I don't
> > want to discourage you from making some attempt to prune quoted
> > text, but aren't you supposed to leave in enough that people can
> > make sense of your reply just on the basis of what's quoted?
> > Well, moving on, and ignoring whether it should be "ellipses"
> > or "ellipsis" ....
> >
>
> Unabridged OED confirms "ellipses" for the plural. In general,
> literate people tend to spell Greek words that end in -is with -es
> following the Greek rule. I used plural because I am referring to
> three dots. I am not certain whether that latter microdecision was
> correct.
Not that it matters, but as best I can tell from the definitions in
the online OED and Merriam-Webster, "ellipsis" refers to the omission
of a word or words, and also the mark *or marks* used to indicate the
omission. So one set of dots might properly be called "an ellipsis".
> <snip>
> >
> > Anyway, here is a URL that works for me:
> >
> > http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/msg/f86ace21f0dd9892?hl=en...
>
> for (count = 0, t = strstr(target, in); t && *t; t = strstr(t, in)) {
> ++count;
> t += inlen;
> }
>
> (1) Apples and oranges. My code was intended not to count occurences
> but to replace them.
The above code is Seebs's, not mine, and as best I can tell from
comments is intended to be used *as part of* a string-replacement
function.
> (2) Your code uses string.h. My purpose was to avoid it.
My code as posted includes several implementations of a string-replace
function, set up to use either the string.h library functions or
user-written functions implementing the same API, because I thought it
would be interesting to compare the performance of the two. I think
I wrote this code before it became apparent that when you said "no
string.h" you meant "and also no user-written functions implementing
the same API".
> (3) Your code does not, as far as I can see, count overlapping
> occurences such as in the two occurences of 123123 in 123123123.
I'm not sure you've actually looked at *my* code, given the above
comments, but -- yes, that's true: Given that I'm not going to
do anything with overlapping occurrences it doesn't strike me as
useful to count them. What my code *does* need is a count of how
many times the "needle" string is going to be replaced, so I can
calculate the size of the output string.
> > I don't have a lot of confidence that it's going to work for you too,
> > but it's the best I can do.
>
> You claim simplicity as the virtue of your code but you didn't do a
> "requirements" study imo.
What do you mean by "requirements" study? and I'm not sure I ever
claimed simplicity as a virtue of my code. though Seebs made that
claim about *his* code, quoted in my post.
[ snip ]
> > The factors I had in mind included, oh, affinity between the
> > language and the problem domain (e.g., APL is apparently very
> > good for problems that can expressed in terms of working on arrays
> > or lists), suitability for the target hardware/software platform,
> > the programmer's background and interests, and probably some others
> > I'm not thinking of right now.
>
> But phrasing this as an engineering problem means you're basically
> abusing human beings. It's one thing to be a civil engineer and master
> Nature. It's quite another to distort yourself and your perceptions in
> order to meet corporate programming expectations. For example, if the
> flavor du jour is a false "simplicity" it's a disservice to subtly
> change the requirements and to even unintentionally try to make
> someone who's met requirements look "wrong".
Huh?
> <snip>
> > Did you have a point to make here, or is this just a demonstration
> > that you're just as willing to be vulgar when conversing(?) with a
> > woman as with a man?
>
> Yes. It is that compared to stalking Schildt, the constant verbal
> assaults on unpopular posters including Kenny, Navia and myself, and
> the disagreeable manners shown mainland Chinese posters, ironic sexism
> is pretty small potatoes.
I don't quite understand how this explains your replying to a technical
point with
"(Sigh) (Eye roll) (Crotch grab)"
Well, whatever.
[ snip ]
> > I'll admit to a preference for UNIX-like environments -- but the
> > thing is, declaring main() to return an int is compliant with the
> > C standard for what it calls "hosted environments" and presumably
> > will work on platforms that don't care about the return value as well
> > as those that do. So to me this is the more portable choice and
> > therefore the better one.
>
> I think that part of this talk about "portability" is grandiose, a
> programmer fantasy that "my code is so great that generations yet
> unborn will want to port it".
Or a recognition of the fact that code, great or not, often survives
much longer than its author(s) might have intended, and is put to
uses they might not have imagined in writing it.
> The fact is that C is not portable. Because it is possible to make
> things subtly dependent on hardware, any port needs a great deal of
> diligence. The fact that this diligence isn't manifest doesn't change
> this.
So why make the job more difficult ....
[ snip ]
> > > basically (cf Lanier's book) just a copy of unix, based on the work of
> > > an author other than the millionaire Torvaldys whose work was stolen
> > > by Torvaldys much as MS-DOS was stolen. The same sleaze and inferior
> > > praxis occurs in both communities.
> >
> > I don't quite understand who you're saying stole from whom here,
> > but whatever. (I'm also not sure why you spell the Linux
> > originator's name with a y, when no one else seems to, but
> > "whatever" on that too.)
>
> An infinite number of spelling flames will not establish a higher
> level of literacy.
I think it's mildly disrespectful to not get someone's name right.
<shrug>
[ snip ]
> > > Back to 1984...
> >
> > Instead you want us all to conform to the expectations of a
> > platform defined and owned by another corporate entity (Microsoft)
> > whose reputation is not exactly spotless?
>
> This is associative thinking, where if one's affiliated with Microsoft
> in some way the inference is made, rather childishly based on Lucas'
> myths in Star Wars etc., that one's gone over to the Dark Side.
> Whereas merely using Linux, a copy of unix, which could be considered
> a considerably improved MS-DOS since MS-DOS was a misunderstood unix,
Where "considerably improved" here means -- *very* considerably,
I'd say, and "misunderstood" means -- I have no idea.
Would you like to hear the story I call "How I Discovered
the Difference Between (MS-)DOS and a Real Operating System"?
(Summary version: Buggy user program puts machine in a state from
which only physically turning it off and back on can rescue it.)
Single-user versus multi-user, remotely accessible via not ....
I'm sure I can come up with some other differences that seem
pretty significant to me.
> and all three are based on Western Union Teletypewriter IO,
The *command shells* may be. A command shell is not an operating
system.
> is
> supposed to make one one of the Shining Ones, even if one works for an
> Israeli firm, say, that deliberately mistranslates Iranian government
> statements in order to deceive the Americans.
>
> At least Microsoft pays its developers.
Pays them, but -- rumor has it -- expects rather a lot of hours in
return.
> Furthermore, minorities need
> to learn it and I prefer working at campuses like DeVry where people
> show up for classes and major in what they plan to profess.
Just out of curiosity, how many of these students seemed to you
to be motivated by genuine interest in the field, and how many
by the desire to get training and/or a credential that would lead
to a good-paying job? (Not that there's necessarily much wrong
with the latter, especially in people who didn't grow up affluent.)
(What I've observed in the students where I teach is that, oh,
ten years ago during the so-called dot-com boom, there seemed
to be a lot of the latter, while now it's more the former.
We have fewer majors now, but the ones we have are more capable,
and more interested.)
[ snip ]
> > > > Well, you never know. One thing I figured out a long time ago is
> > > > that some people come across as being smarter than they actually
> > > > are, by virtue of being articulate and self-confident, while others
> > > > who are actually very bright fly under the radar, so to speak.
> >
> > > This is an urban legend.
> >
> > You do realize that when I said "I figured out" I meant that
> > I, well, figured it out, based on my own experiences, rather
> > than simply believing something I was told, right? I guess it's
> > possible that someone else did draw my attention to it, but if
> > so I believed it because it accorded with my own experience.
>
> It remains a data processing myth which has created several software
> crises, because it's more convenient to the corporation to celebrate
> idiot savants than men and women.
I don't agree that it's a myth, or that it's confined to data
processing; I first noticed this phenomenon by comparing two of
my undergraduate acquaintances, neither of them involved with
data processing.
> <snip>
> > My own thinking is that academic credentials are a useful screening
> > mechanism in the absence of other information about a person,
> > but the correlation between them and genuine qualifications is
> > not 100%. Indeed, I strongly suspect you'd claim that you're
> > more qualified than your academic credentials might imply, no?
>
> Yes, but in Seebach's case the lack has real consequences. I did take
> the classes and worked for the grades: he did not. The final
> credential is what's missing in my case, but it appears that Seebach
> didn't leave the starting gate.
>
> Furthermore, anyone with any respect for learning would never (and I
> mean never) reduce university attendance as opposed to final
> credentials to a "useful screening mechanism".
I have no idea what you mean here, but perhaps it will clarify
*my* intended meaning if I say that by "academic credentials"
I mean to include not only degrees but the entire record --
think "transcript" rather than "diploma(s)". But even the fuller
record doesn't tell the whole story. And really, I'm inclined to
have more respect for someone who's self-taught, since I think
that indicates a level of interest and commitment in a way that
academic coursework might -- *might* -- not.
[ snip ]
> > > My sexism is ironic. Real malice, of the sort shown Kenny, Navia,
> > > Schildt, Chinese visitors and myself, as well as competent female
> > > programmers, is my concern here.
> >
> > I have no idea what "ironic" means here.
>
> It means I'm pulling your leg.
This is not apparent, and indeed I'm -- skeptical. That's
offensive, yes, but so be it.
(Why am I reminded of "can't you take a joke?" used as a defense against
accusations of various -isms?)
> > > > > The New York Times did a followup circa 1997 of the Princeton computer
> > > > > science fe-male
> >
> > > > Okay, I guess I'm going to ask -- why the hyphen?
> >
> > > A deliberate affectation.
> >
> > No idea what this means either.
>
> OED: An ostentatious fondness for something; a studied display
I know what "affectation" means in general. I don't understand what
it means in context. Well, whatever.
[ snip ]
> > I would be mildly interested in an explanation of how anything I've
> > said constitutes a tu quoque argument.
>
> Each spelling flame is one, since you want to disprove my claim that
> I'm more literate by bringing down to the level of normalized
> deviance.
I do? that seems unlikely, since I don't even know what "normalized
deviance" means. The point *I* think I'm making, in drawing attention
to spelling mistakes, is that you are not in the strongest position
to comment on others' spelling, as you sometimes do, or have done.
I'd ask how what I'm doing here is different from *your* claiming(?)
that Seebs is in no position to criticize others' code given that he
makes mistakes in his own code, but -- that's rather the same line of
reasoning, isn't it?
> You will fail.
I'll probably give up before you do, yes.
spinoza1111
> the online OED and Merriam-Webster, "ellipsis" refers to the omission
> of a word or words, and also the mark *or marks* used to indicate the
> omission. So one set of dots might properly be called "an ellipsis".
Point taken.
<snip>
> I'm not sure you've actually looked at *my* code, given the above
> comments, but -- yes, that's true: Given that I'm not going to
> do anything with overlapping occurrences it doesn't strike me as
> useful to count them. What my code *does* need is a count of how
> many times the "needle" string is going to be replaced, so I can
> calculate the size of the output string.
Got it. But the ambiguity of "the number of occurences" remains.
>
> > But phrasing this as an engineering problem means you're basically
> > abusing human beings. It's one thing to be a civil engineer and master
> > Nature. It's quite another to distort yourself and your perceptions in
> > order to meet corporate programming expectations. For example, if the
> > flavor du jour is a false "simplicity" it's a disservice to subtly
> > change the requirements and to even unintentionally try to make
> > someone who's met requirements look "wrong".
>
> Huh?
(1) Computing is about people and machines to a greater extent than
traditional engineering
(2) Despite obfuscation, this means mastering people as we master
nature
(3) This is always an ugly business
>
.
>
> I don't quite understand how this explains your replying to a technical
> point with
>
> "(Sigh) (Eye roll) (Crotch grab)"
I take it you disapprove. Well, I disapprove of someone trying to ruin
Schildt's reputation to puff his own, and I think my recreational
sexism is nothing in comparision.
>
> Well, whatever.
>
> [ snip ]
>
>
> Or a recognition of the fact that code, great or not, often survives
> much longer than its author(s) might have intended, and is put to
> uses they might not have imagined in writing it.
In my experience, contemporary American programmers rarely code, and
when they do, it's for specific assignments intended as one-off. They
simply can't be trusted anymore, and this is because corporate life
causes them to waste too much time with silly one-upmanship.
>
> > The fact is that C is not portable. Because it is possible to make
> > things subtly dependent on hardware, any port needs a great deal of
> > diligence. The fact that this diligence isn't manifest doesn't change
> > this.
>
> So why make the job more difficult ....
It's not made any easier by following formulae and shibboleth. Quite
the opposite; the formulae and shibboleth lull the coder into
neglecting real problems.
>
> [ snip ]
>
>
> I think it's mildly disrespectful to not get someone's name right.
> <shrug>
Babe, it's far more than "mildly" disrespectful to coin neologisms
such as "Bullschildt" and "Nilgewater" out of patronyms, and in
response I won't only coin Dweebach: I'll write original limericks in
Peter's honor:
A lousy coder named Dweebach
Was a munching on a Zweibach
Munched he, incoherently,
I knows about C
That mistaken coder named Dweebach
(Don't compete with me). This is because verbal self-defense is a
human right, sugar. Stop enabling.
>
> > This is associative thinking, where if one's affiliated with Microsoft
> > in some way the inference is made, rather childishly based on Lucas'
> > myths in Star Wars etc., that one's gone over to the Dark Side.
> > Whereas merely using Linux, a copy of unix, which could be considered
> > a considerably improved MS-DOS since MS-DOS was a misunderstood unix,
>
> Where "considerably improved" here means -- *very* considerably,
> I'd say, and "misunderstood" means -- I have no idea.
>
> Would you like to hear the story I call "How I Discovered
> the Difference Between (MS-)DOS and a Real Operating System"?
> (Summary version: Buggy user program puts machine in a state from
> which only physically turning it off and back on can rescue it.)
>
> Single-user versus multi-user, remotely accessible via not ....
> I'm sure I can come up with some other differences that seem
> pretty significant to me.
Remember the expert, who avoids minor errors while sweeping on to the
grand fallacy? We all know that MS-DOS is no longer viable.
But it's a mistake to believe that Linux is the answer. As the
(textbook author and professor) Andrew Tanenbaum pointed out, Linux as
compared to the MORE MODERN technology of microkernel OSen, is
innately insecure, less reliable and maintainable. Tanenbaum had a
"flame war" with Torvalds over this. He graciously apologized for some
of his flames; Torvalds did not, and failed to credit Tanenbaum for
Minix on which Linux was based. This was Maoism; the assault on
midlevel academic authority in the service of big money and power.
Far more than Windows, Linux is in the service of big money and power
since it is the product of slave labor. That is, each coder who
contributed to any version was a time-sliced slave. He might have been
a happy slave, but these are the best kind.
This allowed IBM, a larger and more powerful (and somewhat less
principled) company than Microsoft, to lay off its proprietary OS
developers and save the big bucks. It started with Torvalds' attack on
and expropriation of, Tanenbaum. These are as far as I can tell the
objective facts even if Tanenbaum expressed respect for Torvalds,
since computer science departments are so supported by corporate
interests that most of their professors lack true intellectual
independence.
>
> > and all three are based on Western Union Teletypewriter IO,
>
> The *command shells* may be. A command shell is not an operating
> system.
No it is not. So why is it important enough to try to ruin careers
over command shells?
>
> > is
> > supposed to make one one of the Shining Ones, even if one works for an
> > Israeli firm, say, that deliberately mistranslates Iranian government
> > statements in order to deceive the Americans.
>
> > At least Microsoft pays its developers.
>
> Pays them, but -- rumor has it -- expects rather a lot of hours in
> return.
Expects deliverables. And to reduce hours, expects a deliverable, on
many of its projects, at 5:00 PM every day. This deliverable may be a
simple return, or the final product.
>
> > Furthermore, minorities need
> > to learn it and I prefer working at campuses like DeVry where people
> > show up for classes and major in what they plan to profess.
>
> Just out of curiosity, how many of these students seemed to you
> to be motivated by genuine interest in the field, and how many
> by the desire to get training and/or a credential that would lead
> to a good-paying job? (Not that there's necessarily much wrong
> with the latter, especially in people who didn't grow up affluent.)
They cannot afford, growing up in hell, to disambiguate the two. I did
meet a former student in the loop. He was a janitor when he was in my
classes. He'd gotten a job at seven times the income that helped him
to support his family. He liked programming.
>
> (What I've observed in the students where I teach is that, oh,
> ten years ago during the so-called dot-com boom, there seemed
> to be a lot of the latter, while now it's more the former.
> We have fewer majors now, but the ones we have are more capable,
> and more interested.)
>
> [ snip ]
>
> > > > > Well, you never know. One thing I figured out a long time ago is
> > > > > that some people come across as being smarter than they actually
> > > > > are, by virtue of being articulate and self-confident, while others
> > > > > who are actually very bright fly under the radar, so to speak.
>
> > > > This is an urban legend.
>
> > > You do realize that when I said "I figured out" I meant that
> > > I, well, figured it out, based on my own experiences, rather
> > > than simply believing something I was told, right? I guess it's
> > > possible that someone else did draw my attention to it, but if
> > > so I believed it because it accorded with my own experience.
>
> > It remains a data processing myth which has created several software
> > crises, because it's more convenient to the corporation to celebrate
> > idiot savants than men and women.
>
> I don't agree that it's a myth, or that it's confined to data
> processing; I first noticed this phenomenon by comparing two of
> my undergraduate acquaintances, neither of them involved with
> data processing.
I think it's a myth, because in my experience the defective
personalities I've had to work with are normally the sort of
personalities who manifest anti-intellectualism, haven't dealt with
their resentments against an educational system that failed to serve
them, and who make precisely the decisions that cause large software
systems to fail.
Most of these personalities are aliterate, and think of user needs
based on the law as whims. As they age and stale, they are usually
attracted to right-wing simplifications of complexity.
Most are uninterested in Dijkstra's job one, not making a mess of it,
since they tend to like messes that form a mirror of the mess they're
in.
They are fond of laughing at anything that manifests thought in excess
of a low minimum.
If your acquaintances are in other fields, then the rot is spreading.
For example, before Reagan, GWB would not have been considered a
viable candidate, and Sarah Palin would have been locked up. But the
prototypes of GWB and Palin were forged in the corporation.
>
> > <snip>
> > > My own thinking is that academic credentials are a useful screening
> > > mechanism in the absence of other information about a person,
> > > but the correlation between them and genuine qualifications is
> > > not 100%. Indeed, I strongly suspect you'd claim that you're
> > > more qualified than your academic credentials might imply, no?
>
> > Yes, but in Seebach's case the lack has real consequences. I did take
> > the classes and worked for the grades: he did not. The final
> > credential is what's missing in my case, but it appears that Seebach
> > didn't leave the starting gate.
>
> > Furthermore, anyone with any respect for learning would never (and I
> > mean never) reduce university attendance as opposed to final
> > credentials to a "useful screening mechanism".
>
> I have no idea what you mean here, but perhaps it will clarify
> *my* intended meaning if I say that by "academic credentials"
> I mean to include not only degrees but the entire record --
> think "transcript" rather than "diploma(s)". But even the fuller
> record doesn't tell the whole story. And really, I'm inclined to
> have more respect for someone who's self-taught, since I think
> that indicates a level of interest and commitment in a way that
> academic coursework might -- *might* -- not.
Being self-taught in your sense might indicate interest and
committment, but in a company with tuition refund, not beating your
ass on over to NYU, Stanford or even DeVry might also indicate vanity
and reluctance to be exposed to the Other. I say this because in Peter
I detect this reluctance, most strongly from his not even reading the
first email from me when I tried to resolve the "flame war". He also
acted bizarrely as regards Schildt, refusing an offer from McGraw Hill
possibly because this might have meant an encounter. Also, I checked
his Mom's blog...which is public, to find her protesting the
affirmative expansion of science classes to minorities, which
indicates a sort of social background of mistrust and reluctance to
engage.
I was largely self-taught but also unafraid to take a LOT of graduate
classes. And, I succeeded at them. It simply is bizarre to brag, as
does Peter, about not taking CS.
>
> [ snip ]
>
> > > > My sexism is ironic. Real malice, of the sort shown Kenny, Navia,
> > > > Schildt, Chinese visitors and myself, as well as competent female
> > > > programmers, is my concern here.
>
> > > I have no idea what "ironic" means here.
>
> > It means I'm pulling your leg.
>
> This is not apparent, and indeed I'm -- skeptical. That's
> offensive, yes, but so be it.
>
> (Why am I reminded of "can't you take a joke?" used as a defense against
> accusations of various -isms?)
Because you can't? Seriously, corporate anti-sexism is an ersatz for
personal decency. I will remind you that I allied myself and went to
bat for a female coworker at Bell Northern Research and this conduct
was not at all atypical.
>
> > > > > > The New York Times did a followup circa 1997 of the Princeton computer
> > > > > > science fe-male
>
> > > > > Okay, I guess I'm going to ask -- why the hyphen?
>
> > > > A deliberate affectation.
>
> > > No idea what this means either.
>
> > OED: An ostentatious fondness for something; a studied display
>
> I know what "affectation" means in general. I don't understand what
> it means in context. Well, whatever.
Leg pull?
>
> [ snip ]
>
> > > I would be mildly interested in an explanation of how anything I've
> > > said constitutes a tu quoque argument.
>
> > Each spelling flame is one, since you want to disprove my claim that
> > I'm more literate by bringing down to the level of normalized
> > deviance.
>
> I do? that seems unlikely, since I don't even know what "normalized
> deviance" means. The point *I* think I'm making, in drawing attention
Cf. THE CHALLENGER LAUNCH DECISION, Univ of Chicago 1999, Diane
Vaughan. It's a study of the 1986 explosion of the Space Shuttle.
Vaughan had to develop a theory of "normalized deviance" because
quantitative sociologists tend to accept statistically predominant
behavior as non-deviant within a community, but it was obvious that as
a result of Reagan-era demands on NASA to "prove" that "America was
still great", engineers abandoned nondeviant practice from immediately
outside NASA, and normalized bad practice, including being proactively
skeptical of knowledge claims; engineers "knew that they didn't know"
how alloys on O-rings around fuel tanks would perform in unusually
(for Florida) low temperatures, and this absence was used (deviantly
with respect even to former NASA standards applied to Apollo) to
justify a disastrously aggressive launch schedule.
The normalized deviant here doesn't make spelling errors out of
knowing a variant practice (I have to teach UK spelling with an
American education), wit or laziness. He makes them because he doesn't
read books all that much.
I'm just different.
> to spelling mistakes, is that you are not in the strongest position
> to comment on others' spelling, as you sometimes do, or have done.
Only in the context of pointing out a broader ill or a literacy, and
NEVER in some tirade of the template "you think you're so fucking
smart but you make spelling mistakes like us, therefore (derefore) you
is a dime a dozen just like us".
>
> I'd ask how what I'm doing here is different from *your* claiming(?)
> that Seebs is in no position to criticize others' code given that he
> makes mistakes in his own code, but -- that's rather the same line of
> reasoning, isn't it?
No, because Seebs' posted code is in each case I've seen since the
beginning of this year, when I started to look at it, much worse than
Schildt's examples: failure to replace %s, off by one in one line, and
an unstructured switch().
My argument contra Dweebach is holistic. The package doesn't make the
grade. If he were a programmer like Bacarisse, he'd be forgiven the
lack of academic qualifications. If he had a PhD like Malcolm, I'd be
more patient with him. If he hadn't stalked Schildt, I wouldn't fuck
with him at all.
My reasons for concluding that Seebach is off the rails are those
three. The worst is the stalking, then the bad code, and then the lack
of academic qualifications (which could be undegreed course work)
relative to his claims.
blm...@myrealbox.com
spinoza1111 <spino...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Apr 13, 6:42 pm, blm...@myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
> <snip>
[ snip ]
> > I'm not sure you've actually looked at *my* code, given the above
> > comments, but -- yes, that's true: Given that I'm not going to
> > do anything with overlapping occurrences it doesn't strike me as
> > useful to count them. What my code *does* need is a count of how
> > many times the "needle" string is going to be replaced, so I can
> > calculate the size of the output string.
>
> Got it. But the ambiguity of "the number of occurences" remains.
And? As best I can tell, you're critiquing code I didn't write.
Now, it's true that the function in my code that counts how many
replacements are needed is called count_occurrences. But I think
the ambiguity is resolved by the comments -- or at least that
was my intent:
/*
* count occurrences of old_text in s, scanning left to right and
* ignoring overlapping occurrences
*/
size_t count_occurrences(const char* s, const char* old_text) {
char* first;
if (x_strlen(s) == 0) return 0;
first = x_strstr(s, old_text);
if (first == NULL) return 0;
return 1 + count_occurrences(first + x_strlen(old_text), old_text);
}
(Functions x_strlen and x_strstr are either the string.h library
functions or user-written substitutes.)
Possibly some other wording would be even less ambiguous. <shrug>
I'm still curious about what you meant by "requirements study", when
you said upthread:
'You claim simplicity as the virtue of your code but you didn't do a
"requirements" study imo.'
[ snip ]
> > I don't quite understand how this explains your replying to a technical
> > point with
> >
> > "(Sigh) (Eye roll) (Crotch grab)"
>
> I take it you disapprove.
Yes. Mildly, but yes.
> Well, I disapprove of someone trying to ruin
> Schildt's reputation to puff his own, and I think my recreational
> sexism is nothing in comparision.
I don't find that the one excuses the other. <shrug>
[ snip ]
> > I think it's mildly disrespectful to not get someone's name right.
> > <shrug>
>
> Babe, it's far more than "mildly" disrespectful to coin neologisms
> such as "Bullschildt" and "Nilgewater" out of patronyms,
Agreed, but I'm not sure the one excuses the other. <shrug>
> and in
> response I won't only coin Dweebach: I'll write original limericks in
> Peter's honor:
[ snip ]
> > > Whereas merely using Linux, a copy of unix, which could be considered
> > > a considerably improved MS-DOS since MS-DOS was a misunderstood unix,
> >
> > Where "considerably improved" here means -- *very* considerably,
> > I'd say, and "misunderstood" means -- I have no idea.
[ snip ]
> Remember the expert, who avoids minor errors while sweeping on to the
> grand fallacy? We all know that MS-DOS is no longer viable.
And?
> But it's a mistake to believe that Linux is the answer. As the
> (textbook author and professor) Andrew Tanenbaum pointed out, Linux as
> compared to the MORE MODERN technology of microkernel OSen, is
> innately insecure, less reliable and maintainable. Tanenbaum had a
> "flame war" with Torvalds over this. He graciously apologized for some
> of his flames; Torvalds did not, and failed to credit Tanenbaum for
> Minix on which Linux was based. This was Maoism; the assault on
> midlevel academic authority in the service of big money and power.
>
> Far more than Windows, Linux is in the service of big money and power
> since it is the product of slave labor. That is, each coder who
> contributed to any version was a time-sliced slave. He might have been
> a happy slave, but these are the best kind.
>
> This allowed IBM, a larger and more powerful (and somewhat less
> principled) company than Microsoft, to lay off its proprietary OS
> developers and save the big bucks. It started with Torvalds' attack on
> and expropriation of, Tanenbaum. These are as far as I can tell the
> objective facts even if Tanenbaum expressed respect for Torvalds,
> since computer science departments are so supported by corporate
> interests that most of their professors lack true intellectual
> independence.
Are they. Hm, where's *my* corporate support ....
[ snip ]
> > > is
> > > supposed to make one one of the Shining Ones, even if one works for an
> > > Israeli firm, say, that deliberately mistranslates Iranian government
> > > statements in order to deceive the Americans.
> >
> > > At least Microsoft pays its developers.
> >
> > Pays them, but -- rumor has it -- expects rather a lot of hours in
> > return.
>
> Expects deliverables. And to reduce hours, expects a deliverable, on
> many of its projects, at 5:00 PM every day. This deliverable may be a
> simple return, or the final product.
So are you saying that Microsoft's technical employees are not
expected to work more than about 40 hours a week? That would be
a pleasant surprise if true -- which I suppose it could be.
[ snip ]
Can you provide a specific reference to one such post? The link
from Seebs's Web page (at http://www.seebs.net) to his mother's column
appears to be broken. Googling, I found this
http://www.lindaseebach.net/wordpress/
which I think is the right person, but in a quick skim of the first
few entries I don't find anything like what you describe.
[ snip ]
> > > > > My sexism is ironic. Real malice, of the sort shown Kenny, Navia,
> > > > > Schildt, Chinese visitors and myself, as well as competent female
> > > > > programmers, is my concern here.
> >
> > > > I have no idea what "ironic" means here.
> >
> > > It means I'm pulling your leg.
> >
> > This is not apparent, and indeed I'm -- skeptical. That's
> > offensive, yes, but so be it.
> >
> > (Why am I reminded of "can't you take a joke?" used as a defense against
> > accusations of various -isms?)
>
> Because you can't?
Could be. In my experience, however, "can't you take a joke?" is
as often as not an attempted defense of supposed humor that's really
a thinly-veiled insult.
> Seriously, corporate anti-sexism is an ersatz for
> personal decency. I will remind you that I allied myself and went to
> bat for a female coworker at Bell Northern Research and this conduct
> was not at all atypical.
With all due respect, we have only your word for this.
[ snip ]
> > > Each spelling flame is one, since you want to disprove my claim that
> > > I'm more literate by bringing down to the level of normalized
> > > deviance.
> >
> > I do? that seems unlikely, since I don't even know what "normalized
> > deviance" means. The point *I* think I'm making, in drawing attention
>
> Cf. THE CHALLENGER LAUNCH DECISION, Univ of Chicago 1999, Diane
> Vaughan. It's a study of the 1986 explosion of the Space Shuttle.
> Vaughan had to develop a theory of "normalized deviance" because
> quantitative sociologists tend to accept statistically predominant
> behavior as non-deviant within a community, but it was obvious that as
> a result of Reagan-era demands on NASA to "prove" that "America was
> still great", engineers abandoned nondeviant practice from immediately
> outside NASA, and normalized bad practice, including being proactively
> skeptical of knowledge claims; engineers "knew that they didn't know"
> how alloys on O-rings around fuel tanks would perform in unusually
> (for Florida) low temperatures, and this absence was used (deviantly
> with respect even to former NASA standards applied to Apollo) to
> justify a disastrously aggressive launch schedule.
Huh. I think I was under the impression that the Challenger launch
disaster had been caused by management acting against the advice of
technical employees. Your description makes it sound as though the
engineers were at fault.
> The normalized deviant here doesn't make spelling errors out of
> knowing a variant practice (I have to teach UK spelling with an
> American education),
You seem to be saying here that the supposed spelling errors I've
pointed out are standard UK spelling. That's not the impression
I get from the OED, though in some cases I suppose I *could* be
misinterpreting the entries. <shrug>
> wit or laziness. He makes them because he doesn't
> read books all that much.
>
> I'm just different.
Indeed.
> > to spelling mistakes, is that you are not in the strongest position
> > to comment on others' spelling, as you sometimes do, or have done.
>
> Only in the context of pointing out a broader ill or a literacy, and
> NEVER in some tirade of the template "you think you're so fucking
> smart but you make spelling mistakes like us, therefore (derefore) you
> is a dime a dozen just like us".
[ snip ]
BruceS
> In article <7f64b94d-e4d9-4677-b2b6-80304e482...@q23g2000yqd.googlegroups.com>,
>
> spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > On Apr 13, 6:42 pm, blm...@myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
> > > > At least Microsoft pays its developers.
>
> > > Pays them, but -- rumor has it -- expects rather a lot of hours in
> > > return.
>
> > Expects deliverables. And to reduce hours, expects a deliverable, on
> > many of its projects, at 5:00 PM every day. This deliverable may be a
> > simple return, or the final product.
>
> So are you saying that Microsoft's technical employees are not
> expected to work more than about 40 hours a week? That would be
> a pleasant surprise if true -- which I suppose it could be.
I had the opportunity to talk casually to a couple of Microsoft
developers while my employer was in a cooperative project with
Microsoft. They told me that the schedules at M$ are very loose.
When everything is working well, they put in short hours, spend time
playing Frisbee at work, etc. At other times, they work very long
hours, essentially living at work and just going home for a little
sleep. I asked how long it had been since they were on the "loose"
schedule, and they said it had been several years. They described a
work environment that I would call a sweat shop, with workers
accepting the conditions because (theoretically) there was the flip
side (a sweet shop?) some of the time. That flip side just kept not
happening. One could call that corporate abuse of workers, but since
they can quit at any time, they bring it on themselves. At the other
end of the spectrum, my current client won't allow me to work overtime
without specific permission. So far this contract, I've averaged a
bit under 40 hours per week. However, they don't do this out of the
goodness of their hearts, but rather as a way to avoid spending too
much on me, as I'm paid hourly.
Seebs
> I had the opportunity to talk casually to a couple of Microsoft
> developers while my employer was in a cooperative project with
> Microsoft. They told me that the schedules at M$ are very loose.
> When everything is working well, they put in short hours, spend time
> playing Frisbee at work, etc. At other times, they work very long
> hours, essentially living at work and just going home for a little
> sleep. I asked how long it had been since they were on the "loose"
> schedule, and they said it had been several years.
Yeah. MS is famous for this.
$ork is serious about it. Yes, we've had periods of long hours -- twice,
shortly before releases, since I got here. We've also been given
compensation for putting in the extra hours. Not always quite hour-for-hour
matching, but close enough for my purposes.
It also helps that if we tell management a schedule is unrealistic, they
usually listen to us, and adapt the schedule to match reality.
-s
--
Keith Thompson
> In article <7f64b94d-e4d9-4677...@q23g2000yqd.googlegroups.com>,
> spinoza1111 <spino...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Also, I checked
> > his Mom's blog...which is public, to find her protesting the
> > affirmative expansion of science classes to minorities, which
> > indicates a sort of social background of mistrust and reluctance to
> > engage.
>
> Can you provide a specific reference to one such post? The link
> from Seebs's Web page (at http://www.seebs.net) to his mother's column
> appears to be broken. Googling, I found this
>
>
> which I think is the right person, but in a quick skim of the first
> few entries I don't find anything like what you describe.
Ok, so Nilges wrote about something that Seebs's mother is
alleged to have posted on her blog. Fine, we've come to expect that
kind of crap from him.
Why the *&%^ are you discussing it with him? In public? Here in
comp.lang.c? Even if what Nilges is true, what possible relevance
could it have to the C language, to Schildt, or to anything that
anyone here could possible care about? Must you reply in public to
every sentence he writes?
I believe that the e-mail address under which Nilges posts is valid.
If you really want to discuss Seebs's mother's blog with him, feel
free to do so by e-mail. Or perhaps you could find another newsgroup
or forum where it's topical. Create an alt.* group for the purpose if
you like.
Please please *please* stop feeding the troll.
Squeamizh
> In article <7f64b94d-e4d9-4677-b2b6-80304e482...@q23g2000yqd.googlegroups.com>,
>
> spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > (textbook author and professor) Andrew Tanenbaum pointed out, Linux as
> > compared to the MORE MODERN technology of microkernel OSen, is
> > innately insecure, less reliable and maintainable. Tanenbaum had a
> > "flame war" with Torvalds over this. He graciously apologized for some
> > of his flames; Torvalds did not, and failed to credit Tanenbaum for
> > Minix on which Linux was based. This was Maoism; the assault on
> > midlevel academic authority in the service of big money and power.
>
> > Far more than Windows, Linux is in the service of big money and power
> > since it is the product of slave labor. That is, each coder who
> > contributed to any version was a time-sliced slave. He might have been
> > a happy slave, but these are the best kind.
>
> > This allowed IBM, a larger and more powerful (and somewhat less
> > principled) company than Microsoft, to lay off its proprietary OS
> > developers and save the big bucks. It started with Torvalds' attack on
> > and expropriation of, Tanenbaum. These are as far as I can tell the
> > objective facts even if Tanenbaum expressed respect for Torvalds,
> > since computer science departments are so supported by corporate
> > interests that most of their professors lack true intellectual
> > independence.
>
> Are they. Hm, where's *my* corporate support ....
Hey, B.L. Barnaby (yes, I know that is not your real name, but I'm
allowing you to indulge your fantasy of being the circus clown of the
forum), at this time I must ask you the following questions. Do you
derive amusement from responding to spinoza's incomprehensible
ramblings? Are you pleased with yourself when you give Seebs more
ammo to further pollute this group with responses to these threads?
How on Earth have you not realized that spinoza is too pleased with
himself to ever contribute anything in the way of a productive
discussion of ideas?
Seebs
> Ok, so Nilges wrote about something that Seebs's mother is
> alleged to have posted on her blog. Fine, we've come to expect that
> kind of crap from him.
Actually, I have to dispute this. I was absolutely shocked that
he actually managed to successfully identify my mom. (To save him
trouble, the UFO nut "Linda Seebach" is a different person.)
> Why the *&%^ are you discussing it with him? In public? Here in
> comp.lang.c? Even if what Nilges is true, what possible relevance
> could it have to the C language, to Schildt, or to anything that
> anyone here could possible care about? Must you reply in public to
> every sentence he writes?
I think it's like watching a train wreck. It's utterly fascinating
trying to find some kind of connection between the various things
he says. I just think it's a waste of bandwidth. He should come
over to one of the vB boards where it won't bother other people and
he can post nonsense to his heart's content.
Of course, he won't do that if the whole thing is just an attempt
to destroy comp.lang.c over some imagined slight.
Keith Thompson
> > Why the *&%^ are you discussing it with him? In public? Here in
> > comp.lang.c? Even if what Nilges is true, what possible relevance
> > could it have to the C language, to Schildt, or to anything that
> > anyone here could possible care about? Must you reply in public to
> > every sentence he writes?
>
> I think it's like watching a train wreck. It's utterly fascinating
> trying to find some kind of connection between the various things
> he says. I just think it's a waste of bandwidth.
It's more like showing up at a train wreck with a can of gasoline and
a book of matches.
(Yeah, that's a gross exaggeration and probably an inappropriate
comparison, but ...)
Kenny McCormack
blm...@myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
...
>Can you provide a specific reference to one such post? The link
>from Seebs's Web page (at http://www.seebs.net) to his mother's column
>appears to be broken. Googling, I found this
>
>http://www.lindaseebach.net/wordpress/
>
>which I think is the right person, but in a quick skim of the first
>few entries I don't find anything like what you describe.
You have to dig a bit. For some reason, Ms. Seebs put only a teaser on
her page - you have to go to "bigjournalism.com" and then put "seebach"
in the "Search" box. Then the article comes up.
I'm not sure it says exactly what Nilges says it does, but it is
abundantly clear which side of the political spectrum the seebs are on -
just from the general tone (read: teabagger) of the site and the text in
her article.
It explains a lot about why Seebs fits in well with the other Bible
bangers here in clc.
--
(This discussion group is about C, ...)
Wrong. It is only OCCASIONALLY a discussion group
about C; mostly, like most "discussion" groups, it is
off-topic Rorsharch revelations of the childhood
traumas of the participants...
David Thompson
<blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
> In article <f68bd6a2-795b-4d8b...@r18g2000yqd.googlegroups.com>,
> spinoza1111 <spino...@yahoo.com> wrote:
<rest snipped>
> It may be that all(?) of the ways of invoking a program in a
> Windows environment ignore its return value. This is not the
> case in all operating systems:
>
The Win32-standard command processor CMD.EXE can check (easily
although a tad uglily), and I'm pretty sure the earlier and generally
less powerful MSDOS COMMAND.COM also. The two other ways I commonly
use, mingw (port of) gawk and ActiveState (port of) perl, also do,
although perl uses the (annoying) Unix form of shifting left 8 bits.
It is not as standard/conventional among Windows *programs* to provide
meaningful exit values as it is among Unix ones, so it is not as often
*useful* to check, but it is possible.
However, doubleclicking (or select+Open/etc) on a desktop icon or
file-explorer entry, for the program or a file associated with it, or
Start / Run (or CMD START), do discard the exit value. And the first
of these is the only way used by many naive users, and the two of them
together IME used often even by power users, so this is an important
even if technically exceptional case.
> Command shells for UNIX-like systems may (usually do?) provide
> access to the return value via an environment variable, and some
> shell scripts make use of it. Other mechanisms for invoking
> programs (e.g., fork/exec*/waitpid) also provide access to the
> return code.
>
A shell variable, but not an environment variable; though often
conflated those aren't quite the same thing. And Unix shells can also
use the exit value implicitly: 'if foo; then bar; fi' runs foo, and if
it exits successfully (defined as 0) then the shell runs bar,
otherwise it doesn't. Similarly for while, &&, ||. In addition to many
(not all, as above) Unix-designed programs returning a usable status
as a side-effect of their 'primary' operation, there have long been
some programs, most notably 'test', whose *only* purpose is to return
a status value; newer shells like bash often have this functionality
builtin but systems often still have the external program also.
> And didn't JCL for the venerable IBM OS/VS operating system(s) use
> the value returned by a called program to control execution flow?
> That's how I remember it anyway.
>
All versions/descendants of OS/360, yes. But very limited 'control',
basically just continue or stop/abort.
And of course there's VMS, frequently cited here because it had a
whole complex scheme of status values in which zero meant (a) failure,
so C exit(0) or exit(EXIT_SUCCESS) had to actually map to something
nonzero -- perhaps 1, the simplest (but very not only) success.
blm...@myrealbox.com
Keith Thompson <ks...@mib.org> wrote:
> Seebs <usenet...@seebs.net> writes:
> > On 2010-04-15, Keith Thompson <ks...@mib.org> wrote:
> [...]
> > > Why the *&%^ are you discussing it with him? In public? Here in
> > > comp.lang.c? Even if what Nilges is true, what possible relevance
> > > could it have to the C language, to Schildt, or to anything that
> > > anyone here could possible care about? Must you reply in public to
> > > every sentence he writes?
But, but ....
(Attempt at humor. There's probably little point in protesting
that I don't respond to *everything*, since apparently I'm setting
the bar too low.)
> > I think it's like watching a train wreck. It's utterly fascinating
> > trying to find some kind of connection between the various things
> > he says. I just think it's a waste of bandwidth.
> [...]
>
> It's more like showing up at a train wreck with a can of gasoline and
> a book of matches.
>
> (Yeah, that's a gross exaggeration and probably an inappropriate
> comparison, but ...)
But just accurate enough to be disturbing. Even more disturbing
are the replies from some of the anti-Seebs regulars(?) ("circus
clown"?). Point taken, okay?
blm...@myrealbox.com
David Thompson <dave.th...@verizon.net> wrote:
> On 5 Apr 2010 16:27:33 GMT, blm...@myrealbox.com
> <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
>
> > In article <f68bd6a2-795b-4d8b...@r18g2000yqd.googlegroups.com>,
> > spinoza1111 <spino...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> <rest snipped>
> > It may be that all(?) of the ways of invoking a program in a
> > Windows environment ignore its return value. This is not the
> > case in all operating systems:
> >
> The Win32-standard command processor CMD.EXE can check (easily
> although a tad uglily), and I'm pretty sure the earlier and generally
> less powerful MSDOS COMMAND.COM also. The two other ways I commonly
> use, mingw (port of) gawk and ActiveState (port of) perl, also do,
> although perl uses the (annoying) Unix form of shifting left 8 bits.
>
> It is not as standard/conventional among Windows *programs* to provide
> meaningful exit values as it is among Unix ones, so it is not as often
> *useful* to check, but it is possible.
>
> However, doubleclicking (or select+Open/etc) on a desktop icon or
> file-explorer entry, for the program or a file associated with it, or
> Start / Run (or CMD START), do discard the exit value. And the first
> of these is the only way used by many naive users, and the two of them
> together IME used often even by power users, so this is an important
> even if technically exceptional case.
Helpful information; thanks. I have essentially zero experience
programming in a Windows environment. (Correcting that is on my
long-term "to do" list, but -- it's a long list.)
> > Command shells for UNIX-like systems may (usually do?) provide
> > access to the return value via an environment variable, and some
> > shell scripts make use of it. Other mechanisms for invoking
> > programs (e.g., fork/exec*/waitpid) also provide access to the
> > return code.
> >
> A shell variable, but not an environment variable; though often
> conflated those aren't quite the same thing.
Nitpick accepted!
> And Unix shells can also
> use the exit value implicitly: 'if foo; then bar; fi' runs foo, and if
> it exits successfully (defined as 0) then the shell runs bar,
> otherwise it doesn't. Similarly for while, &&, ||. In addition to many
> (not all, as above) Unix-designed programs returning a usable status
> as a side-effect of their 'primary' operation, there have long been
> some programs, most notably 'test', whose *only* purpose is to return
> a status value; newer shells like bash often have this functionality
> builtin but systems often still have the external program also.
Yes, quite.
> > And didn't JCL for the venerable IBM OS/VS operating system(s) use
> > the value returned by a called program to control execution flow?
> > That's how I remember it anyway.
> >
> All versions/descendants of OS/360, yes. But very limited 'control',
> basically just continue or stop/abort.
That's how I remember it too.
> And of course there's VMS, frequently cited here because it had a
> whole complex scheme of status values in which zero meant (a) failure,
> so C exit(0) or exit(EXIT_SUCCESS) had to actually map to something
> nonzero -- perhaps 1, the simplest (but very not only) success.
Yes ....
Okay, so a question:
I can easily imagine ways of invoking a program that *allow* it
to return a value but don't *require* it to, in the sense that
there are no spectacular failures if it doesn't. (I'm thinking
here about the OS/360 convention of putting the return value in
register 15 -- a program that takes no definite action to put
something sensible in r15 still leaves *something* there.)
But I'm vaguely remembering that on some systems there are ways
of invoking a program that do produce spectacular failures if
it doesn't "return a value" -- something about not following
conventions about stack usage??
Am I totally misremembering/confused?
lawrenc...@siemens.com
>
> And of course there's VMS, frequently cited here because it had a
> whole complex scheme of status values in which zero meant (a) failure,
Actually, zero is a schizophrenic status code: the corresponding message
is "%SYSTEM-W-NORMAL, normal successful completion", where the "W"
indicates a warning. Given the frequency with which my programs
complete successfully, a warning might be appropriate!
--
Larry Jones
Something COULD happen today. And if anything DOES,
by golly, I'm going to be ready for it! -- Calvin
Seebs
> I can easily imagine ways of invoking a program that *allow* it
> to return a value but don't *require* it to, in the sense that
> there are no spectacular failures if it doesn't. (I'm thinking
> here about the OS/360 convention of putting the return value in
> register 15 -- a program that takes no definite action to put
> something sensible in r15 still leaves *something* there.)
Right. And in some cases (especially in C99), that can even
be cleverly managed by the compiler.
> But I'm vaguely remembering that on some systems there are ways
> of invoking a program that do produce spectacular failures if
> it doesn't "return a value" -- something about not following
> conventions about stack usage??
I believe I've heard of implementations where a mismatched return
type will indeed produce spectacular failures -- say, if someone
tries to call a function returning int, but the function actually
called returns void, the return goes to the wrong place entirely
and Bad Stuff Happens.
Haven't seen one, usually all I see is stack garbage. Although
that can produce surprises sometimes too.
spinoza1111
wrote:
> In article <7f64b94d-e4d9-4677-b2b6-80304e482...@q23g2000yqd.googlegroups.com>,
My understanding is that if you deliver, you can work 20 hours a week.
That's what I was told in my 1986 interview, which I hosed.
> from Seebs's Web page (athttp://www.seebs.net) to his mother's column
> appears to be broken. Googling, I found this
>
> http://www.lindaseebach.net/wordpress/
>
> which I think is the right person, but in a quick skim of the first
> few entries I don't find anything like what you describe.
Mrs. Seebach links to her rather well-written and reasoned defense of
preserving funding for Advanced Placement science preparation, against
efforts to redistribute resources to minority students in the Berkeley
school system in California (which includes students from a much
poorer Oakland).
However, I sense in her a desire to defend privilege. For one thing, I
think Advanced Placement is misused by many students (esp. middle
class students) to avoid "having to take" "boring" survey classes lest
they be exposed to some professor's possibly idiosyncratic views: as
if learning is in no way a social thing. In this attitude I see
Peter's absurd pride in never having taken computer science classes.
In wanting to "AP out", the student wants to avoid a particular
viewpoint in fear that the viewpoint, like Herb's MS-DOS focus, might
not be the "right" viewpoint. However, there is no such thing as the
"right viewpoint". A viewpoint, like a taxonomy, is neither right nor
wrong.
For another, I think that the needs of the least well off do indeed
trump in this case the needs of more privileged students. Indeed, the
very fact that the AP students want to avoid, a bit later at
university, exposure to professors and students in "boring" survey
classes (and in Peter's case, wanted to avoid computer science
altogether while at the same time wanting to be a programmer), means
that students who need and want to take the basics should be funded by
taking money away from AP science.
If you have as much contempt for professors and authors as is often
manifested here, don't take it away from people who have more respect
for learning. And: my direct experience at Roosevelt University and
DeVry in Chicago is that American black people (especially women, but
guys too) have more respect than many whites for learning and for
teachers. I taught some serious ex-cons of color who'd served time for
murder. They knew that they had to fuck or walk, and I never had any
trouble from them. And some of the highest-achieving women in America
today, starting with the First Lady, are of course minorities.
The AP students can start tutoring the minorities in math and science
as a way of both deepening their own knowledge, and giving back
something to society, which in Berkeley isn't just "Berkeley": it's
Oakland, too.
I sense in Mrs Seebach a psychology of disassociation from the world
around her. AP science is as much a frill as girl's sports, art, dance
and music, to name three more popular targets for educational
cutbacks.
>
> [ snip ]
>
> > > > > > My sexism is ironic. Real malice, of the sort shown Kenny, Navia,
> > > > > > Schildt, Chinese visitors and myself, as well as competent female
> > > > > > programmers, is my concern here.
>
> > > > > I have no idea what "ironic" means here.
>
> > > > It means I'm pulling your leg.
>
> > > This is not apparent, and indeed I'm -- skeptical. That's
> > > offensive, yes, but so be it.
>
> > > (Why am I reminded of "can't you take a joke?" used as a defense against
> > > accusations of various -isms?)
>
> > Because you can't?
>
> Could be. In my experience, however, "can't you take a joke?" is
> as often as not an attempted defense of supposed humor that's really
> a thinly-veiled insult.
Yeah, well I don't accept that women are to be accorded respect
insofar as they enable bullying. Period.
>
> > Seriously, corporate anti-sexism is an ersatz for
> > personal decency. I will remind you that I allied myself and went to
> > bat for a female coworker at Bell Northern Research and this conduct
> > was not at all atypical.
>
> With all due respect, we have only your word for this.
With all due respect, don't call me a liar.
>
> [ snip ]
>
>
>
>
>
> > > > Each spelling flame is one, since you want to disprove my claim that
> > > > I'm more literate by bringing down to the level of normalized
> > > > deviance.
>
> > > I do? that seems unlikely, since I don't even know what "normalized
> > > deviance" means. The point *I* think I'm making, in drawing attention
>
> > Cf. THE CHALLENGER LAUNCH DECISION, Univ of Chicago 1999, Diane
> > Vaughan. It's a study of the 1986 explosion of the Space Shuttle.
> > Vaughan had to develop a theory of "normalized deviance" because
> > quantitative sociologists tend to accept statistically predominant
> > behavior as non-deviant within a community, but it was obvious that as
> > a result of Reagan-era demands on NASA to "prove" that "America was
> > still great", engineers abandoned nondeviant practice from immediately
> > outside NASA, and normalized bad practice, including being proactively
> > skeptical of knowledge claims; engineers "knew that they didn't know"
> > how alloys on O-rings around fuel tanks would perform in unusually
> > (for Florida) low temperatures, and this absence was used (deviantly
> > with respect even to former NASA standards applied to Apollo) to
> > justify a disastrously aggressive launch schedule.
>
> Huh. I think I was under the impression that the Challenger launch
> disaster had been caused by management acting against the advice of
> technical employees. Your description makes it sound as though the
> engineers were at fault.
The engineers were, but insofar as they, with the encouragement of
managers, "acted like managers and not engineers". The older
tradition, as documented by Diane Vaughan, was "pushback", in which an
engineer not also a manager could veto a launch at NASA or a software
release at IBM up to about 1980 based on technical criteria alone. By
the 1980s, and especially in software, many workers who bragged of
being "engineers" were quick to assent to bad decisions because of
Reagan-era propaganda to the effect that only "academics" and trouble-
makers would insist on "niceties" and "frills".
In fact, the Columbia disaster of 2003 was caused by the same
situation. Chunks of foam insulation were coming off Columbia in
launches, and striking the wings forcefully. However, inspection
showed little damage. The situation (which was recognized by the post-
crash official investigation as being grave) was transformed into a
"known issue" and was administratively forgotten even though, as the
investigation pointed out, the Columbia was operating outside of its
intended performance; it had not been designed to discard pieces of
itself any more than a driver is supposed to drive around with a
busted taillight or exhaust pipe making sparks on the road.
But in the case of Columbia, the engineers were silenced by the
absence of pushback and the administrators were focused on making the
schedule. The result was the slaughter of the crew including the first
astronaut from India, a woman named Kalpana Chawla.
http://caib.nasa.gov/news/report/volume1/default.html
What troubles me is that would be "software engineers" right here
treat errors as "known issues" in exactly the same way; for example
Seebach as regards %s, broken switch() and off by one. Instead of
fixing their errors they explain that they are being "fast and
dirty" (without explaining why we would be interested in their F & D
code), that it's not "rilly" an error, etc., whilst engaging in
deliberate campaigns of personal and professional destruction over the
putative errors of others.
Enablers here silence meaningful dissents in the case of Navia and
myself by politely dismissing or deliberately failing to understand
their concerns using patronizing language. This also seems to have
occured at NASA, where female managers were selected because of their
"people" (enabling) and codependent skills. It appears that these
enablers set "attack dog" engineers on engineers pointing out the
truth, which was that the insulation shedding was a serious problem as
were the O-rings.
A typical pattern is a pseudo-compenatory overstress on popular issues
*du jour* such as int v. void main() in hopes of diverting attention
away from "the elephant in the living room". This conduct requires
codependent enablers in the same way the family of the alcoholic often
manages a great deal of rigidity about minor rules while Dad is passed
out on the couch.
Here, you're ignoring and codependently enabling the fact that Seebach
doesn't moderate clcm competently, refuses to engage, and conducts
vicious personal campaigns against others based on "competence" while
being himself incompetent in C.
This is what Vaughan calls "normalized deviance". Just as "the
elephant in the living room", the deviant behavior of the alcoholic,
becomes normalized, here, incompetence and the politics of personal
destruction are so normed as to make the normal "trolling".
spinoza1111
> blm...@myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> writes:
> >spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> [...]
> > > Also, I checked
> > > his Mom's blog...which is public, to find her protesting the
> > > affirmative expansion of science classes to minorities, which
> > > indicates a sort of social background of mistrust and reluctance to
> > > engage.
>
> > Can you provide a specific reference to one such post? The link
> > appears to be broken. Googling, I found this
>
> [URL deleted]
>
> > which I think is the right person, but in a quick skim of the first
> > few entries I don't find anything like what you describe.
>
> [...]
>
> Ok, so Nilges wrote about something that Seebs's mother is
> alleged to have posted on her blog. Fine, we've come to expect that
> kind of crap from him.
Excuse me, I posted the link. I did not "allege" the posting. And I'm
sure she knows that her blog is readable by anyone.
>
> Why the *&%^ are you discussing it with him? In public? Here in
> comp.lang.c? Even if what Nilges is true, what possible relevance
> could it have to the C language, to Schildt, or to anything that
> anyone here could possible care about? Must you reply in public to
> every sentence he writes?
Because so many of Seebach's claims have no technical basis, that's
why, and to account for them, and to demonstrate this, the
"constructive" way (in the sense of a "constructivist" argument in
mathematics) is to psychoanalyze him, and to show that even as his Mom
defends AP science against cutbacks, Seebach took the "advanced
placement" philosophy, a middle class retreat from engagement which is
anti-intellectual and anti-professorial, and generalized it.
>
> I believe that the e-mail address under which Nilges posts is valid.
> If you really want to discuss Seebs's mother's blog with him, feel
> free to do so by e-mail. Or perhaps you could find another newsgroup
> or forum where it's topical. Create an alt.* group for the purpose if
> you like.
>
> Please please *please* stop feeding the troll.
I am not a troll. There are three common senses.
1. The old sense used on LANs was a known person who in bad faith
posts things to "get a rise" out of people.
2. Jaron Lanier (writing in "You Are Not a Gadget", 2010) defines a
"troll" as an anonymous hostile poster such as "Colonel Harlan
Sanders" here who shits on people.
3. Your sense is beneath contempt. It is Nordic racist and it means
"someone I do not like".
I have been responsible for large and on-topic threads with a lot of C
code in them, for example as regards replace(). Your participation in
these threads has been derisory; for example, you approved a one line
strlen by Seebach which was off by one in an obvious way.
I suggest you stop these "troll" posts for they codependently
encourage and enable the Lanier trolls.
spinoza1111
> On 2010-04-15, Keith Thompson <ks...@mib.org> wrote:
>
> > Ok, so Nilges wrote about something that Seebs's mother is
> > alleged to have posted on her blog. Fine, we've come to expect that
> > kind of crap from him.
>
> Actually, I have to dispute this. I was absolutely shocked that
> he actually managed to successfully identify my mom. (To save him
> trouble, the UFO nut "Linda Seebach" is a different person.)
I don't know what you are talking about. You link to your mother's
blog in your blog.
>
> > Why the *&%^ are you discussing it with him? In public? Here in
> > comp.lang.c? Even if what Nilges is true, what possible relevance
> > could it have to the C language, to Schildt, or to anything that
> > anyone here could possible care about? Must you reply in public to
> > every sentence he writes?
>
> I think it's like watching a train wreck. It's utterly fascinating
> trying to find some kind of connection between the various things
> he says. I just think it's a waste of bandwidth. He should come
> over to one of the vB boards where it won't bother other people and
> he can post nonsense to his heart's content.
>
> Of course, he won't do that if the whole thing is just an attempt
> to destroy comp.lang.c over some imagined slight.
>
> -s
> --
spinoza1111
wrote:
> In article <82or0tFeb...@mid.individual.net>,blm...@myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
>
> ...
>
> >Can you provide a specific reference to one such post? The link
> >appears to be broken. Googling, I found this
>
> >http://www.lindaseebach.net/wordpress/
>
> >which I think is the right person, but in a quick skim of the first
> >few entries I don't find anything like what you describe.
>
> You have to dig a bit. For some reason, Ms. Seebs put only a teaser on
> her page - you have to go to "bigjournalism.com" and then put "seebach"
> in the "Search" box. Then the article comes up.
No, you just go to Seebie's blog (http://www.seebs.net/log/).
You click "the eclectic Linda". The Jan 29 2010 post "Berkeley Science
Labs" links to Mrs. Seebachs's article at
http://bigjournalism.com/lseebach/2010/01/27/at-berkeley-high-struggling-to-find-the-balance-between-excellence-and-equity/#idc-container.
>
> I'm not sure it says exactly what Nilges says it does, but it is
> abundantly clear which side of the political spectrum the seebs are on -
> just from the general tone (read: teabagger) of the site and the text in
> her article.
Based on the article, Mrs Seebach isn't a teabagger. But she does feel
that AP science shouldn't be cut back, and Advanced Placement is
primarily used by white and middle class students to avoid survey
classes. I believe that they do so out of a typically "white" desire
not to engage the Other, be it a professor who could give them a new
view or a minority. But I would not make this interpretation in the
absence of confirmation, in the form of Seebach's corporate anti-
intellectualism, his confusion of shibboleth and saw with science, and
his normalized deviance.
spinoza1111
> In article
> <c474d1c9-77dd-4d0d-a1c0-74996f541...@x12g2000yqx.googlegroups.com>,
>
> spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
> > The fact is that C is not portable. Because it is possible to make
> > things subtly dependent on hardware, any port needs a great deal of
> > diligence. The fact that this diligence isn't manifest doesn't change
> > this.
>
> > If you want to write portable code, it is folly to int main(). Use
> > Java or C Sharp.
>
> not mean that others can't. At SLAC in the mid-late 80s, we had a
> threads kernel written in C (that supported events, semaphores, timers
> [1], and thread priorities) that it was no great effort to port to DEC's
> VAX/VMS and to IBM's VM/CMS. That's substantially different OSes,
> different endiannesses [2], and different character sets. It's called
> being professional, Spinny. You should try it sometime instead of just
> being a mouth.
>
> [1] Some of this work exposed bugs in IBM's timer services that (having
> access to the assembler source code) we fixed.
>
> [2] which affected how structs were packed, as I recall, so that
> required some care.
[1] and [2] show, in fact, that C code is NOT PORTABLE. You're
bragging about doing your job, but portability means "run anywhere
without change or the need for research to disprove portability".
>
> --
> Tim
>
> "That excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed,
> nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted" -- Bill of Rights 1689
Kenny McCormack
spinoza1111 <spino...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>On Apr 16, 3:55 am, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
>> On 2010-04-15, Keith Thompson <ks...@mib.org> wrote:
>>
>> > Ok, so Nilges wrote about something that Seebs's mother is
>> > alleged to have posted on her blog. Fine, we've come to expect that
>> > kind of crap from him.
>>
>> Actually, I have to dispute this. I was absolutely shocked that
>> he actually managed to successfully identify my mom. (To save him
>> trouble, the UFO nut "Linda Seebach" is a different person.)
>
>I don't know what you are talking about. You link to your mother's
>blog in your blog.
It is clear by now that Seebs is, like most Republicans nowadays, just
spewing. Putting out words that sound good (i.e., advance their agenda),
with zero concern for whether they are true, valid, or in any way map to
(easily verifiable) reality.
Kenny McCormack
Tim Streater <timst...@waitrose.com> wrote:
...
>Ah, the brown-noser's back.
Guess so. Where ya been?
Richard
> In article <hqfdgt$e7d$3...@news.xmission.com>,
> gaz...@shell.xmission.com (Kenny McCormack) wrote:
>
>> In article <50282471-3258-4570...@s9g2000yqa.googlegroups.com>,
>> spinoza1111 <spino...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> >On Apr 16, 3:55 am, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
>> >> On 2010-04-15, Keith Thompson <ks...@mib.org> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> > Ok, so Nilges wrote about something that Seebs's mother is
>> >> > alleged to have posted on her blog. Fine, we've come to expect that
>> >> > kind of crap from him.
>> >>
>> >> Actually, I have to dispute this. I was absolutely shocked that
>> >> he actually managed to successfully identify my mom. (To save him
>> >> trouble, the UFO nut "Linda Seebach" is a different person.)
>> >
>> >I don't know what you are talking about. You link to your mother's
>> >blog in your blog.
>>
>> It is clear by now that Seebs is, like most Republicans nowadays, just
>> spewing. Putting out words that sound good (i.e., advance their agenda),
>> with zero concern for whether they are true, valid, or in any way map to
>> (easily verifiable) reality.
>
> Ah, the brown-noser's back.
Referring to oneself in the 3rd person is the first sign of being in
need of some self importance reduction surgery.
--
"Avoid hyperbole at all costs, its the most destructive argument on
the planet" - Mark McIntyre in comp.lang.c
Keith Thompson
> In article <hqfdgt$e7d$3...@news.xmission.com>,
> gaz...@shell.xmission.com (Kenny McCormack) wrote:
>
> Ah, the brown-noser's back.
Tim, I'm sure that everyone who cares is already aware that Kenny is
back.
Please don't feed the troll.
Keith Thompson
> spinoza1111 <spino...@yahoo.com> wrote:
[more of the same]
>
> Are you deliberately stupid? Or are you simply out of arguments today
> (like yesterday, and the day before, and the day before *that*, ad
> fucking nauseam).
[snip]
> You've been ground into the dust in the last few months, dimwit, why not
> admit it.
He never will. He's been doing this for years, and his behavior has
been quite consistent. It's borderline insane to think he's going to
change because you poke at him *just one more time*.
When are you going to admit that, Tim, and give up?
Kenny McCormack
Keith Thompson <ks...@mib.org> wrote:
>Tim Streater <timst...@waitrose.com> writes:
>> In article <hqfdgt$e7d$3...@news.xmission.com>,
>> gaz...@shell.xmission.com (Kenny McCormack) wrote:
>[snip]
>>
>> Ah, the brown-noser's back.
>
>Tim, I'm sure that everyone who cares is already aware that Kenny is
>back.
I never left.
spinoza1111
> (like yesterday, and the day before, and the day before *that*, ad
> fucking nauseam).
>
> IBM systems programmers had *fixed these bugs*, the C code in question
> ran fine with no changes required to it.
Portability in fact reduces dependencies even on bugs. Basically, if
the virtual machine is effectively bug-free, bugs lower down do not
effect truly portable code. But C runtime is not a virtual machine and
thus C programs can be affected by bugs in the support software at any
level.
>
> [2] related to the endianess of the two machines, which is obviously
> different.
This also shows that the code wasn't portable, I'm afraid. You need to
learn Java and C Sharp.
>
> Once we'd modified the C slightly to account for this, the *same* source
> was used on *both* architectures - without even any pre-processor work
> required.
If it was modified it wasn't the same.
>
> You've been ground into the dust in the last few months, dimwit, why not
> admit it.
Your savage imagery doesn't frighten me, because I'd whip your ass in
any real fight.
spinoza1111
wrote:
> In article <50282471-3258-4570-a035-3c2e6066d...@s9g2000yqa.googlegroups.com>,
>
> spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >On Apr 16, 3:55 am, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
> >> On 2010-04-15, Keith Thompson <ks...@mib.org> wrote:
>
> >> > Ok, so Nilges wrote about something that Seebs's mother is
> >> > alleged to have posted on her blog. Fine, we've come to expect that
> >> > kind of crap from him.
>
> >> Actually, I have to dispute this. I was absolutely shocked that
> >> he actually managed to successfully identify my mom. (To save him
> >> trouble, the UFO nut "Linda Seebach" is a different person.)
>
> >I don't know what you are talking about. You link to your mother's
> >blog in your blog.
>
> It is clear by now that Seebs is, like most Republicans nowadays, just
> spewing. Putting out words that sound good (i.e., advance their agenda),
> with zero concern for whether they are true, valid, or in any way map to
> (easily verifiable) reality.
He did support Bush in 2000. However, his Mom is probably not a formal
Tea Bag supporter. The problem is that a family of teachers can
encourage their kids to think of themselves superior to the "common
herd" who need to be Singled Out for Advanced Placement, and have
their Learning Disorders accomodated.
Since part of my teaching experience includes tutoring homeless black
kids in New York City, and discovering that one was a mathematical
genius whose in public school classes where math is NO LONGER TAUGHT,
I find Mrs. Seebach to be uniquely without compassion.
Since part of my teaching experience includes teaching programmers in
Fiji, where there are no bookstores in the capital city save one which
sells primary schoolbooks, books on farming, and Hindu scriptures, I
think a dog-eared Schildt would be there treasured by programmers
smart enough to know that they should test all code snippets by using
a debugger to step through the code and watch what happens. They catch
errors, whether in the snippet or in their environment, and they learn
more.
It was clear to me after the Seebagger's off by one strlen that the
guy doesn't have this level of attention to detail.
Richard Heathfield
> In article
> <584b3a08-fb1e-427e...@g30g2000yqc.googlegroups.com>,
> spinoza1111 <spino...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> On Apr 19, 1:26 am, Tim Streater <timstrea...@waitrose.com> wrote:
<snip>
>>> Once we'd modified the C slightly to account for this, the *same* source
>>> was used on *both* architectures - without even any pre-processor work
>>> required.
>> If it was modified it wasn't the same.
>
> Wasn't the same as *what*?
Wasn't the same as something that no longer existed. Duh. :-)
> My, you are being dim today. Read what I
> wrote, this time for comprehension.
He doesn't do comprehension.
--
Richard Heathfield <http://www.cpax.org.uk>
Email: -http://www. +rjh@
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999
Sig line vacant - apply within
Nick Keighley
> On Apr 13, 12:51 am, Tim Streater <timstrea...@waitrose.com> wrote:
> > spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > > The fact is that C is not portable. Because it is possible to make
> > > things subtly dependent on hardware, any port needs a great deal of
> > > diligence. The fact that this diligence isn't manifest doesn't change
> > > this.
with care you can write portable C. For a lot of code hardware
independence isn't particularly difficult.
> > > If you want to write portable code, it is folly to int main(). Use
> > > Java or C Sharp.
which need fairly powerful machines, limit what you can do (this may
be perfectly fine for some applications) and do things that hard real-
time systems can't tolerate (like garbage collection, and JIT
compilation).
> > Just because you don't know how to write portable code in C, [...] does
> > not mean that others can't.
<snip example>
<some problems>
> [which] show, in fact, that C code is NOT PORTABLE. You're
> bragging about doing your job, but portability means "run anywhere
> without change or the need for research to disprove portability".
no that's /a/ definition of portability. It isn't what some people
want. Java code will only run where a JVM is available. Your anti-lock
brakes probably don't run Java. Portability is not a binary attribute.
Portability often covers a range ("will run on Linux" "will run on
Posix" "will run where sizeof(int) > sizeof(char)" "will run on any
C89 platform").
I've seen the same code run on a Z80 and a Sun. It took careful design
and the Sun did more things, but it worked. Most of the debugging was
done on the Sun.
Not all the world's the desktop. And this "other world" is where a lot
of C programming goes on.
Ian Collins
> On 18 Apr, 17:49, spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>>> If you want to write portable code, it is folly to int main(). Use
>>>> Java or C Sharp.
>
> which need fairly powerful machines, limit what you can do (this may
> be perfectly fine for some applications) and do things that hard real-
> time systems can't tolerate (like garbage collection, and JIT
> compilation).
You overlooked the obvious: C Sharp isn't portable!
--
Ian Collins
Nick Keighley
shrug. It's the same thing its portable to wherever its virtual
machine is available.
Most of what I said about java applies to C hash.
Java is the world's least portable language as it only runs on one
platform.
:-)
spinoza1111
> On 04/19/10 09:26 PM, Nick Keighley wrote:
>
>
> >>>> If you want to write portable code, it is folly to int main(). Use
> >>>> Java or C Sharp.
>
> > which need fairly powerful machines, limit what you can do (this may
> > be perfectly fine for some applications) and do things that hard real-
> > time systems can't tolerate (like garbage collection, and JIT
> > compilation).
>
> You overlooked the obvious: C Sharp isn't portable!
It is. Check out mono. It has no dependencies on Windows.
>
> --
> Ian Collins
spinoza1111
wrote:
> On 18 Apr, 17:49,spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:> On Apr 13, 12:51 am, Tim Streater <timstrea...@waitrose.com> wrote:
>
> -a1c0-74996f541...@x12g2000yqx.googlegroups.com>,
>
> > > spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > > > The fact is that C is not portable. Because it is possible to make
> > > > things subtly dependent on hardware, any port needs a great deal of
> > > > diligence. The fact that this diligence isn't manifest doesn't change
> > > > this.
>
> with care you can write portable C. For a lot of code hardware
> independence isn't particularly difficult.
The developers of your code used care, right? But they failed to
anticipate either that IBM software handles timing differently or
buggily. This means that the software was overdependent (codependent
if you like) on an excessive number of facts and to this extent not
portable.
>
> > > > If you want to write portable code, it is folly to int main(). Use
> > > > Java or C Sharp.
>
> which need fairly powerful machines, limit what you can do (this may
> be perfectly fine for some applications) and do things that hard real-
> time systems can't tolerate (like garbage collection, and JIT
> compilation).
The pretense is that "we're always doin', or should be doin', hard low
level down and dirty 'masculine' systems" ... even when on
investigation one finds that the hard guy in fact is doing girlieman
code (such as replacing %s and fuck all else by a directory). This
leads to vanity non-separation of concerns to maintain the self-image.
For example, I'd have to ask whether the dependency in the code on
endianness was a necessity or vanity.
>
> > > Just because you don't know how to write portable code in C, [...] does
> > > not mean that others can't.
>
> <snip example>
>
> <some problems>
>
> > [which] show, in fact, that C code is NOT PORTABLE. You're
> > bragging about doing your job, but portability means "run anywhere
> > without change or the need for research to disprove portability".
>
> no that's /a/ definition of portability. It isn't what some people
> want. Java code will only run where a JVM is available. Your anti-lock
Love these examples. Buncha coders workin' in a bank speculating about
their anti-lock brakes.
Nick Keighley
On 19 Apr, 15:06, spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Apr 19, 5:26 pm, Nick Keighley <nick_keighley_nos...@hotmail.com>
> wrote:
> > On 18 Apr, 17:49,spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:>
> > On Apr 13, 12:51 am, Tim Streater <timstrea...@waitrose.com> wrote:
> > -a1c0-74996f541...@x12g2000yqx.googlegroups.com>,
> > > > spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > > > > The fact is that C is not portable. Because it is possible to make
> > > > > things subtly dependent on hardware, any port needs a great deal of
> > > > > diligence. The fact that this diligence isn't manifest doesn't change
> > > > > this.
>
> > with care you can write portable C. For a lot of code hardware
> > independence isn't particularly difficult.
>
> The developers of your code used care, right? But they failed to
> anticipate either that IBM software handles timing differently or
> buggily.
you are confusing me with someone else. I have never written code for
an IBM machine (apart from a PC). It wasn't me what had a problem with
timers.
I didn't say all code was independent of the hardware. I said a lot
was.
> This means that the software was overdependent (codependent
> if you like) on an excessive number of facts and to this extent not
> portable.
>
> > > > > If you want to write portable code, it is folly to int main(). Use
> > > > > Java or C Sharp.
>
> > which need fairly powerful machines, limit what you can do (this may
> > be perfectly fine for some applications) and do things that hard real-
> > time systems can't tolerate (like garbage collection, and JIT
> > compilation).
>
> The pretense is that "we're always doin', or should be doin', hard low
> level down and dirty [systems]"
no, I was not pretending that. I was maintaining that some code is
like that. And that Java is unsuitable for such applications, and
hence that Java is not universally portable. C can achieve a different
kind of "portable" from Java. Note I'm not claiming Java isn't
portable I'm saying it cover a different spectrum of possibilities.
<snip>
a brief moment of clarity:
> I'd have to ask whether the dependency in the code on
> endianness was a necessity or vanity.
it's usually just an accident. People hack the code around until it
works on the platform de jour. Then when it gets ported Bad Things
Happen. It doesn't have to be that way though.
<snip>
> > > [which] show, in fact, that C code is NOT PORTABLE. You're
> > > bragging about doing your job, but portability means "run anywhere
> > > without change or the need for research to disprove portability".
>
> > no that's /a/ definition of portability. It isn't what some people
> > want. Java code will only run where a JVM is available. Your anti-lock
>
> Love these examples. Buncha coders workin' in a bank speculating about
> their anti-lock brakes.
for the record (though I doubt you care) I've never worked in a bank.
OTH I've never programmed anti-lock brakes either. I *have* programmed
some mushy (thixotropic?) real time systems. That is not really hard
but still had to get things done in milli-seconds. On hardware that
wouldn't be fit to process the key strokes on my current computer.
You are (probably deliberatly) missing the points of the examples I
give.
> > brakes probably don't run Java. Portability is not a binary attribute.
> > Portability often covers a range ("will run on Linux" "will run on
> > Posix" "will run where sizeof(int) > sizeof(char)" "will run on any
> > C89 platform").
>
> > I've seen the same code run on a Z80 and a Sun. It took careful design
> > and the Sun did more things, but it worked. Most of the debugging was
> > done on the Sun.
>
> > Not all the world's the desktop. And this "other world" is where a lot
> > of C programming goes on.
There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of
in your philosophy.