C: The Complete Meta-Nonsense
spinoza1111
document "C: The Complete Nonsense", which is as far as I can tell the
sole source of the false rumors about Herb Schildt's books, a source
amplified by the confusion of a citation with that of a citation of a
citation.
I shall start the ball rolling: Peter, what goes around, comes around.
"Page 284
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. "
Herb here relies on the relative prevelance of case insensitivity in
Windows systems and before them, in IBM systems. It has long been a
sort of fashion statement in unix to be case sensitive. There are
arguments pro and con both ways, but by omitting this information
Peter is able to make Yet Another unwarranted implication about
Seebach's competence.
It is tribalism to confuse shibboleths such as these with knowledge,
where a "shibboleth" is used to recognized tribe members. It is a
barbarism.
Seebach implies that the practice is indeed standard but cites this to
pad his antiresume re Schildt.
Also, "but nor" is completely illiterate.
Seebs
> This thread shall be the center for compaints about Peter Seebach's
> document "C: The Complete Nonsense",
Wonderful!
> which is as far as I can tell the
> sole source of the false rumors about Herb Schildt's books,
There are a number of problems with this clause.
The first is the implicit assertion that there are false rumors about
Schildt's books, an assertion not yet demonstrated to be true. But let
us handwave that away and assume that the phrase "false rumors" is
a poor choice of words for "wholly accurate beliefs" or something similar.
Then it remains only to ask: What about the multiple other sources which
people have referred you to? Why is it that, shortly after some anonymous
user started harassing the Wikipedia staff using various proxies to circumvent
a justified ban, and they finally told him that my page on the topic was
sufficient to qualify as a citable source, suddenly you're obsessed with
that PARTICULAR page rather than any of the other sources?
Hmm. Questions for the ages.
> a source
> amplified by the confusion of a citation with that of a citation of a
> citation.
Not noticably.
> I shall start the ball rolling: Peter, what goes around, comes around.
Round round round round I get around?
> "Page 284
> 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. "
> Herb here relies on the relative prevelance of case insensitivity in
> Windows systems and before them, in IBM systems. It has long been a
> sort of fashion statement in unix to be case sensitive. There are
> arguments pro and con both ways, but by omitting this information
> Peter is able to make Yet Another unwarranted implication about
> Seebach's competence.
Lots of noise, but you miss the key point: If you use all-caps names
for headers, they're likely to not work on some fairly common systems.
Your focus has, time and again, come back to a vague notion that the
goal is to teach, not to be correct. But how does it help the reader
if you consistently use capital letters where they aren't particularly
guaranteed to work?
I did not claim that I had presented every last possible shred of relevant
data -- I merely pointed out that the names Schildt shows may not work.
If you had some kind of argument for why writing the names in all caps
would be essential to effective teaching, you could argue the case, but
merely pointing out that it's possible that they work somewhere is not
so persuasive.
> Seebach implies that the practice is indeed standard but cites this to
> pad his antiresume re Schildt.
> Also, "but nor" is completely illiterate.
Ahh, yes. Complete illiteracy, once thought to be the realm of being
unable to distinguish letters from random markings, is now revealed to
be the use of a conjunction in conjunction with another conjunction,
when only the second of the pair is needed. Absolutely, this is
the sort of thing up with which we must not put.
But I can see that you're not going to be happy until I've gone back to
that document, not as a kid fresh out of college with no particular
credentials, but as a veteran of a decade or so of standards work with
hundreds of thousands of my own words published, to go clean the page
up and make it a much stronger and more persuasive document. Seems silly
given that the book's ten years old, but I have to listen to my fans.
-s
--
Copyright 2009, 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!
spinoza1111
> On 2009-11-01,spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > This thread shall be the center for compaints about Peter Seebach's
> > document "C: The Complete Nonsense",
>
> Wonderful!
>
> > which is as far as I can tell the
> > sole source of the false rumors about Herb Schildt's books,
>
> There are a number of problems with this clause.
>
> The first is the implicit assertion that there are false rumors about
> Schildt's books, an assertion not yet demonstrated to be true. But let
> us handwave that away and assume that the phrase "false rumors" is
> a poor choice of words for "wholly accurate beliefs" or something similar.
>
> Then it remains only to ask: What about the multiple other sources which
> people have referred you to? Why is it that, shortly after some anonymous
> user started harassing the Wikipedia staff using various proxies to circumvent
> a justified ban
It wasn't a justified ban. I was welcome as a contributor in
2005..2006 and a number of pages including Kant and Adorno retain a
lot of my material. Then, in 2006, a poster to Kant named
amerindianarts, who was unqualified to write about philosophy, was
offended by one of my private responses and started issuing all sorts
of bans...despite the fact that a professor of philosophy who was at
the time moderating the Kant page wanted me to contribute. The issue
snowballed to the point where I was supposed to undergo some sort of
Star Chamber proceeding where I would have to admit the wisdom of
wikipedia and the new crop of convenience store clerks who'd appointed
themselves editors, and as you know I don't eat shit.
>, and they finally told him that my page on the topic was
> sufficient to qualify as a citable source, suddenly you're obsessed with
> that PARTICULAR page rather than any of the other sources?
Your page isn't citable according to standards of citeability and
common decency, since it itself is based on no source except your own
fantasies and prejudices. You could have at least have had it peer
reviewed and you did not. It is not an adequate source merely because
a bunch of half-literate convenience store clerks at Wikipedia say it
is.
>
> Hmm. Questions for the ages.
>
> > a source
> > amplified by the confusion of a citation with that of a citation of a
> > citation.
>
> Not noticably.
>
> > I shall start the ball rolling: Peter, what goes around, comes around.
>
> Round round round round I get around?
>
> > "Page 284
> > 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. "
> > Herb here relies on the relative prevelance of case insensitivity in
> > Windows systems and before them, in IBM systems. It has long been a
> > sort of fashion statement in unix to be case sensitive. There are
> > arguments pro and con both ways, but by omitting this information
> > Peter is able to make Yet Another unwarranted implication about
> > Seebach's competence.
>
> Lots of noise, but you miss the key point: If you use all-caps names
> for headers, they're likely to not work on some fairly common systems.
This is arguably a bug of those systems, but had been Herb I would
have mentioned this issue.
>
> Your focus has, time and again, come back to a vague notion that the
> goal is to teach, not to be correct. But how does it help the reader
> if you consistently use capital letters where they aren't particularly
> guaranteed to work?
The computer science or programming teacher is not, whatever his
students might claim, required to teach sub-academic mechanics. The
student is in part responsible for figuring out lab assignments.
>
> I did not claim that I had presented every last possible shred of relevant
> data -- I merely pointed out that the names Schildt shows may not work.
Your point had not to do with substance but with mechanics. In my own
C classes I did more presentation on IBM v unix differences than did
Herb because I knew more than he and/or made a choice he did not. His
omission of your hobby-horse justified you pointing this out on Amazon
or in a review in a computer journal. It did not justify what you did.
>
> If you had some kind of argument for why writing the names in all caps
> would be essential to effective teaching, you could argue the case, but
> merely pointing out that it's possible that they work somewhere is not
> so persuasive.
I have known about this problem for 20 years since I worked from 1981
to 1986 at Bell Northern Research Mountain View, which had both a DEC
20 and an IBM mainframe. At BNR I noticed that the less competent DEC
specialists made big deals about this difference whereas the best
people (Bob Gaskins, who invented Power Point, and Whitfield Diffie,
the cryptography expert) did not. Bob worked closely with my boss,
who'd come from IBM and Whitfield and I had a cordial relationship.
The DEC people who made a big "deal" out of the innate superiority of
case sensitivity were incompetent for the most part.
>
> > Seebach implies that the practice is indeed standard but cites this to
> > pad his antiresume re Schildt.
> > Also, "but nor" is completely illiterate.
>
> Ahh, yes. Complete illiteracy, once thought to be the realm of being
> unable to distinguish letters from random markings, is now revealed to
> be the use of a conjunction in conjunction with another conjunction,
> when only the second of the pair is needed. Absolutely, this is
> the sort of thing up with which we must not put.
OK, point taken. We must not generalize from too small a data set.
Therefore I look forward to your withdrawing the Vicious Little
Tirade.
In pointing these errors out, I hope to teach you perspective and the
reality of the Homeric nod, although I, and as I am sure Herb would
admit, he, are closer to Homer Simpson than the poet.
>
> But I can see that you're not going to be happy until I've gone back to
> that document, not as a kid fresh out of college with no particular
> credentials, but as a veteran of a decade or so of standards work with
> hundreds of thousands of my own words published, to go clean the page
> up and make it a much stronger and more persuasive document. Seems silly
> given that the book's ten years old, but I have to listen to my fans.
No, you are not qualified to publish documents of this nature. Please
replace it by an apology and get on with your life.
>
> -s
> --
> Copyright 2009, 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!
Seebs
> It wasn't a justified ban.
I don't think I buy it. You have a mysterious tendency to rant about
things without understanding them, pick fights, and end up becoming
unpopular.
> wikipedia and the new crop of convenience store clerks who'd appointed
> themselves editors, and as you know I don't eat shit.
Just spew it.
> Your page isn't citable according to standards of citeability and
> common decency, since it itself is based on no source except your own
> fantasies and prejudices.
The opinions of a qualified expert in the field are sufficient to qualify
something as justifying a claim.
> You could have at least have had it peer
> reviewed and you did not. It is not an adequate source merely because
> a bunch of half-literate convenience store clerks at Wikipedia say it
> is.
That may well be.
But it sure is suspcious that, now that they've said it is, you're suddenly
hugely obsessed with this particular page, despite having had several other
sources for similar opinions and observations presented to you.
>> Lots of noise, but you miss the key point: �If you use all-caps names
>> for headers, they're likely to not work on some fairly common systems.
> This is arguably a bug of those systems,
Or a bug of systems where it's not the case. Just about anything can
be argued.
> but had been Herb I would have mentioned this issue.
Which would be a lot of hassle to go to when there is simply no need to
ever write the names in anything but the canonical form. No problem, no
hassle, everything works.
> The computer science or programming teacher is not, whatever his
> students might claim, required to teach sub-academic mechanics. The
> student is in part responsible for figuring out lab assignments.
That's a bullshit excuse. The job of a writer is to cover the material
clearly and correctly. Especially, I might add, in a book claiming to
be "The Complete Reference".
> Your point had not to do with substance but with mechanics.
It turns out that mechanics are part of the substance of using computers
effectively.
> His
> omission of your hobby-horse justified you pointing this out on Amazon
> or in a review in a computer journal. It did not justify what you did.
Because putting something up on your personal web page is WAY more serious
than publishing a review in a computer journal, right?
> OK, point taken. We must not generalize from too small a data set.
:)
> Therefore I look forward to your withdrawing the Vicious Little
> Tirade.
Ahh, but it's not generalized from too small a data set; it's cherry-picked
from a much larger data set. That's different.
> In pointing these errors out, I hope to teach you perspective
You'd have to have some.
> No, you are not qualified to publish documents of this nature.
Actually, I sort of am.
> Please replace it by an apology
I refer you to the Defendant's response in Arkell v. Pressdram.
> and get on with your life.
For reading Usenet, I normally use an irony meter that's certified to
be able to survive the EMP from a 50 megaton bomb, but you just slagged
it anyway.
-s
--
Richard Heathfield
<20c15de3-50de-4b44...@r24g2000prf.googlegroups.com>,
spinoza1111 wrote:
> On Nov 1, 7:16 pm, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
<snip>
>> Then it remains only to ask: What about the multiple other sources
>> which people have referred you to? Why is it that, shortly after
>> some anonymous user started harassing the Wikipedia staff using
>> various proxies to circumvent a justified ban
>
> It wasn't a justified ban.
Er, yes it was.
> I was welcome as a contributor in 2005..2006
Well, why wouldn't you be? After all, it takes time to get to know
you, and you were in any case contributing in soft subjects, where
facts aren't as important.
<complete nonsense snipped>
--
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
Colonel Harlan Sanders
<spino...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>It wasn't a justified ban. I was welcome as a contributor in
>2005..2006 and a number of pages including Kant and Adorno retain a
>lot of my material. Then, in 2006, a poster to Kant named
>amerindianarts, who was unqualified to write about philosophy, was
>offended by one of my private responses and started issuing all sorts
>of bans...despite the fact that a professor of philosophy who was at
>the time moderating the Kant page wanted me to contribute. The issue
>snowballed to the point where I was supposed to undergo some sort of
>Star Chamber proceeding where I would have to admit the wisdom of
>wikipedia and the new crop of convenience store clerks who'd appointed
>themselves editors, and as you know I don't eat shit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=block&page=User:Spinoza1111
>12:12, 25 October 2006 Shell Kinney (talk | contribs) blocked Spinoza1111 (talk | contribs) with an expiry time of indefinite ?(user claims to have left Wikipedia but continues to harass and attack other users via talk pages)
>04:36, 20 October 2006 Luna Santin (talk | contribs) blocked Spinoza1111 (talk | contribs) with an expiry time of 48 hours ?(Continued personal attacks)
>04:36, 20 October 2006 Luna Santin (talk | contribs) unblocked "Spinoza1111 (talk | contribs)" ? (unblock to change duration)
>05:29, 19 October 2006 Luna Santin (talk | contribs) blocked Spinoza1111 (talk | contribs) with an expiry time of 24 hours ?(Personal attacks)
>08:54, 6 September 2006 Andrew Norman (talk | contribs) blocked Spinoza1111 (talk | contribs) with an expiry time of 1 week ?(Personal attacks)
Pages and pages of your own words linked there condemning you.
You insisted on inserting your opinions into various articles, simply
asserting they are facts. When asked to support these, you just do as
you do here, shouting down any conflicting facts and call the
questioner an idiot.
Wikipedia has evolved procedures for dealing with assholes like you,
so eventually you were banned, temporarily, at which point you
redoubled your abuse using anonymous IPs, then finally the ban was
made permanent.
Usenet is where you always return to, since more structured
communities all eventually spit you out.
But it's obvious that the real reason you act like this is you enjoy
the conflict. You don't have any friends (except for John Nash, who
you last saw 30 years ago), but you can always come here and get a
rise out of Heathfield, or more recently Seebach. Though of course
either or both of them may be just stringing you along for their own
amusement. (Seebach for instance suckered you by feeding you the
"autistic" line, which you now regurgitate at every opportunity.)
One thing is sure, the only effect your crusade is having on Schildt's
reputation is to highlight his failings. But that's secondary to the
real object of all these 500 post threads; to make you the center of
attention.
spinoza1111
> On 2009-11-02,spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > It wasn't a justified ban.
>
> I don't think I buy it. You have a mysterious tendency to rant about
> things without understanding them, pick fights, and end up becoming
...or understanding them at greater depth, perhaps. But yes, I like
fighting.
> unpopular.
>
> > wikipedia and the new crop of convenience store clerks who'd appointed
> > themselves editors, and as you know I don't eat shit.
>
> Just spew it.
>
> > Your page isn't citable according to standards of citeability and
> > common decency, since it itself is based on no source except your own
> > fantasies and prejudices.
>
> The opinions of a qualified expert in the field are sufficient to qualify
> something as justifying a claim.
Who is the qualified expert at "C: The Complete Nonsense?" You admit
you were a kid when you wrote it.
>
> > You could have at least have had it peer
> > reviewed and you did not. It is not an adequate source merely because
> > a bunch of half-literate convenience store clerks at Wikipedia say it
> > is.
>
> That may well be.
>
> But it sure is suspcious that, now that they've said it is, you're suddenly
> hugely obsessed with this particular page, despite having had several other
> sources for similar opinions and observations presented to you.
Excuse me, where were those source presented? Give yourself some
credit. "C: the Complete Nonsense" is the single stop source for anti-
Schildt bullshit, and I know of no independent source of criticism of
Schildt.
>
> >> Lots of noise, but you miss the key point: If you use all-caps names
> >> for headers, they're likely to not work on some fairly common systems.
> > This is arguably a bug of those systems,
>
> Or a bug of systems where it's not the case. Just about anything can
> be argued.
>
> > but had been Herb I would have mentioned this issue.
>
> Which would be a lot of hassle to go to when there is simply no need to
> ever write the names in anything but the canonical form. No problem, no
> hassle, everything works.
>
> > The computer science or programming teacher is not, whatever his
> > students might claim, required to teach sub-academic mechanics. The
> > student is in part responsible for figuring out lab assignments.
>
> That's a bullshit excuse. The job of a writer is to cover the material
> clearly and correctly. Especially, I might add, in a book claiming to
> be "The Complete Reference".
>
> > Your point had not to do with substance but with mechanics.
>
> It turns out that mechanics are part of the substance of using computers
> effectively.
That's untrue. The mechanics can be the work of low-level
functionaries.
>
> > His
> > omission of your hobby-horse justified you pointing this out on Amazon
> > or in a review in a computer journal. It did not justify what you did.
>
> Because putting something up on your personal web page is WAY more serious
> than publishing a review in a computer journal, right?
Wrong. You had no independent reviewer as did I in my published
articles in .Net Programmer's Journal and "Build Your Own .Net
Language and Compiler, nor as Herb had at McGraw-Hill. A reasonably
competent editor would have rejected your copy: that's why McGraw Hill
shitcanned it. It was a disorganized mass of trivia and opinion
masquerading as fact.
You pussies pick your fights carefully and still lose. I note you
don't comment on the C version of the infix2Polish grammar-based
conversion, because when you can't make cheap shots you don't fire,
yet I want your opinion because you're good coders all the same.
>
> > OK, point taken. We must not generalize from too small a data set.
>
> :)
>
> > Therefore I look forward to your withdrawing the Vicious Little
> > Tirade.
>
> Ahh, but it's not generalized from too small a data set; it's cherry-picked
> from a much larger data set. That's different.
Where is the big data set? I've asked this repeatedly.
>
> > In pointing these errors out, I hope to teach you perspective
>
> You'd have to have some.
>
> > No, you are not qualified to publish documents of this nature.
>
> Actually, I sort of am.
No, you're sort of not.
>
> > Please replace it by an apology
>
> I refer you to the Defendant's response in Arkell v. Pressdram.
>
> > and get on with your life.
>
> For reading Usenet, I normally use an irony meter that's certified to
> be able to survive the EMP from a 50 megaton bomb, but you just slagged
> it anyway.
>
> -s
> --
spinoza1111
> On Sun, 1 Nov 2009 18:21:07 -0800 (PST),spinoza1111
>
> >It wasn't a justified ban. I was welcome as a contributor in
> >2005..2006 and a number of pages including Kant and Adorno retain a
> >lot of my material. Then, in 2006, a poster to Kant named
> >amerindianarts, who was unqualified to write about philosophy, was
> >offended by one of my private responses and started issuing all sorts
> >of bans...despite the fact that a professor of philosophy who was at
> >the time moderating the Kant page wanted me to contribute. The issue
> >snowballed to the point where I was supposed to undergo some sort of
> >Star Chamber proceeding where I would have to admit the wisdom of
> >wikipedia and the new crop of convenience store clerks who'd appointed
> >themselves editors, and as you know I don't eat shit.
>
>
> >12:12, 25 October 2006 Shell Kinney (talk | contribs) blockedSpinoza1111(talk | contribs) with an expiry time of indefinite ?(user claims to have left Wikipedia but continues to harass and attack other users via talk pages)
> >04:36, 20 October 2006 Luna Santin (talk | contribs) blockedSpinoza1111(talk | contribs) with an expiry time of 48 hours ?(Continued personal attacks)
> >04:36, 20 October 2006 Luna Santin (talk | contribs) unblocked "Spinoza1111(talk | contribs)" ? (unblock to change duration)
> >05:29, 19 October 2006 Luna Santin (talk | contribs) blockedSpinoza1111(talk | contribs) with an expiry time of 24 hours ?(Personal attacks)
> >08:54, 6 September 2006 Andrew Norman (talk | contribs) blockedSpinoza1111(talk | contribs) with an expiry time of 1 week ?(Personal attacks)
>
> Pages and pages of your own words linked there condemning you.
>
> You insisted on inserting your opinions into various articles, simply
> asserting they are facts. When asked to support these, you just do as
> you do here, shouting down any conflicting facts and call the
> questioner an idiot.
>
> Wikipedia has evolved procedures for dealing with assholes like you,
> so eventually you were banned, temporarily, at which point you
> redoubled your abuse using anonymous IPs, then finally the ban was
> made permanent.
>
> Usenet is where you always return to, since more structured
> communities all eventually spit you out.
>
> But it's obvious that the real reason you act like this is you enjoy
> the conflict. You don't have any friends (except for John Nash, who
> you last saw 30 years ago), but you can always come here and get a
> rise out of Heathfield, or more recently Seebach. Though of course
> either or both of them may be just stringing you along for their own
> amusement. (Seebach for instance suckered you by feeding you the
> "autistic" line, which you now regurgitate at every opportunity.)
>
> One thing is sure, the only effect your crusade is having on Schildt's
> reputation is to highlight his failings. But that's secondary to the
> real object of all these 500 post threads; to make you the center of
> attention.
It's not an opinion that to write the history of philosophy one has to
do philosophy. Nor is it an opinion to say that wikipedia has been
taken over by 14 year old Hitler Youth and convenience store clerks.
It's an acknowledged fact. Do your homework: there are any number of
bitter former wikipedians blowing the whistle on the fraud and tax
cheat Jimmy Wales, and I hope to see his hairy ass in jail on tax
charges.
jacob navia
> But it's obvious that the real reason you act like this is you enjoy
> the conflict. You don't have any friends (except for John Nash, who
> you last saw 30 years ago), but you can always come here and get a
> rise out of Heathfield, or more recently Seebach.
There is not a lot of posters here that care about C. Specially
heathfield apparently is the major promoter of endless discussions
about anything where he can write about his prejudices about everything
(assembly, Design patterns, whatever).
For heathfield and Kiki, Spinoza1111 is a welcome partner.
Richard
> cheat Jimmy Wales, and I hope to see his hairy ass in jail on tax
> charges.
Do you hope to be in the same cell too?
--
"Avoid hyperbole at all costs, its the most destructive argument on
the planet" - Mark McIntyre in comp.lang.c
Mark Bluemel
it" (attributed variously).
I'd also suggest what is reportedly a Malagasy proverb "In a fight
with a fool, it's the wise man who quits".
Richard
> This thread shall be the center for compaints about Peter Seebach's
> document "C: The Complete Nonsense", which is as far as I can tell the
> sole source of the false rumors about Herb Schildt's books, a source
> amplified by the confusion of a citation with that of a citation of a
> citation.
>
> I shall start the ball rolling: Peter, what goes around, comes around.
>
> "Page 284
> 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. "
>
> Herb here relies on the relative prevelance of case insensitivity in
> Windows systems and before them, in IBM systems. It has long been a
> sort of fashion statement in unix to be case sensitive. There are
> arguments pro and con both ways, but by omitting this information
> Peter is able to make Yet Another unwarranted implication about
> Seebach's competence.
Herb's competence I assume you mean.
>
> It is tribalism to confuse shibboleths such as these with knowledge,
> where a "shibboleth" is used to recognized tribe members. It is a
> barbarism.
>
> Seebach implies that the practice is indeed standard but cites this to
> pad his antiresume re Schildt.
>
> Also, "but nor" is completely illiterate.
--
spinoza1111
> Colonel Harlan Sanders a écrit :
Jacob, they prefer to stay away from code apart from telling people
their code sucks. I came in here on topic only to find Heathfield et
al. changing the topic to the incompetence of the people who disagreed
with them.
Above all, Heathfield et al. love pointers. Instead of taking the risk
to write code extempore here and discuss it, they prefer pointers to
sources that putatively affirm the incompetence of their enemies, and
dismissing open questions as having been answered. This is to avoid
being wrong, for they so abuse people they think wrong, or who make
trivial mistakes, that they are afraid of the treatment they visit on
others.
They multiply pointers to the failings of Schildt et al. deliberately
with the malign and dishonest intent of deceiving people into
reasoning from large N (where N==the number of times a canard, or a
citation of a canard, or a citation of a citation of a canard, is
repeated) to the largeness of what usually turns out, on
investigation, to be small n, where n==the actual number of data
points.
For example, "C: the Complete Nonsense" lists ONLY 20 separate anti-
Schildt canards, most of which are trivia and all of which were
rejected by technical editors at McGraw Hill as errata. It identifies
this small n set as "currently known" while in a self-contradictory
and dishonest fashion it ALSO implies that "several hundred" are
known! Yet this single document appears to be the sole source for the
anti-Schildt case, since on the Internet a "buzz" is created by
repetition.
I am not, *mon cher Monsieur*, here to do Heathfield et aliter any
favors. I am here to rip them a new asshole and destroy their
dominance of this newsgroup, so that it can be a fair and open forum.
Richard Heathfield
spinoza1111 wrote:
> On Nov 2, 10:39 am, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
>> On 2009-11-02,spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>> > It wasn't a justified ban.
>>
>> I don't think I buy it. You have a mysterious tendency to rant
>> about things without understanding them, pick fights, and end up
>> becoming
>
> ...or understanding them at greater depth, perhaps.
No, there's no perhaps about it - you certainly don't understand C.
<snip>
>> The opinions of a qualified expert in the field are sufficient to
>> qualify something as justifying a claim.
>
> Who is the qualified expert at "C: The Complete Nonsense?" You admit
> you were a kid when you wrote it.
Nevertheless, he was a qualified expert when he wrote it.
>> > You could have at least have had it peer
>> > reviewed and you did not. It is not an adequate source merely
>> > because a bunch of half-literate convenience store clerks at
>> > Wikipedia say it is.
>>
>> That may well be.
>>
>> But it sure is suspcious that, now that they've said it is, you're
>> suddenly hugely obsessed with this particular page, despite having
>> had several other sources for similar opinions and observations
>> presented to you.
>
> Excuse me, where were those source presented? Give yourself some
> credit. "C: the Complete Nonsense" is the single stop source for
> anti- Schildt bullshit,
To be more accurate, it's a critique of "C: The Complete Reference" -
and a good one.
> and I know of no independent source of
> criticism of Schildt.
Here's one: http://www.davros.org/c/schildt.html
<nonsense snipped>
>> > His
>> > omission of your hobby-horse justified you pointing this out on
>> > Amazon or in a review in a computer journal. It did not justify
>> > what you did.
>>
>> Because putting something up on your personal web page is WAY more
>> serious than publishing a review in a computer journal, right?
>
> Wrong.
Your irony meter is broken.
> You had no independent reviewer
So be an independent reviewer. Find a technical error in the analysis.
If you succeed, I suspect that Seebs will be only too happy to amend
the page, since he values accuracy.
> as did I in my published articles in .Net Programmer's Journal and
> "Build Your Own .Net Language and Compiler,
I had independent reviewers for CU. Not all of them knew what they
were talking about, alas. Whilst independent review is undoubtedly a
good thing, I see no reason to place undue reliance thereon.
> nor as Herb had at McGraw-Hill. A reasonably
> competent editor would have rejected your copy:
A reasonably competent editor would have rejected much of Schildt's
code and quite a bit of his text.
<snip>
>> Ahh, but it's not generalized from too small a data set; it's
>> cherry-picked from a much larger data set. That's different.
>
> Where is the big data set? I've asked this repeatedly.
You'll find it in "C: The Complete Reference", by Herbert Schildt.
<snip>
Rich Webb
Or a corollary to Murphy's Law:
"In any situation, the craziest person in the room controls the agenda."
This formulation is attributed to Blue Meme, who continues "Reasonable
people tend to try to accommodate, find common ground and compromise.
Those with limited capacity for reason tend to take harder and more
extreme positions, and take more extreme actions to defend those
positions. And, sadly, the dynamics of such a conflict tend to favor the
crazy."
--
Rich Webb Norfolk, VA
Colonel Harlan Sanders
<spino...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>Nor is it an opinion to say that wikipedia has been
>taken over by 14 year old Hitler Youth and convenience store clerks.
>It's an acknowledged fact.
Like all your "facts", all the vast conspiracies of Nazis directed at
you, acknowledged by you, and you alone. And that you keep repeating
and possibly believing them, indicative of a seriously disturbed mind.
>Do your homework: there are any number of
>bitter former wikipedians blowing the whistle on the fraud and tax
>cheat Jimmy Wales, and I hope to see his hairy ass in jail on tax
>charges.
If you have any information regarding tax fraud, why the hell don't
you inform the IRS, and they will certainly act on it.
Well?
Why don't you?
Take ten minutes, send an email.
You'd be vindicated.
The fact that you do not, will not and cannot shows that you are just
a windbag, for all you macho talk and threats, you never follow
through.
Seebs
> do philosophy.
Yes, it is. And a stupid one at that.
> Nor is it an opinion to say that wikipedia has been
> taken over by 14 year old Hitler Youth and convenience store clerks.
Actually, it is. And again, a stupid one.
> It's an acknowledged fact. Do your homework: there are any number of
> bitter former wikipedians blowing the whistle on the fraud and tax
> cheat Jimmy Wales, and I hope to see his hairy ass in jail on tax
> charges.
This doesn't establish your claim, even if it's true.
-s
--
Gareth Owen
> For heathfield and Kiki, Spinoza1111 is a welcome partner.
Please Jacob, rise above the silly name calling.
I still want to believe you're above that level.
Seebs
No. People who understand things in greater depth can provide justifications
other than bald assertion that intelligent people would agree with them.
> But yes, I like fighting.
Quite obvious. Shame you're no good at it, but at least you're having fun.
> Who is the qualified expert at "C: The Complete Nonsense?" You admit
> you were a kid when you wrote it.
Ahh, but I'm a qualified expert now, and while I think the page is poorly
organized, the substance is sufficient to establish the claim.
> Excuse me, where were those source presented?
Usenet. Repeatedly. In these very threads.
> Give yourself some
> credit. "C: the Complete Nonsense" is the single stop source for anti-
> Schildt bullshit, and I know of no independent source of criticism of
> Schildt.
Your inability to read responses in threads you started is not my problem.
>> It turns out that mechanics are part of the substance of using computers
>> effectively.
> That's untrue. The mechanics can be the work of low-level
> functionaries.
The people who claim this always seem to go bankrupt trying to get anything
to work. It turns out it just ain't so.
>> > His
>> > omission of your hobby-horse justified you pointing this out on Amazon
>> > or in a review in a computer journal. It did not justify what you did.
>> Because putting something up on your personal web page is WAY more serious
>> than publishing a review in a computer journal, right?
> Wrong.
... Uh. Dude. THAT WAS MY POINT. That sentence there? It is an example
of a literary form known as "sarcasm".
Your material (quoted above in >> >) implies that a review in a computer
journal could be justified, but that posting on the internet is MUCH more
serious (in the sense of "taking serious steps" -- a graver or more extreme
measure) and requires a higher standard of justification.
That's stupid. I commented on it.
> You had no independent reviewer as did I in my published
> articles in .Net Programmer's Journal and "Build Your Own .Net
> Language and Compiler, nor as Herb had at McGraw-Hill. A reasonably
> competent editor would have rejected your copy:
No. A mediocre editor would have rejected it. A competent editor would
have sent it back for revision with suggestions as to organization.
> that's why McGraw Hill shitcanned it.
You keep claiming this, but it's already been pointed out that this event
never occurred.
> It was a disorganized mass of trivia and opinion
> masquerading as fact.
Actually, it's a disorganized mass of trivia, opinion, and fact, not
particularly masquerading as anything. But since some of the trivia are
factual, and some of the opinions are essentially universal among competent
C programmers, that's good enough.
> You pussies pick your fights carefully and still lose. I note you
> don't comment on the C version of the infix2Polish grammar-based
> conversion, because when you can't make cheap shots you don't fire,
> yet I want your opinion because you're good coders all the same.
Er, what C version of it? If you posted it within the last 12ish hours
or so, I probably haven't seen it. While I spend far too much time on
Usenet, I do occsionally sleep or even work at my regular job and stuff.
>> Ahh, but it's not generalized from too small a data set; it's cherry-picked
>> from a much larger data set. �That's different.
> Where is the big data set? I've asked this repeatedly.
And you've been told, repeatedly.
To reiterate, since you apparently couldn't figure it out:
The big data set is the pool of errors in the book. No one that I know of
has had the time or patience to actually write these all down, but that
doesn't change anything; data exist whether or not they've been written
down.
>> > No, you are not qualified to publish documents of this nature.
>> Actually, I sort of am.
> No, you're sort of not.
If you have reasoning, you're welcome to present it at any time. No
one is stopping you.
Hmm.
Come to think of it, maybe that's the problem. If I start telling you
that you are *forbidden* to actually argue your points, will that cause you
to do it?
-s
--
Kenny McCormack
Would all those who've referred to Mr. Nilges as "Spinny" please tender
their resignations from the high court now? Thank you.
Seebs
> "Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, but the pig enjoys
> it" (attributed variously).
Certainly, my engagements with Spinny have left a number of pigs wondering
where their vocal instructor went, but consider that if you just accept that
he's clearly not reacting rationally at any particular level, it is actually
really funny. In short, it is amusing and suprisingly likely to yield
an occasional nugget of genuinely interesting discussion of C, albeit usually
that's a discussion between two other people rather than one involving him
directly.
Still, you can sometimes learn more from bad claims than good ones, because
understanding why they're wrong is extremely informative.
Seebs
> Would all those who've referred to Mr. Nilges as "Spinny" please tender
> their resignations from the high court now? Thank you.
'k. I hereby resign from the high court.
That said, the guy's an absolute kook, and I have no intention of ceasing
to refer to him by a funny nickname. Yes, it indicates that I don't take
him seriously. So did my suggestion of a spinoza1111 drinking game, and
the comment about the clown nose.
I'll change my mind when we see his coherent, reasoned, arguments based
on actual evidence of the claim that the C standard exists solely to allow
vendors to fire compiler developers and preserve profits.
Chris McDonald
>Schildt bullshit, and I know of no independent source of criticism of
>Schildt.
I suspect that you've, yet again, chosen your weasel words carefully,
but why don't the criticisms of Schildt's doorstops on Amazon count as
"independent" sources?
If someone buys a book, strongly dislikes it, and expresses their dislike,
have they lost their "independence"?
If so, any such positive review should be discounted, too.
--
Chris.
John Bode
> This thread shall be the center for compaints about Peter Seebach's
> document "C: The Complete Nonsense", which is as far as I can tell the
> sole source of the false rumors about Herb Schildt's books, a source
> amplified by the confusion of a citation with that of a citation of a
> citation.
>
> I shall start the ball rolling: Peter, what goes around, comes around.
>
> "Page 284
> 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. "
>
> Herb here relies on the relative prevelance of case insensitivity in
> Windows systems and before them, in IBM systems.
So? Why not use canonical forms that are guaranteed to work
*everywhere*, regardless of whether the underlying platform is case-
insensitive or not?
This was the thing that frustrated me the most about his book and one
of the reasons why it wound up in the trash; a good chunk of his
examples wouldn't even compile for me since I was working on VAX/VMS,
and the VAX C compiler would inevitably choke on some DOS-ism. Why
limit your audience by writing examples that only work for a subset of
possible platforms? Why not write examples that work on all systems
with conforming compilers? K&R did it. H&S did it. Why couldn't
Herb?
> It has long been a
> sort of fashion statement in unix to be case sensitive. There are
> arguments pro and con both ways, but by omitting this information
> Peter is able to make Yet Another unwarranted implication about
> Seebach's competence.
>
Seebach correctly points out that using all caps may not always work.
One would think that information would be valuable.
> It is tribalism to confuse shibboleths such as these with knowledge,
> where a "shibboleth" is used to recognized tribe members. It is a
> barbarism.
>
Okay, let's talk about *knowledge*. Let's talk about another example
cited by Seebach:
> Page 53
> 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.
This is *not* a trivial mistake. We're not arguing over style, we're
not arguing over platform idiosyncracies. This is basic shit that
Shildt gets *wrong*; any student who read this was grossly misinformed
on the semantics of arrays as function parameters.
Or how about this:
> #include <string.h>
>
> char s1[] = "hello ";
> char s2[] = "there.";
>
> void main(void)
> {
> int p;
>
> p = strcat(s1, s2);
> }
Hello instant security hole!
Again, these aren't trivial mistakes, and they aren't rare in
Schildt's book. God knows how many students and professionals
repeated those mistakes in their own code.
I said it in another thread, I believe there's a correlation between
the popularity of Schildt's books and the generally abysmal quality of
C code written in the '80s and '90s. Schildt caused real harm to the
industry, and your quixotic defense of his honor is puzzling to say
the least. Unless you are Herb himself, it simply doesn't make sense
why someone would waste their time defending the indefensible.
spinoza1111
> On Nov 1, 5:05 am,spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > This thread shall be the center for compaints about Peter Seebach's
> > document "C: The Complete Nonsense", which is as far as I can tell the
> > sole source of the false rumors about Herb Schildt's books, a source
> > amplified by the confusion of a citation with that of a citation of a
> > citation.
>
> > I shall start the ball rolling: Peter, what goes around, comes around.
>
> > "Page 284
> > 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. "
>
> > Herb here relies on the relative prevelance of case insensitivity in
> > Windows systems and before them, in IBM systems.
>
> So? Why not use canonical forms that are guaranteed to work
> *everywhere*, regardless of whether the underlying platform is case-
> insensitive or not?
>
> This was the thing that frustrated me the most about his book and one
> of the reasons why it wound up in the trash; a good chunk of his
> examples wouldn't even compile for me since I was working on VAX/VMS,
> and the VAX C compiler would inevitably choke on some DOS-ism. Why
Then Vax was arguably wrong. And why are we discussing out of date
systems, and why is Richard Heathfield quoting Aho/Sethi et al (Dragon
compiler book) 1986? Are we in a time warp?
> limit your audience by writing examples that only work for a subset of
> possible platforms? Why not write examples that work on all systems
> with conforming compilers? K&R did it. H&S did it. Why couldn't
No they didn't. No intelligent programmer (there are very few)
programs by moronically copying code snippets. Nothing really works,
without change, for all platforms, and this isn't Herb's doing: it's
what vendors do to make money. Even if the code doesn't have to be
changed for a particular target, anyone who expects not to have to
probably change and in consequence doesn't do his homework, deserves
what he gets.
> Herb?
>
> > It has long been a
> > sort of fashion statement in unix to be case sensitive. There are
> > arguments pro and con both ways, but by omitting this information
> > Peter is able to make Yet Another unwarranted implication about
> > Seebach's competence.
>
> Seebach correctly points out that using all caps may not always work.
> One would think that information would be valuable.
Yes, it is. Even more valuable would have been an explanation of the
culture divide in computing between case insensitivity in IBM
mainframes and subsequently PCs, and Vaxen and many other systems
which were case-sensitive.
It's not Herb's fault that this difference exists. I do feel that for
best results, he needed a co-author who was expert on non-Microsoft
systems. But this lack was absolutely no reason for the campaign of
abuse to which he was subjected.
>
> > It is tribalism to confuse shibboleths such as these with knowledge,
> > where a "shibboleth" is used to recognized tribe members. It is a
> > barbarism.
>
> Okay, let's talk about *knowledge*. Let's talk about another example
> cited by Seebach:
>
> > Page 53
> > 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.
>
> This is *not* a trivial mistake. We're not arguing over style, we're
> not arguing over platform idiosyncracies. This is basic shit that
> Shildt gets *wrong*; any student who read this was grossly misinformed
> on the semantics of arrays as function parameters.
The shit is in the design of C.
>
> Or how about this:
>
> > #include <string.h>
>
> > char s1[] = "hello ";
> > char s2[] = "there.";
>
> > void main(void)
> > {
> > int p;
>
> > p = strcat(s1, s2);
> > }
>
> Hello instant security hole!
It's actually a bug in C akin to the sprintf issue (sprintf
intrinsically unsafe on all platforms). As I have said, a professional
doesn't accept the correctness of code in books any more than a
mathematician expects all the statements in an elementary math
textbook to be true in literal terms and given what we now know:
explanations in calculus in particular can be wildly off-base.
As a humanist and not an autistic twerp who worships abstractions and
machines because he can't get laid, I think Schildt's peace of mind
and reputation was MORE important than using a language in which it is
(almost by design) insanely difficult to write correct code. The
standards efforts had a chance to rectify this situation and they
failed to owing to vendor greed.
>
> Again, these aren't trivial mistakes, and they aren't rare in
Actually, they are. Seeback lists only twenty mistakes and says in "C:
The Complete Nonsense" that these are the known errors.
> Schildt's book. God knows how many students and professionals
> repeated those mistakes in their own code.
>
> I said it in another thread, I believe there's a correlation between
> the popularity of Schildt's books and the generally abysmal quality of
> C code written in the '80s and '90s. Schildt caused real harm to the
> industry, and your quixotic defense of his honor is puzzling to say
> the least. Unless you are Herb himself, it simply doesn't make sense
> why someone would waste their time defending the indefensible.
Coders who write crap code are in general aliterate or autistic and
either don't read at all, or read standards manuals exclusively.
People who actually can read do so critically. As in the case of my
own experience in 1970 (getting a book about the IBM 7094 in a class
that used the 1401) the "errors" are a learning experience.
I today teach classes in *critical* reading of texts such as Joseph
Conrad. You don't understand until you've found aporias and errors in
a text so arguably Schildt does his readers an unintentional service
with his errors, which as I have said, are fewer in number than
claimed.
In an ideal world computer books would contain "nothing but the
truth". But in the real world, programmers, who proclaim their
dedication to truth, actually are so completely dependent on their
jobs and health insurance that when one reads THEIR code, it is full
of errors and bad practice in nearly all cases. This is because as
paraprofessionals, the rate of speed at which they must work is
consistently set above the rational and humane, and the result is real
code that really sucks.
Furthermore, I see where you don't have the balls to post a fix to the
strcat. Let me try:
>
> > char s1[] = "hello ";
> > char s2[] = "there.";
>
> > void main(void)
> > {
> > int p;
>
> > p = strcat(s1, s2);
> > }
No, that doesn't work, does it?
OK, how about
s1[6] = '\0'; p = strcat(s1, s2);
That might work (I haven't tested it.)
The point is that C IS A JOKE especially in string handling. As soon
as any competent programmer starts using C (whether Bjarne Stroustrup
in the 1970s or I in the early 1990s) he is appalled by it and starts
using its macro and function facility to craft his own C.
Stop blaming, and scapegoating, Schildt for your own poor taste in
programming languages.
Richard Heathfield
<34d52fef-cec8-42cb...@v37g2000prg.googlegroups.com>,
> On Nov 3, 6:34 am, John Bode <jfbode1...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Nov 1, 5:05 am,spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
<snip>
>> > Herb here relies on the relative prevelance of case insensitivity
>> > in Windows systems and before them, in IBM systems.
>>
>> So? Why not use canonical forms that are guaranteed to work
>> *everywhere*, regardless of whether the underlying platform is
>> case- insensitive or not?
>>
>> This was the thing that frustrated me the most about his book and
>> one of the reasons why it wound up in the trash; a good chunk of
>> his examples wouldn't even compile for me since I was working on
>> VAX/VMS, and the VAX C compiler would inevitably choke on some
>> DOS-ism. Why
>
> Then Vax was arguably wrong.
The Vax was wrong because it didn't run MS-DOS? You get funnier every
day.
> And why are we discussing out of date systems,
Because you keep banging on about an author whose books were written
ten to fifteen years ago.
> and why is Richard Heathfield quoting Aho/Sethi et al
Because you accused someone of stealing a grammar from you. I
demonstrated that essentially the same grammar is in the Dragon Book.
> (Dragon compiler book) 1986? Are we in a time warp?
Are you claiming that Aho, Sethi, and Ullman used a time machine to
steal a grammar from you? Somehow, I wouldn't put it past you.
>> limit your audience by writing examples that only work for a subset
>> of possible platforms? Why not write examples that work on all
>> systems with conforming compilers? K&R did it. H&S did it. Why
>> couldn't
>
> No they didn't.
Um, yes they did.
> No intelligent programmer (there are very few)
You are not qualified to judge.
> programs by moronically copying code snippets. Nothing really works,
> without change, for all platforms,
It is actually trivial to write a program that will work on all
conforming hosted implementation with 8-bit bytes - which turns out
to be most conforming hosted implementations. (I would doubt very
much whether you personally could name a hosted implementation that
has wider bytes.) Once your byte sizes start to crank up, it does get
harder to keep things portable /and/ sane at the same time.
<snip>
[case-sensitive header names]
> It's not Herb's fault that this difference exists.
But it is his fault that he either was unaware of, or ignored, the
difference. It is not unreasonable for a purchaser to expect a book
with the name "C: The Complete Reference" to be usable on Unix as
well as MS-DOS.
> I do feel that
> for best results, he needed a co-author who was expert on
> non-Microsoft systems.
And indeed a co-author who was an expert on C. That would have been
very useful.
> But this lack was absolutely no reason for
> the campaign of abuse to which he was subjected.
It isn't a campaign, it isn't abuse, and it is his work, not his
person, that is the subject.
<snip>
>> Okay, let's talk about *knowledge*. Let's talk about another
>> example cited by Seebach:
>>
>> > Page 53
>> > 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.
>>
>> This is *not* a trivial mistake. We're not arguing over style,
>> we're not arguing over platform idiosyncracies. This is basic shit
>> that Shildt gets *wrong*; any student who read this was grossly
>> misinformed on the semantics of arrays as function parameters.
>
> The shit is in the design of C.
I disagree, but whether C's design is flawed here doesn't actually
matter for the purpose of this discussion. Let's just accept (as we
might accept the existence of talking mice when watching a cartoon)
that you're right and C's design is flawed. What is the appropriate
reaction for a C author writing a complete reference to C? Is it:
(A) "Here is sizeof... [explanation]... as you can see, the design is
flawed because... Nevertheless, that's how it works, so that's what
you do, here's a working example to illustrate it"
or
(B) "Here is a wrong explanation of sizeof which is based on a
misunderstanding of how C deals with function parameters with
array-like syntax... as you can see, the design is flawed because...
nevertheless that's how I think it works (but I'm wrong)... here the
example is broken and doesn't work, even though it would have been
possible to write a working example if only I'd known how."
(A) is not a response I'd agree with, but at least it makes sense. (B)
is what Schildt.
>> Or how about this:
>>
>> > #include <string.h>
>>
>> > char s1[] = "hello ";
>> > char s2[] = "there.";
>>
>> > void main(void)
>> > {
>> > int p;
>>
>> > p = strcat(s1, s2);
>> > }
>>
>> Hello instant security hole!
>
> It's actually a bug in C akin to the sprintf issue (sprintf
> intrinsically unsafe on all platforms).
No, it's a bug in the program. Trying to squeeze a quart into a pint
pot. C lets you do this because C trusts you to provide sufficient
storage for the side effect of the strcat call. If you don't want to
be trusted, either don't use strcat (I don't, as a rule) or don't use
C.
<nonsense snipped>
> Coders who write crap code are in general aliterate or autistic
Which one are you?
<snip>
> [...] arguably Schildt does his readers an unintentional
> service with his errors,
Ah, I see you're coming around. Give it another fifty years or so, and
you'll be publishing your own Schildt critiques.
> which as I have said, are fewer in number than claimed.
Which specific reported Schildt "errors" are not actually errors,
then?
<snip>
> Furthermore, I see where you don't have the balls to post a fix to
> the strcat. Let me try:
>
>>
>> > char s1[] = "hello ";
>> > char s2[] = "there.";
>>
>> > void main(void)
>> > {
>> > int p;
>>
>> > p = strcat(s1, s2);
>> > }
>
> No, that doesn't work, does it?
>
> OK, how about
>
> s1[6] = '\0'; p = strcat(s1, s2);
>
> That might work (I haven't tested it.)
It will, but it's a lousy fix.
Far better: char meaningful_name[] = "hello there";
This eliminates the strcat call completely and constructs the whole
string in a single operation, resulting in more readable code.
<nonsense snipped>
Gareth Owen
I am not one of them. Besides, I believe Jacob is better than that.
I don't think that of those to whom you refer.
Gareth Owen
> but consider that if you just accept that he's clearly not reacting
> rationally at any particular level, it is actually really funny.
No. That's the point where its completely clear that its not funny.
American Idol auditions aside, is "tease the mentally ill" really
considered grown-up entertainment these days?
Kenny McCormack
My point is that we all engage in name-calling here. It is what CLC is
all about. So, don't sweat it.
Kenny McCormack
This is CLC. It's what we do.
Note that Seebs has publicly stated his own mental illness here, so he
is free to do it to others. Just like N's are allowed to use "the N
word"...
Gareth Owen
> This is CLC. It's what we do.
Well, Han. it's what you do, certainly.
Gareth Owen
> My point is that we all engage in name-calling here.
No, we don't.
Seebs
> Then Vax was arguably wrong.
Well, uhm. No. That's sort of the point.
Remember your rant about the guy who has to get started right now to keep
his job? He might not be on a DOS box.
You've offered thus far *zero* reasons for which writing the names in caps
can ever be of any benefit to the user, and you've just heard that, in the
real world, it screwed up at least one user.
> And why are we discussing out of date
> systems, and why is Richard Heathfield quoting Aho/Sethi et al (Dragon
> compiler book) 1986? Are we in a time warp?
You're the one obsessing over a 1995 book review.
> No they didn't. No intelligent programmer (there are very few)
> programs by moronically copying code snippets.
But someone trying to learn from a book is certainly likely to start
by naively (not moronically) copying in example code, assuming that
it'll work.
> Nothing really works,
> without change, for all platforms, and this isn't Herb's doing:
Again, many writers were able to make C books which did not run into these
problems. He's special.
> it's
> what vendors do to make money. Even if the code doesn't have to be
> changed for a particular target, anyone who expects not to have to
> probably change and in consequence doesn't do his homework, deserves
> what he gets.
Again, the entire point is that if Herb's book doesn't actually tell people
correctly how to use C, and other books do, then Herb's book sucks. The
more you talk, the more you establish that his book is crap; you're
blaming the victim at a revolutionary pace.
The hypocrisy is particularly stunning. If it's *your* expectation, failure
to comply with the expectation is a horrible thing. But if it's the fairly
reasonable expectation that code examples in a book which claims to cover
"standard C" will run on a variety of systems unless they specifically state
otherwise, then it's because people didn't do their homework...
>> Seebach correctly points out that using all caps may not always work.
>> One would think that information would be valuable.
> Yes, it is. Even more valuable would have been an explanation of the
> culture divide in computing between case insensitivity in IBM
> mainframes and subsequently PCs, and Vaxen and many other systems
> which were case-sensitive.
While that might make a great sidebar, the fact is that using names
that aren't in the canonical forms, and never mentioning that they won't
work, is indubitably worse than just using names in the correct forms.
> It's not Herb's fault that this difference exists. I do feel that for
> best results, he needed a co-author who was expert on non-Microsoft
> systems. But this lack was absolutely no reason for the campaign of
> abuse to which he was subjected.
There has been no campaign of abuse. Merely a properly evidenced and
supported claim that, for NO BENEFIT AT ALL, he did something in a way
that screws many readers, but does not improve the experience of any
readers. And we keep finding more and more of these examples.
>> This is *not* a trivial mistake. �We're not arguing over style, we're
>> not arguing over platform idiosyncracies. �This is basic shit that
>> Shildt gets *wrong*; any student who read this was grossly misinformed
>> on the semantics of arrays as function parameters.
> The shit is in the design of C.
Even if that's so, if the book can't describe it accurately, it's a pretty
shitty reference.
The world is full of things which have design flaws or historical quirks.
Good references correctly describe the thing they claim to be a reference
for. They might criticize it, too, but the first key step is to describe
it accurately.
> It's actually a bug in C
Again, even if we grant this (and you've shown no evidence for it), it's
the author's job to describe the language correctly.
> akin to the sprintf issue (sprintf
> intrinsically unsafe on all platforms).
Actually, it isn't. sprintf can be used unsafely, but... Let's come back
to this.
> As I have said, a professional
Might not be reading this book. He hasn't got time to mess around with
stuff that might be right most of the time. But what about hobbyists, who
also like to learn to program sometimes?
> doesn't accept the correctness of code in books any more than a
> mathematician expects all the statements in an elementary math
> textbook to be true in literal terms and given what we now know:
> explanations in calculus in particular can be wildly off-base.
I love that when it's an error in the book your venerate, a "professional"
ought to check his work. But when it's sprintf, the "professional"
mysteriously loses all obligation to expend any kind of cognitive effort
whatsoever.
But you'll be glad to know, the sprintf thing was fixed, in fact, in C99.
We now provide snprintf, which is safe.
> As a humanist and not an autistic twerp who worships abstractions and
> machines because he can't get laid, I think Schildt's peace of mind
> and reputation was MORE important than using a language in which it is
> (almost by design) insanely difficult to write correct code.
You may well be right, in which case, he shouldn't have written a book
about a language in which he was unable to write correct code. He should
have picked a better language and gone and written about that.
> The standards efforts had a chance to rectify this situation and they
> failed to owing to vendor greed.
You keep saying this, but keep not supporting it.
> Actually, they are. Seeback lists only twenty mistakes and says in "C:
> The Complete Nonsense" that these are the known errors.
Bullshit.
The following is a partial list of the errors I am aware of, sorted by
page number. I am not including everything; just many of them.
I am missing several hundred errors. Please write me if you think you
know of any I'm missing. Please also write if you believe one of these
corrections is inadequate or wrong; I'd love to see it.
The page unambiguously states that it is a partial list, and has done so for
over ten years.
> I today teach classes in *critical* reading of texts such as Joseph
> Conrad. You don't understand until you've found aporias and errors in
> a text so arguably Schildt does his readers an unintentional service
> with his errors, which as I have said, are fewer in number than
> claimed.
This is so awesome. If/when I redo the page, I am going to have to do a
ton of sidebars for your various awesome quotes.
> Furthermore, I see where you don't have the balls to post a fix to the
> strcat.
... Uh. There are at least a dozen fixes, all utterly trivial.
Maybe we should leave fixing the errors to a first-year CS student or
something.
> The point is that C IS A JOKE especially in string handling.
It certainly isn't a string processing language, but it's actually pretty
easy to get right.
> As soon
> as any competent programmer starts using C (whether Bjarne Stroustrup
> in the 1970s or I in the early 1990s) he is appalled by it and starts
> using its macro and function facility to craft his own C.
Interesting assertion, but not especially supported.
> Stop blaming, and scapegoating, Schildt for your own poor taste in
> programming languages.
It sure is a shame that, in the 80s and 90s, marauding gangs of fanatic
lovers of bad programming language went around holding guns to peoples'
heads and forcing them to write books about substandard languages.
Seebs
I sure hope so, because people do it to me all the time! :)
... More seriously, you're probably right, I should just ignore the guy.
Exploring his madness is fascinating, but it doesn't seem likely to result
in any possible educational value about 80% of the time, and the remainder
doesn't seem much rewarding. About the best defense I can offer is that
he appears to be even less aware that fun is being had than he is of C.
Richard Heathfield
<snip>
> But you'll be glad to know, the sprintf thing was fixed, in fact, in
> C99. We now provide snprintf, which is safe.
The sprintf thing wasn't broken. If used correctly, it's fine. Like
any tool, it can be used incorrectly.
The snprintf thing is safe if used correctly, just like sprintf. And,
like any tool, snprintf can be used incorrectly (and unsafely).
Seebs
> In <slrnhevnfs.2br...@guild.seebs.net>, Seebs wrote:
>> But you'll be glad to know, the sprintf thing was fixed, in fact, in
>> C99. We now provide snprintf, which is safe.
> The sprintf thing wasn't broken. If used correctly, it's fine. Like
> any tool, it can be used incorrectly.
> The snprintf thing is safe if used correctly, just like sprintf. And,
> like any tool, snprintf can be used incorrectly (and unsafely).
Right you are. However, it's much EASIER to use snprintf safely, which
is why it's there. I mostly brought it up just because it precisely
disproves at least three of his claims about standardization... :)
io_x
"spinoza1111" <spino...@yahoo.com> ha scritto nel messaggio
news:34d52fef-cec8-42cb...@v37g2000prg.googlegroups.com...
On Nov 3, 6:34 am, John Bode <jfbode1...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Nov 1, 5:05 am,spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
you seesm to do a war again the all, don't know why
because i not see the reason
>No they didn't. No intelligent programmer (there are very few)
what do you mean by "intelligent programmer" ?
if you have one balance
in one side of it there is the formal intelligence
in the other one there is the will (la volota') and the heart
what is the side more weight (pesare)
for me it is the second one
Richard Heathfield
> Buon Giorno
>
> "spinoza1111" <spino...@yahoo.com> ha scritto nel messaggio
>
news:34d52fef-cec8-42cb...@v37g2000prg.googlegroups.com...
> On Nov 3, 6:34 am, John Bode <jfbode1...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Nov 1, 5:05 am,spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> you seesm to do a war again the all, don't know why
> because i not see the reason
>
>>No they didn't. No intelligent programmer (there are very few)
>
> what do you mean by "intelligent programmer" ?
He means him.
<snip>
Kenny McCormack
The sky is blue...
gwowen
wrote:
> The sky is blue...
What name calling was that?
Kenny McCormack
You need to sit up straighter in your chair.
You'll catch more of what's going on around you that way.
gwowen
> In article <2281198a-4b83-4aac-9da5-a0afa2202...@a31g2000yqn.googlegroups.com>,
> >What name calling was that?
>
> You need to sit up straighter in your chair.
> You'll catch more of what's going on around you that way.
"And answer came there none"
Nice try Han. Now back under the bridge.
John Bode
[snip]
> Stop blaming, and scapegoating, Schildt for your own poor taste in
> programming languages.
>
WHY DO YOU CARE? What difference does it make to you what we think of
Schildt's books? Is he your BFF? Or are you Herb himself and
unwilling to face criticism directly?
Why are you going to such lengths to defend Herb's honor? What's in
it for you? Why don't you just put up a YouTube video of you
screaming "Leave Herb aloooooonnnnnneee!!!!!!!!!!" It'll be just as
effective as your efforts here.
Keith Thompson
> On Nov 3, 2:06 pm, gaze...@shell.xmission.com (Kenny McCormack) wrote:
> Nice try Han. Now back under the bridge.
You're assuming that "Kenny McCormack" and "Han from China" are the
same person. That's possible, but I believe they're two distinct
people.
--
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"
Colonel Harlan Sanders
<jfbod...@gmail.com> wrote:
>On Nov 2, 9:03�pm, spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>[snip]
>
>> Stop blaming, and scapegoating, Schildt for your own poor taste in
>> programming languages.
>>
Umm... isn't this Schildt's taste in programming languages? He wrote
several books about C, that indicates some level of interest.
>WHY DO YOU CARE? What difference does it make to you what we think of
>Schildt's books? Is he your BFF? Or are you Herb himself and
>unwilling to face criticism directly?
>
>Why are you going to such lengths to defend Herb's honor? What's in
>it for you? Why don't you just put up a YouTube video of you
>screaming "Leave Herb aloooooonnnnnneee!!!!!!!!!!" It'll be just as
>effective as your efforts here.
Kenny McCormack
John Bode <jfbod...@gmail.com> wrote:
>On Nov 2, 9:03�pm, spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>[snip]
>
>> Stop blaming, and scapegoating, Schildt for your own poor taste in
>> programming languages.
>>
>
>WHY DO YOU CARE? What difference does it make to you what we think of
The question of "Why do you post to Usenet?" (and all its variations,
such as this "Why do you care?" [a question that I, too, have often
asked]) is a deep, multidimensional, and, ultimately, unanswerable
question.
So, there is no answer to your question, much as I'd like it to be
otherwise.
Richard Harter
<ks...@mib.org> wrote:
>gwowen <gwo...@gmail.com> writes:
>> On Nov 3, 2:06 pm, gaze...@shell.xmission.com (Kenny McCormack) wrote:
>[...]
>> Nice try Han. Now back under the bridge.
>
>You're assuming that "Kenny McCormack" and "Han from China" are the
>same person. That's possible, but I believe they're two distinct
>people.
>
Perhaps he is using Han as a generic term. It's a way of
implying that in this context Kenny has no real self; he's just a
bit of babble from the bottle of bitterness.
Richard Harter, c...@tiac.net
http://home.tiac.net/~cri, http://www.varinoma.com
Kafka wasn't an author;
Kafka was a prophet!
Kenny McCormack
Richard Harter <c...@tiac.net> wrote:
>On Tue, 03 Nov 2009 08:30:52 -0800, Keith Thompson
><ks...@mib.org> wrote:
>
>>gwowen <gwo...@gmail.com> writes:
>>> On Nov 3, 2:06 pm, gaze...@shell.xmission.com (Kenny McCormack) wrote:
>>[...]
>>> Nice try Han. Now back under the bridge.
>>
>>You're assuming that "Kenny McCormack" and "Han from China" are the
>>same person. That's possible, but I believe they're two distinct
>>people.
http://www.politicsforum.org/images/flame_warriors/flame_61.php
>Perhaps he is using Han as a generic term. It's a way of
>implying that in this context Kenny has no real self; he's just a
>bit of babble from the bottle of bitterness.
http://www.politicsforum.org/images/flame_warriors/flame_18.php
spinoza1111
> In article <4af08973.71226...@text.giganews.com>,
>
> Richard Harter <c...@tiac.net> wrote:
> >On Tue, 03 Nov 2009 08:30:52 -0800, Keith Thompson
> ><ks...@mib.org> wrote:
>
> >>gwowen <gwo...@gmail.com> writes:
> >>> On Nov 3, 2:06 pm, gaze...@shell.xmission.com (Kenny McCormack) wrote:
> >>[...]
> >>> Nice try Han. Now back under the bridge.
>
> >>You're assuming that "Kenny McCormack" and "Han from China" are the
> >>same person. That's possible, but I believe they're two distinct
> >>people.
>
> http://www.politicsforum.org/images/flame_warriors/flame_61.php
>
> >Perhaps he is using Han as a generic term. It's a way of
> >implying that in this context Kenny has no real self; he's just a
> >bit of babble from the bottle of bitterness.
What is this need for people who don't follow the deviant herd
"bitter"? Does everybody here have problems with their father that to
such an extent, they fear being labeled "bitter" like their defeated
old man? Seems to me that Kenny is a funny guy with a sense of humor
and perspective, and that his enemies are humorless little twerps that
like to destroy people for shits and giggles, 'cause they're evil.
That's how it looks to me.
>
> http://www.politicsforum.org/images/flame_warriors/flame_18.php
spinoza1111
> In article <97ddea3b-c456-43ef-b98e-5aaef8139...@s31g2000yqs.googlegroups.com>,
> John Bode <jfbode1...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >On Nov 2, 9:03 pm,spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> >[snip]
>
> >> Stop blaming, and scapegoating, Schildt for your own poor taste in
> >> programming languages.
>
> >WHY DO YOU CARE? What difference does it make to you what we think of
>
> The question of "Why do you post to Usenet?" (and all its variations,
> such as this "Why do you care?" [a question that I, too, have often
> asked]) is a deep, multidimensional, and, ultimately, unanswerable
> question.
Read the chapter on Lordship and Bondage from Hegel's Phenomenology of
Mind.
spinoza1111
> On Tue, 3 Nov 2009 08:28:08 -0800 (PST), John Bode
>
> >On Nov 2, 9:03 pm,spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> >[snip]
>
> >> Stop blaming, and scapegoating, Schildt for your own poor taste in
> >> programming languages.
>
> Umm... isn't this Schildt's taste in programming languages? He wrote
> several books about C, that indicates some level of interest.
A professional masters a tool without loving it.
>
> >WHY DO YOU CARE? What difference does it make to you what we think of
> >Schildt's books? Is he your BFF? Or are you Herb himself and
> >unwilling to face criticism directly?
I'm Edward G. Nilges, not Herb Schildt. And it's called solidarity.
I've seen too many people publish books and work as editors, only to
get screwed.
SAMS, for example, took one of their Chicago based freelance editors
to court when she put up a Web site several years ago detailing how
they'd screwed her. She went to court unable to retain a lawyer
because she couldn't afford a lawyer and was jailed for contempt when
she neglected to a file a paper.
Kathy Sierra, a Java author whose books are popular, was targeted by
www.meankids.org and this enabled anonymous people to send her email
threatening her with rape.
I think the Internet has "empowered" vicious and stupid people to
multiply "evidence" that consists of pointers to misinterpreted facts,
and I think Schildt was a victim of this misuse of freedom of speech.
>
> >Why are you going to such lengths to defend Herb's honor? What's in
> >it for you? Why don't you just put up a YouTube video of you
> >screaming "Leave Herb aloooooonnnnnneee!!!!!!!!!!" It'll be just as
> >effective as your efforts here.
>
Bullies can't stand it when their targets link up in solidarity
because bullies are cowards. Furthermore, both in school and in life,
bullies do the dirty work of elites by silencing dissidence.
spinoza1111
> On 2009-11-03, Richard Heathfield <r...@see.sig.invalid> wrote:
>
> >> But you'll be glad to know, the sprintf thing was fixed, in fact, in
> >> C99. We now provide snprintf, which is safe.
> > The sprintf thing wasn't broken. If used correctly, it's fine. Like
> > any tool, it can be used incorrectly.
> > The snprintf thing is safe if used correctly, just like sprintf. And,
> > like any tool, snprintf can be used incorrectly (and unsafely).
>
> Right you are. However, it's much EASIER to use snprintf safely, which
> is why it's there. I mostly brought it up just because it precisely
> disproves at least three of his claims about standardization... :)
When are you going to fix printf? If it's redirected, doesn't it have
the same unbounded behavior as sprintf?
Because any program, which ordinarily writes to a "stdout", can be
redirected to a file or storage, and because this is a useful
technique, printf has the same problem as sprintf.
Because of the idiotic way in which C delimits strings, printf can
spew output in an unbounded fashion, whereas in C Sharp and in Java,
we always know string length.
Don't claim to have fixed anything whatsoever.
>
> -s
> --
> Copyright 2009, 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
> On 2009-11-03, Gareth Owen <gwo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> but consider that if you just accept that he's clearly not reacting
> >> rationally at any particular level, it is actually really funny.
> > No. That's the point where its completely clear that its not funny.
> > American Idol auditions aside, is "tease the mentally ill" really
> > considered grown-up entertainment these days?
>
> I sure hope so, because people do it to me all the time! :)
>
> ... More seriously, you're probably right, I should just ignore the guy.
> Exploring his madness is fascinating, but it doesn't seem likely to result
> in any possible educational value about 80% of the time, and the remainder
> doesn't seem much rewarding. About the best defense I can offer is that
> he appears to be even less aware that fun is being had than he is of C.
>
> -s
> --
spinoza1111
> >> but consider that if you just accept that he's clearly not reacting
> >> rationally at any particular level, it is actually really funny.
> > No. That's the point where its completely clear that its not funny.
> > American Idol auditions aside, is "tease the mentally ill" really
> > considered grown-up entertainment these days?
>
> I sure hope so, because people do it to me all the time! :)
>
> ... More seriously, you're probably right, I should just ignore the guy.
> Exploring his madness is fascinating, but it doesn't seem likely to result
> in any possible educational value about 80% of the time, and the remainder
> doesn't seem much rewarding. About the best defense I can offer is that
> he appears to be even less aware that fun is being had than he is of C.
Grow up, Seebach. This is a serious business. You've libeled C and
lost this debate. Now, like a child, you want to pretend you were
having fun, but now you're libeling me.
>
> -s
> --
spinoza1111
> In <slrnhevnfs.2br.usenet-nos...@guild.seebs.net>, Seebs wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> > But you'll be glad to know, the sprintf thing was fixed, in fact, in
> > C99. We now provide snprintf, which is safe.
>
> The sprintf thing wasn't broken. If used correctly, it's fine. Like
> any tool, it can be used incorrectly.
This shows a deep and incurable ignorance, because by this logic, my
first language (machine language) was just fine. I just had to "do the
math".
spinoza1111
How would you know? I have already shown that the proliferation of
"tools" on unix (C++, awk, grep, sh, bsh) is in large part a reaction
to the deficiencies of C. In particular, Stroustrup had learned about
object oriented programming using Simula in Denmark before coming to
the US, because in Denmark labor unions had real power and demanded
that factory automation be documented for union oversight.
You squeal that my assertions are "not especially supported". Then
you're blasted with the documented record, and facts you can verify.
Your feeble and libelous response is to accuse me of mental disorder,
when you yourself has told us you're autistic. Your autism, however,
is used by you to excuse your behavior and to garner sympathy. Pretty
ridiculous when you think it's funny to compare people to mental
patients.
>
> > Stop blaming, and scapegoating, Schildt for your own poor taste in
> > programming languages.
>
> It sure is a shame that, in the 80s and 90s, marauding gangs of fanatic
> lovers of bad programming language went around holding guns to peoples'
> heads and forcing them to write books about substandard languages.
>
> -s
> --
spinoza1111
> Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> writes:
> > but consider that if you just accept that he's clearly not reacting
> > rationally at any particular level, it is actually really funny.
>
> No. That's the point where its completely clear that its not funny.
No, it's not. I'm not autistic and I don't have a learning disorder,
but I don't mock Seebach for being autistic other than calling him an
"autistic twerp", of course. You see, an "autistic twerp" is someone
who simultaneously tries to get sympathy for his disease but doesn't
take responsibility for the fact that, in Seeb's case, his autism
causes him to be mistaken about the knowledge of others, and to make
unwarranted generalizations from small data sets. It also causes the
autistic to be deficient at organizing material (in his Vicious
Tirade) in a sensible way, which caused McGraw Hill to reject it.
And it's obscene to turn from trying to get sympathy for having a
fashionable disease, and a fashionable sexual orientation, to labeling
others mentally ill.
I have no problem with homos at all. I've worked with homos in
technology since 1981. However, I have nothing but contempt for
faggots who become bullies, and deal out the persecution to which they
were subject when they were little faggots. The only pervert I despise
is the pervert who infects another pervert with Aids without telling
him, and it appears to me that Seebach is this type of queer. I don't
know whether he does this, but he does use the Internet to try to
destroy people.
Ben Bacarisse shows us all how to act. Peter Seebach needs to learn
from him.
Seebs
> On Nov 4, 12:38�am, Colonel Harlan Sanders <Har...@kfc.com> wrote:
>> Umm... isn't this Schildt's taste in programming languages? He wrote
>> several books about C, that indicates some level of interest.
> A professional masters a tool without loving it.
If Schildt had mastered C, and then criticized it, he'd be a lot more
respected. Instead, he praised it, then didn't get it right at all.
> I think the Internet has "empowered" vicious and stupid people to
> multiply "evidence" that consists of pointers to misinterpreted facts,
> and I think Schildt was a victim of this misuse of freedom of speech.
You do apparently think this.
But:
1. You've made it clear that you, yourself, do not understand C well enough
to comment competently.
2. Even if we ignore that and simply investigate your comments, we
consistently find that you have no clue what you're talking about.
3. You've never actually established that any of the claims made are
substantively false.
4. When confronted with specific, significant, errors in Schildt's texts
which would lead readers who trusted them to grave errors and buggy
code, you make various excuses about how of course the reader is supposed
to put time and effort into guessing when the book is simply wrong.
5. ... even though you elsewhere insist that Schildt's books are of
great importance because they allow people to get quickly up to speed and
use the language effectively.
In short, you make claims which are not only false, but inconsistent, and
have taken to bragging about how little you understand C, and how bad a thing
it would be to understand C.
If we accept your claims of what it would say about someone for that person
to have mastered C, and also your claims that Schildt mastered C, you have
criticized him much more harshly, and in much more personal terms, than any
of his other critics. If we disregard the claims that Schildt mastered
C, we find that you have no basis for complaint about articles which claim
that his knowledge of C is insufficient. If we disregard your claims about
how horrible C is, and how only bad people would be good at it, you're
nothing but an internet kook suitable for drinking games.
> Bullies can't stand it when their targets link up in solidarity
> because bullies are cowards.
And one of their core tactics is to portray that linking up in solidarity
as bullying... :)
-s
--
Seebs
>> Right you are. �However, it's much EASIER to use snprintf safely, which
>> is why it's there. �I mostly brought it up just because it precisely
>> disproves at least three of his claims about standardization... :)
> When are you going to fix printf? If it's redirected, doesn't it have
> the same unbounded behavior as sprintf?
No.
> Because any program, which ordinarily writes to a "stdout", can be
> redirected to a file or storage, and because this is a useful
> technique, printf has the same problem as sprintf.
No, it doesn't.
sprintf() can overrun the ends of a string, which is stored in memory.
printf(), by contrast, writes to a file. No amount of writing to a file
suddenly magically overwrites objects in memory. (Some weird exceptions
exist, involving memory-mapped files, but in general...)
This goes down as one of your more impressively incoherent complaints, and
I consider that category fiercely contested.
> Because of the idiotic way in which C delimits strings, printf can
> spew output in an unbounded fashion, whereas in C Sharp and in Java,
> we always know string length.
Even granting that theoretically printf can spew unbounded output,
there is no problem corresponding to sprintf overruns. Furthermore,
there are multiple ways to keep the output bounded.
> Don't claim to have fixed anything whatsoever.
There was a genuine, well-understood, way in which sprintf could be risky
if not used with extra caution. snprintf corrects that.
-s
--
Seebs
>> > As soon
>> > as any competent programmer starts using C (whether Bjarne Stroustrup
>> > in the 1970s or I in the early 1990s) he is appalled by it and starts
>> > using its macro and function facility to craft his own C.
>> Interesting assertion, but not especially supported.
> How would you know?
Well, one way I'd know would be that you haven't shown any support for
it. You have made a claim about every competent programmer who has ever
used C. You have not shown that this claim is true of more than a tiny
number of people -- or indeed any. Could you cite to a source for the
claim that Stroustrup, in the 1970s, was "appalled" by C?
> I have already shown that the proliferation of
> "tools" on unix (C++, awk, grep, sh, bsh) is in large part a reaction
> to the deficiencies of C.
You've asserted it. To show it, you'd have to make some kind of argument.
> In particular, Stroustrup had learned about
> object oriented programming using Simula in Denmark before coming to
> the US, because in Denmark labor unions had real power and demanded
> that factory automation be documented for union oversight.
This is one of the most astounding non-sequiturs I have ever seen.
Seriously, this is just awesome. "Factory automation must be documented
for union oversight, therefore, people learn about object oriented
programming using Simula."
> You squeal that my assertions are "not especially supported". Then
> you're blasted with the documented record, and facts you can verify.
Except the facts have no connection to anything. You've never shown any
record or facts supporting your various claims about standardization, or
about what "intelligent" programmers ought to expect for order of evaluation,
or any of that. The closest you've gotten thus far to showing support
for a claim with verifiable facts is to assert that labor unions in Denmark
demanded that factory automation be documented. I mean, certainly this
could presumably be verified, but since it has no connection to anything
under discussion, who cares?
-s
--
Seebs
I keep planning to.
> This is a serious business.
No, really, it isn't.
It could be, but for it to be serious, you'd have to actually respond
to any of the dozens of requests that you support your allegations, and
not just with world-class non-sequiturs.
> You've libeled C and lost this debate.
There's been no "debate". A debate is a thing where two parties exchange
arguments. This has been a thing where I alternate between making fun of
you and advancing arguments, and you make random assertions with no
supporting evidence at all.
> Now, like a child, you want to pretend you were
> having fun,
I assure you, I have genuinely been having fun. Also, I am pretty sure the
record is clear here. The part where I told you I was thinking of making a
drinking game? The clown nose comment? There has been no point since my
initial two or three responses to you weeks ago at which any rational observer
could conclude that I had any motivation in reading or responding to your
posts but having fun.
When you come back with a serious argument to support your claim that the
C standard was motivated primarily by a desire to "protect vendor profits"
by avoiding imposing reasonable requirements on vendors, so they could lay
off their compiler developers, I will take you more seriously. Note that
it has to be an actual argument with evidence and with some kind of logical
connection shown between the evidence and your claims. Appeals to the fact
that you used to work with Nash don't count.
> but now you're libeling me.
Not that I can detect.
-s
--
Richard Heathfield
<c6277d7a-0b31-4f52...@a39g2000pre.googlegroups.com>,
spinoza1111 wrote:
> On Nov 3, 4:33 pm, Richard Heathfield <r...@see.sig.invalid> wrote:
>> In <slrnhevnfs.2br.usenet-nos...@guild.seebs.net>, Seebs wrote:
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>> > But you'll be glad to know, the sprintf thing was fixed, in fact,
>> > in C99. We now provide snprintf, which is safe.
>>
>> The sprintf thing wasn't broken. If used correctly, it's fine. Like
>> any tool, it can be used incorrectly.
>
> This shows a deep and incurable ignorance,
No, it doesn't.
> because by this logic, my
> first language (machine language) was just fine. I just had to "do
> the math".
Non-sequitur.
<snip>
Richard Heathfield
<17bf6d18-e9be-44f5...@k13g2000prh.googlegroups.com>,
spinoza1111 wrote:
> On Nov 3, 2:30 pm, Gareth Owen <gwo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> writes:
>> > but consider that if you just accept that he's clearly not
>> > reacting rationally at any particular level, it is actually
>> > really funny.
>>
>> No. That's the point where its completely clear that its not
>> funny.
>
> No, it's not. I'm not autistic
So you claim, but without supporting evidence.
> and I don't have a learning disorder,
You do, however, seem to lack the ability to learn.
> but I don't mock Seebach for being autistic other than calling him
> an "autistic twerp", of course.
That doesn't mock him. It mocks you.
<nonsense snipped>
> I have no problem with homos at all.
And yet you consistently employ homophobic vocabulary.
<nonsense snipped>
Seebs
> but I don't mock Seebach for being autistic other than calling him an
> "autistic twerp", of course. You see, an "autistic twerp" is someone
> who simultaneously tries to get sympathy for his disease
When have I ever done that? I have pointed out that your derision is
likely to make people less sympathetic to you, because many people are
by-default sympathetic to any or all disabilities (note: "disability"
or "disorder", but probably not "disease), but I have not stated that I
want them to do this, or expect it, or anything like that.
> but doesn't
> take responsibility for the fact that, in Seeb's case, his autism
> causes him to be mistaken about the knowledge of others,
If this is the case, it has not been shown. Indeed, you haven't yet
shown that I am substantively mistaken about the knowledge of others,
let alone what the causes of such mistakes might be.
> and to make
> unwarranted generalizations from small data sets.
Unwarranted but provisional, I'd grant -- it's a good way to learn.
> It also causes the
> autistic to be deficient at organizing material (in his Vicious
> Tirade) in a sensible way, which caused McGraw Hill to reject it.
Except that, as you've been told several times, that was never submitted
to McGraw Hill.
> And it's obscene to turn from trying to get sympathy for having a
> fashionable disease, and a fashionable sexual orientation, to labeling
> others mentally ill.
The only reason I mentioned the sexual orientation was that you used the
word "faggots" to mean "people who understand algorithms better than I do."
Richard Heathfield
> On 2009-11-04, spinoza1111 <spino...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> No, it's not. I'm not autistic and I don't have a learning
>> disorder, but I don't mock Seebach for being autistic other than
>> calling him an "autistic twerp", of course. You see, an "autistic
>> twerp" is someone who simultaneously tries to get sympathy for his
>> disease
>
> When have I ever done that?
I don't have any evidence to suggest you've ever done that. Neither
does he. But lack of evidence to support his assertions has never
been a barrier. Observation leads me to conclude that his thought
processes go along the lines of "this might be true, therefore I will
assume it is true, and clearly anyone who disagrees is a bozo and
should be attacked".
<snip>
>> It also causes the
>> autistic to be deficient at organizing material (in his Vicious
>> Tirade) in a sensible way, which caused McGraw Hill to reject it.
>
> Except that, as you've been told several times, that was never
> submitted to McGraw Hill.
You could tell him a million times, but it will make no difference. As
far as he's concerned, it's true, and what would *you* know about it?
>> And it's obscene to turn from trying to get sympathy for having a
>> fashionable disease, and a fashionable sexual orientation, to
>> labeling others mentally ill.
>
> The only reason I mentioned the sexual orientation was that you used
> the word "faggots" to mean "people who understand algorithms better
> than I do."
He uses the phrase "autistic twerp" in much the same way.
Seebs
>> Except that, as you've been told several times, that was never
>> submitted to McGraw Hill.
> You could tell him a million times, but it will make no difference. As
> far as he's concerned, it's true, and what would *you* know about it?
My guess is he's drawing the wrong inference from the snide remark
about the publisher's lack of concern.
>> The only reason I mentioned the sexual orientation was that you used
>> the word "faggots" to mean "people who understand algorithms better
>> than I do."
> He uses the phrase "autistic twerp" in much the same way.
I'd noticed! (He also doesn't seem to read carefully for qualifiers,
I might add.)
Richard Heathfield
> On 2009-11-04, Richard Heathfield <r...@see.sig.invalid> wrote:
>>> Except that, as you've been told several times, that was never
>>> submitted to McGraw Hill.
>
>> You could tell him a million times, but it will make no difference.
>> As far as he's concerned, it's true, and what would *you* know
>> about it?
>
> My guess is he's drawing the wrong inference from the snide remark
> about the publisher's lack of concern.
>
>>> The only reason I mentioned the sexual orientation was that you
>>> used the word "faggots" to mean "people who understand algorithms
>>> better than I do."
>
>> He uses the phrase "autistic twerp" in much the same way.
>
> I'd noticed! (He also doesn't seem to read carefully for
> qualifiers, I might add.)
In fact, his literacy levels are generally low. He suffers from poor
grammar, poor spelling at times, an inability to write clearly, and
almost no capacity for reading for comprehension. He is also utterly
incapable of snipping material to which he is not replying. I've
never known to him snip any material in the last decade.
On the other hand, he does have his good points. For example, he's in
Hong Kong, which is just a shade under 6000 miles from here.
Nick
> This thread shall be the center for compaints about Peter Seebach's
> document "C: The Complete Nonsense", which is as far as I can tell the
> sole source of the false rumors about Herb Schildt's books, a source
> amplified by the confusion of a citation with that of a citation of a
> citation.
>
> I shall start the ball rolling: Peter, what goes around, comes around.
>
> "Page 284
> 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. "
>
> Herb here relies on the relative prevelance of case insensitivity in
> Windows systems and before them, in IBM systems.
Eh? The first IBM[*] I used was most certainly not case
insensitive. Sure, the shell translated everything to upper case, but
if you could fiddle it in (say through a REXX program) you ended up with
a file that you couldn't delete other than through another program.
[*] CMS, since you ask. Gad I hated it.
--
Online waterways route planner: http://canalplan.org.uk
development version: http://canalplan.eu
John Bode
> On Nov 4, 12:38 am, Colonel Harlan Sanders <Har...@kfc.com> wrote:
>
> > On Tue, 3 Nov 2009 08:28:08 -0800 (PST), John Bode
>
> > <jfbode1...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >On Nov 2, 9:03 pm,spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > >[snip]
>
> > >> Stop blaming, and scapegoating, Schildt for your own poor taste in
> > >> programming languages.
>
> > Umm... isn't this Schildt's taste in programming languages? He wrote
> > several books about C, that indicates some level of interest.
>
> A professional masters a tool without loving it.
>
>
>
> > >WHY DO YOU CARE? What difference does it make to you what we think of
> > >Schildt's books? Is he your BFF? Or are you Herb himself and
> > >unwilling to face criticism directly?
>
> I'm Edward G. Nilges, not Herb Schildt. And it's called solidarity.
> I've seen too many people publish books and work as editors, only to
> get screwed.
>
Would you express solidarity with the author of an electronics
textbook that confused capacitance with inductance? How about an
historian who described David Bowie's last hours at the Alamo?
The errors we're talking about in C:TCR are of similar magnitude.
You seem to think that technical accuracy doesn't matter when writing
a technical reference, or that it's not the author's fault for making
the mistake. Such a position is frankly incomprehensible to me.
spinoza1111
> On Nov 4, 10:49 am,spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Nov 4, 12:38 am, Colonel Harlan Sanders <Har...@kfc.com> wrote:
>
> > > On Tue, 3 Nov 2009 08:28:08 -0800 (PST), John Bode
>
> > > <jfbode1...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > >On Nov 2, 9:03 pm,spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > > >[snip]
>
> > > >> Stop blaming, and scapegoating, Schildt for your own poor taste in
> > > >> programming languages.
>
> > > Umm... isn't this Schildt's taste in programming languages? He wrote
> > > several books about C, that indicates some level of interest.
>
> > A professional masters a tool without loving it.
>
> > > >WHY DO YOU CARE? What difference does it make to you what we think of
> > > >Schildt's books? Is he your BFF? Or are you Herb himself and
> > > >unwilling to face criticism directly?
>
> > I'm Edward G. Nilges, not Herb Schildt. And it's called solidarity.
> > I've seen too many people publish books and work as editors, only to
> > get screwed.
>
> Would you express solidarity with the author of an electronics
> textbook that confused capacitance with inductance? How about an
> historian who described David Bowie's last hours at the Alamo?
In the case of electronics and history, there is agreement among
tenured faculty members not subject to market forces about these
matters.
Whereas programming folklore such as what main should return (which is
in fact completely dependent on the host) or whether it's even an
error to use upper case in file ids on Microsoft systems that were
case-insensitive with respect to file ids at the time are the
intellectual production of worker bees working at-will at the pleasure
of an employer.
Everything they say must therefore be discounted in some measure,
since there is no independent test of whether they are making their
claim because it is true, or because it advances or defends their
position.
Thus, people trained in C and in unix have seen, as Kenny points out,
the lower marketability of their skills as a threat and will make
pseudo-scientific claims out of fear, including the attempt to destroy
a computer author's reputation based on twenty "errors".
There are people who either are so employable, or else so reconciled
to economic insecurity as a result of speaking truth-to-power, or
both, that we do not discount what they say. But generally speaking,
they do not attack other people's reputations out of fear and anger.
Whitfield Diffie and Bob Gaskins were co-workers of mine at Bell
Northern Research. Both of them worked cheerfully in a dual-vendor
(DEC and IBM) without once seeking to enlarge their status in the zero
sum game of talking behind people's backs about their limitations or
the limitations of the platform on which they specialized. Diffie and
Gaskins invented power point (and are suitably sorry for that
invention :-)) and Diffie, of course, is a world-famous cryptanalyst.
Neither of them went around shooting off their mouths about other
people's errors. Instead, Diffie in particular had the balls to speak
truth about computer security to power: he testified on his views to
Congress.
In my case, I speak truth to power today because my kids are grown, I
need no longer work in programming, and working with today's noncoding
programmers makes me sick, especially their reversion to the worst
habits of data processing people in the 1960s: the ageism, the sexism,
the racism, and the constant stress on other people's "errors" as a
way of building yourself up by tearing others down.
There is NO learned consensus about C other than a learned hope that
it will just go away some day, because it's just as much an infantile
disorder as Basic was before Visual Basic. If you need to write tight
code, factor that code out and write it in assembler.
Herb made no such errors on the scale of your silly analogies, because
"knowledge" of programming folklore and trivial OS-dependent facts
such as case sensitivity and what main should return is so dependent
on so many preconditions as to be unverifiable and unfalsifiable.
>
> The errors we're talking about in C:TCR are of similar magnitude.
>
> You seem to think that technical accuracy doesn't matter when writing
> a technical reference, or that it's not the author's fault for making
> the mistake. Such a position is frankly incomprehensible to me.- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -
Seebs
> In the case of electronics and history, there is agreement among
> tenured faculty members not subject to market forces about these
> matters.
I suspect you'd find comparable agreement among CS teachers not subject
to market forces about most of the stuff you've asserted.
> Whereas programming folklore such as what main should return (which is
> in fact completely dependent on the host)
Well, no, it isn't. Language spec, not host environment.
> or whether it's even an
> error to use upper case in file ids on Microsoft systems
Liar. The assertion was not that it was an error to do something on a
particular system.
> Everything they say must therefore be discounted in some measure,
> since there is no independent test of whether they are making their
> claim because it is true, or because it advances or defends their
> position.
This is beautiful. You have finally realized that you can't argue your
points at all, and the ad hominem (abusive) didn't get you anywhere,
so you've gone straight to the ad hominem (circumstantial).
Why not just argue your points?
> In my case, I speak truth to power today
No, you don't.
Speaking truth to power has a crucial prerequisite; you have to be
willing to genuinely try to understand the thing you are talking about.
You have made it clear that you don't know jack shit about C, and are
"relearning it".
Given that, the entire history of your random attacks on people who
know something about C is absolutely, categorically, not an example
of "speaking truth to power".
Finish relearning C. When you know C well enough to not pepper your
attempts to talk about C with blatant newbie mistakes, then reevaluate
everything; re-read the Schildt books yourself, for instance, and make
your own conclusions about what they say. Browse Usenet archives from
the mid-90s to see what newbies reading Schildt were saying and asking.
THEN tell us what you think about these matters.
Otherwise, you're not speaking truth to power, you're speaking from
your ego alone.
> There is NO learned consensus about C other than a learned hope that
> it will just go away some day, because it's just as much an infantile
> disorder as Basic was before Visual Basic.
Got any support for this kind of thing?
> Herb made no such errors on the scale of your silly analogies, because
> "knowledge" of programming folklore and trivial OS-dependent facts
> such as case sensitivity and what main should return is so dependent
> on so many preconditions as to be unverifiable and unfalsifiable.
Even if we granted this, his direct self-contradictions and his example
of how to use sizeof on function arguments would be egregious enough
errors to justify serious concern...
>> - Show quoted text -
Please learn to use your newsreader. You keep misquoting things or
quoting only parts of them, and also leaving in hundreds of lines of
text you don't respond to. While this doesn't directly impact the
substance of your arguments, it does appear to result in you not reading
things that are substantial and relevant in other peoples' posts.
Malcolm McLean
>
> Thus, people trained in C and in unix have seen, as Kenny points out,
> the lower marketability of their skills as a threat and will make
> pseudo-scientific claims out of fear, including the attempt to destroy
> a computer author's reputation based on twenty "errors".
>
literal-minded. But people don't learn from formal definitions, but from
explanations. Sometimes it is helpful to skate over details for pedagogical
purposes, sometimes errors are too trivial to be wort worrying about (in
books, not in production code). Then almost all code contains some bugs,
especially code that isn't actually run in real applications.
It is easy for programmers to convince themselves that a book which is in
fact very good at what it sets out to do is worthless.
Seebs
> It's not that. Programmers are very literal-minded, because computers are
> literal-minded.
Not always, but often.
However, this has a corollary: It is *useful* to be literal-minded when
dealing with the computer.
> But people don't learn from formal definitions, but from
> explanations.
This is only partially correct. Some people do in fact learn from formal
definitions.
That said, I agree. People mostly learn from explanations -- which is why
it's extremely important that the explanations be right, because a
persuasive-sounding explanation which is wrong will be extremely hard for
the reader to later correct.
> Sometimes it is helpful to skate over details for pedagogical
> purposes,
Agreed. However, Schildt's problems are not "skating over details".
Let me give you an example of "skating over details for pedagogical
purposes". I'm afraid it's from a shell book, 'cuz that's what I had
handy.
If you try to assign a value including spaces to a variable,
you will discover that the shell splits the line into words before
trying to assign variables. Thus, this doesn't work:
$ name = John Smith
sh: Smith: command not found
$ echo hello, $name
hello,
A brief explanation of what went wrong follows in the next section;
a full explanation of what went wrong is found in Chapter 3. For now,
the key lesson is that the assignment doesn't work, and you need a way
to prevent the shell from splitting words.
That's how you "skate over details". The reader is warned that there's
more lurking, but is given a workable first approximation.
> sometimes errors are too trivial to be wort worrying about (in
> books, not in production code).
Less often in books than in production code, because books are aimed at
teaching people how to do things.
> Then almost all code contains some bugs,
> especially code that isn't actually run in real applications.
Agreed.
> It is easy for programmers to convince themselves that a book which is in
> fact very good at what it sets out to do is worthless.
I don't think this is the case. None of your categories cover the
sizeof(rec) example. The error is not trivial at all -- the code will
absolutely not work as described on any system currently in existence.
And, crucially, it's *not* just a bug in the code -- it's a bug in
the explanation given. The explanation, which is the crucial part that
the reader will be learning from, is more wrong than the code.
Similarly, Schildt doesn't "skate over details" -- he gives details which
are incorrect or only correct in some specific contexts, without any hint
at all that he's describing something that may not be universal.
As a book on "How C works on DOS and Windows", it would be a better book,
but would still have enough flaws that it would not be one I could honestly
recommend to anyone. As a book purporting to be a complete reference,
applicable to all platforms, it was crap.
John Bode
> On Nov 7, 1:03 am, John Bode <jfbode1...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Nov 4, 10:49 am,spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
[snip]
> > > I'm Edward G. Nilges, not Herb Schildt. And it's called solidarity.
> > > I've seen too many people publish books and work as editors, only to
> > > get screwed.
>
> > Would you express solidarity with the author of an electronics
> > textbook that confused capacitance with inductance? How about an
> > historian who described David Bowie's last hours at the Alamo?
>
> In the case of electronics and history, there is agreement among
> tenured faculty members not subject to market forces about these
> matters.
>
So the answer is "no", then?
[snip remainder of "truth to power" rant]
spinoza1111
> On 2009-11-08, Malcolm McLean <regniz...@btinternet.com> wrote:
>
> > It's not that. Programmers are very literal-minded, because computers are
> > literal-minded.
>
> Not always, but often.
>
> However, this has a corollary: It is *useful* to be literal-minded when
> dealing with the computer.
>
> > But people don't learn from formal definitions, but from
> > explanations.
>
> This is only partially correct. Some people do in fact learn from formal
> definitions.
>
> That said, I agree. People mostly learn from explanations -- which is why
> it's extremely important that the explanations be right, because a
> persuasive-sounding explanation which is wrong will be extremely hard for
> the reader to later correct.
All very true. However, you're missing something.
We don't let non-teachers tell teachers what or how to teach in
general, and when we do, the results are about half the time pretty
bad.
If Dennis Ritchie or Brian Kernighan had written an anti-Schildt rant
we would take it seriously because both have a combination of
verifiable academic qualifications and industrial experience to rank
them ABOVE Schildt.
Likewise, why do you suppose academic journals "peer review" by
sending submissions to faculty at prestigious universities?
Why do you suppose tenure decisions are not made by university
administrators or state assembly members except in cases of political
interference?
Sure, the instructional content of K-12 teachers is monitored pretty
closely for political and scholastic reasons in the USA, but part of
this monitoring is political.
You are in fact not a real programmer by your own admission, but some
sort of bug finder who may indeed program very good tools for your own
use and the use of your group, and you have no academic certification
in computer science. Whereas Herb was both employed as a programmer
and completed an MSCS.
You have confirmed this when you foolishly mis-represented Michael L.
Scott, the author of Programming Language Pragmatics as writing about C
++ on p. 111 of that book when he was writing about C, and you said on
two occasions that he was also wrong to speak of Forbidden Things,
such as "the" stack...when you haven't shown us how to implement C
runtime without a stack, and when this would involve disproving Noam
Chomsky's typology of languages, and Hopcroft and Ullman's typology of
automata.
Yet you were the source of a rumor campaign which has seriously
damaged Schildt because of the Internet in which (1) it is hard to
determine whether information is credible unless it originates at
a .edu site and (2) the ease of reproduction of a single claim makes n
claims seem quickly to be n times a tens power of actual facts.
Your errata was rejected by technical people at McGraw Hill yet to my
knowledge you have NOT ONCE sought confirmation of your claims by
having them reviewed by a real C programmer with academic
qualifications, writing experience, and knowledge of both Microsoft
and unix-based technology.
As a result you harmed a man's reputation.
It's time to apologize and withdraw "C: the Complete Nonsense".
>
> > Sometimes it is helpful to skate over details for pedagogical
> > purposes,
>
> Agreed. However, Schildt's problems are not "skating over details".
>
> Let me give you an example of "skating over details for pedagogical
> purposes". I'm afraid it's from a shell book, 'cuz that's what I had
> handy.
>
> If you try to assign a value including spaces to a variable,
> you will discover that the shell splits the line into words before
> trying to assign variables. Thus, this doesn't work:
>
> $ name = John Smith
> sh: Smith: command not found
> $ echo hello, $name
> hello,
>
> A brief explanation of what went wrong follows in the next section;
> a full explanation of what went wrong is found in Chapter 3. For now,
> the key lesson is that the assignment doesn't work, and you need a way
> to prevent the shell from splitting words.
>
> That's how you "skate over details". The reader is warned that there's
> more lurking, but is given a workable first approximation.
This approach doesn't work in the business world. Of course, the
business world sucks since it's based on systematic inequality.
Nonetheless, programmers confronted with a new language don't want to
hear that "I will explain all this later since right now you swine are
too stupid to get it".
Instead, they want a working model which they can examine.
This working model, as an Aristotelean instantiation of a Platonic
idea, will have any number of aporias. However, REAL programmers
understand that life sucks and only approximates the Platonic for the
same reason that I figured out that Sherman's Programming and Coding
Digital Computers was describing a single-address fixed word length
machine, but that not all machines need conform to this model.
Any given time-slice of a classroom on a video or in a transcript will
consist of stops and starts and half-truths.
An autistic-Platonic teacher, that refuses to speak unless he's
speaking "the truth" is a bore, and a damned fool, because learning
STARTS in stories with partial, at times almost mythological truth.
Haven't you ever taken calculus? Most of Calculus 101 is bullshit from
the standpoint of modern mathematics, and students struggle with the
material.
Their "flash of insight" is often a CRITICAL flash of insight where
they realize that what the teacher said was under some interpretation
WRONG. The real teacher, like Wittgenstein, knows
6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands
me
finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through
them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder,
after he has climbed up on it.) He must transcend these propositions,
and then he will see the world aright.
"But professor Schildt told us that the stack grows toward the heap
and the heap grows down to the stack! You've got it backwards! Your
code won't work!"
"Don't be an ass. The POINT is that the stack and the heap are of
varying size with no apriori bound, dipshit, whereas the size of the
compiled code is fixed. Therefore, the IMPORTANT point is that the
stack and the heap have to occupy what's left over when my program is
given a fixed amount of memory on startup, a quantum which is not
modified in our OS."
Should "professor" Schildt have said this? Not if it's going to
confuse the class.
You think, autistically, that there's something out there called the
"truth" and it's to be found in data systems. But ultimately, "the
truth" is ethical. It's what contributes to human survival and human
flourishing, not, in the last analysis, to the "correctness" of
computer code, half of which is bullshit computer games, one quarter
of which could be thrown away, and one quarter of which gets people
killed as part of advanced high-tech weaponry used for shits and
giggles in places like Gaza.
>
> > sometimes errors are too trivial to be wort worrying about (in
> > books, not in production code).
>
> Less often in books than in production code, because books are aimed at
> teaching people how to do things.
"Those who can't do, teach" goes the saw. But I'd add that those who
can't teach should not teach the teacher, although teaching (and
jailing, and shooting) teachers is a favorite hobby world-wide of
Fascists, Taliban, and it seems autistic twerps who simply did not
have the chops to criticise Herb, and need to apologize.
>
> > Then almost all code contains some bugs,
> > especially code that isn't actually run in real applications.
>
> Agreed.
>
> > It is easy for programmers to convince themselves that a book which is in
> > fact very good at what it sets out to do is worthless.
>
> I don't think this is the case. None of your categories cover the
> sizeof(rec) example. The error is not trivial at all -- the code will
> absolutely not work as described on any system currently in existence.
> And, crucially, it's *not* just a bug in the code -- it's a bug in
> the explanation given. The explanation, which is the crucial part that
> the reader will be learning from, is more wrong than the code.
Had you focused on the genuine errors, where errors exist in most
large computer books with code examples, your errata would have been
accepted. What was unacceptable for you to speak without recognizable
incompetence of Schildt in general.
>
> Similarly, Schildt doesn't "skate over details" -- he gives details which
> are incorrect or only correct in some specific contexts, without any hint
> at all that he's describing something that may not be universal.
>
You're confusing computer science and programming language training
here.
> As a book on "How C works on DOS and Windows", it would be a better book,
> but would still have enough flaws that it would not be one I could honestly
> recommend to anyone. As a book purporting to be a complete reference,
> applicable to all platforms, it was crap.
>
> -s
> --
spinoza1111
> On 2009-11-04,spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > No, it's not. I'm not autistic and I don't have a learning disorder,
> > but I don't mock Seebach for being autistic other than calling him an
> > "autistic twerp", of course. You see, an "autistic twerp" is someone
> > who simultaneously tries to get sympathy for his disease
>
> When have I ever done that? I have pointed out that your derision is
> likely to make people less sympathetic to you, because many people are
> by-default sympathetic to any or all disabilities (note: "disability"
> or "disorder", but probably not "disease), but I have not stated that I
> want them to do this, or expect it, or anything like that.
>
> > but doesn't
> > take responsibility for the fact that, in Seeb's case, his autism
> > causes him to be mistaken about the knowledge of others,
>
> If this is the case, it has not been shown. Indeed, you haven't yet
> shown that I am substantively mistaken about the knowledge of others,
> let alone what the causes of such mistakes might be.
>
> > and to make
> > unwarranted generalizations from small data sets.
>
> Unwarranted but provisional, I'd grant -- it's a good way to learn.
>
> > It also causes the
> > autistic to be deficient at organizing material (in his Vicious
> > Tirade) in a sensible way, which caused McGraw Hill to reject it.
>
> Except that, as you've been told several times, that was never submitted
> to McGraw Hill.
You're lying:
"Don't bother contacting the publisher; they apparently don't feel
these errors are significant."
>
> > And it's obscene to turn from trying to get sympathy for having a
> > fashionable disease, and a fashionable sexual orientation, to labeling
> > others mentally ill.
>
> The only reason I mentioned the sexual orientation was that you used the
> word "faggots" to mean "people who understand algorithms better than I do."
>
> -s
> --
Richard Heathfield
<99868231-4bfb-4180...@b36g2000prf.googlegroups.com>,
spinoza1111 wrote:
<nonsense snipped>
In the next paragraph, "you" refers to Peter Seebach.
> Yet you were the source of a rumor campaign which has seriously
> damaged Schildt
Last year, you thought I was the source. Now you think Seebs is the
source. I've got news for you:
(a) There Is No Rumour Campaign;
(b) Seebs was by no means the first to criticise Schildt's C books.
> because of the Internet in which (1) it is hard to
> determine whether information is credible unless it originates at
> a .edu site
It's *trivial*. All you have to do is look stuff up in the language
spec. Sheesh.
<snip>
> Your errata was rejected by technical people at McGraw Hill
Wrong. Again.
> yet to
> my knowledge you have NOT ONCE sought confirmation of your claims
You can confirm them yourself, by checking the original text against
the language spec.
<lots of nonsense snipped>
Richard Heathfield
spinoza1111 wrote:
> On Nov 5, 2:23 am, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
>> On 2009-11-04,spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
<snip>
>> > It also causes the
>> > autistic to be deficient at organizing material (in his Vicious
>> > Tirade) in a sensible way, which caused McGraw Hill to reject it.
>>
>> Except that, as you've been told several times, that was never
>> submitted to McGraw Hill.
>
> You're lying:
You have not demonstrated this.
> "Don't bother contacting the publisher; they apparently don't feel
> these errors are significant."
Congratulations. You've actually produced some evidence in an attempt
to buttress your claim. This is practically unheard of for you, so I
suppose we should be suitably impressed. Unfortunately, the evidence
is unconvincing, as it can adequately be explained by existing known
information. If I recall correctly, they offered to pay him to
produce an errata list, but he considered the amount insufficient for
the amount of work involved. If they had felt the errors were
significant, presumably they would have offered him a reasonable
amount to correct those errors. Seebs has always maintained, as far
as I can tell, that he did not submit his list to the publisher.
<snip>
Seebs
> All very true. However, you're missing something.
No, I'm not.
> We don't let non-teachers tell teachers what or how to teach in
> general, and when we do, the results are about half the time pretty
> bad.
We do, however, let specialists in a field point out that a particular
teacher doesn't know the field.
> If Dennis Ritchie or Brian Kernighan had written an anti-Schildt rant
> we would take it seriously because both have a combination of
> verifiable academic qualifications and industrial experience to rank
> them ABOVE Schildt.
In other words, you don't care about truth, you care only about status.
Fine.
> You are in fact not a real programmer by your own admission,
You know, your ability to read for comprehension is pretty minimal. I'm
a programmer. The specific case in which I don't do programming but merely
filter things is when I'm passing compiler bug reports on to a vendor...
But note that even CREATING those bug reports is often programming beyond
what most people would ever need to do. ;)
> but some
> sort of bug finder who may indeed program very good tools for your own
> use and the use of your group, and you have no academic certification
> in computer science.
My code is run by all our customers, not just internally. :)
> Whereas Herb was both employed as a programmer
> and completed an MSCS.
That's nice.
> You have confirmed this when you foolishly mis-represented Michael L.
> Scott, the author of Programming Language Pragmatics as writing about C
> ++ on p. 111 of that book when he was writing about C,
I did not represent him as anything, I merely pointed out that what was
said wasn't true of C, but perhaps it was of another language.
> and you said on
> two occasions that he was also wrong to speak of Forbidden Things,
> such as "the" stack...when you haven't shown us how to implement C
> runtime without a stack,
But I have shown how to implement a C runtime without the thing Schildt
actually describes, which is not "a" stack but "the" stack, and is
specifically asserted to have very specific trait which are not universal.
> Your errata was rejected by technical people at McGraw Hill
This is not true. The document you see was never shown to any technical
people at McGraw hill, or indeed, to anyone at McGraw Hill. They got
a vague letter asserting that there appeared to be errors.
> yet to my
> knowledge you have NOT ONCE sought confirmation of your claims by
> having them reviewed by a real C programmer with academic
> qualifications, writing experience, and knowledge of both Microsoft
> and unix-based technology.
I posted them on the Internet and have welcomed comments and feedback
for fifteen years. In all that time, I've gotten no bug reports which
withstood even casual analysis.
> It's time to apologize and withdraw "C: the Complete Nonsense".
When someone proves to me that the statements therein are false, sure.
> This approach doesn't work in the business world. Of course, the
> business world sucks since it's based on systematic inequality.
So fuck the business world. I am not interested in writing something
based on systematic inequality; I am interested in writing something true.
> Nonetheless, programmers confronted with a new language don't want to
> hear that "I will explain all this later since right now you swine are
> too stupid to get it".
Cite.
> Instead, they want a working model which they can examine.
Cite.
> Any given time-slice of a classroom on a video or in a transcript will
> consist of stops and starts and half-truths.
Depends on the teacher.
> "Don't be an ass. The POINT is that the stack and the heap are of
> varying size with no apriori bound, dipshit, whereas the size of the
> compiled code is fixed. Therefore, the IMPORTANT point is that the
> stack and the heap have to occupy what's left over when my program is
> given a fixed amount of memory on startup, a quantum which is not
> modified in our OS."
If that actually happened, you'd have a point. Howeve, Schildt made
it clear that he was specifically talking about the directions and
relationship of their growth.
Consider: Schildt asserts that the stack can run into the heap. Why
can it run into the heap, but not run into the program code? Because
he's describing a specific system's implementation, but claiming it to
be "how things work".
> Had you focused on the genuine errors, where errors exist in most
> large computer books with code examples, your errata would have been
> accepted.
I think I would have had to submit them.
-s
--
Seebs
>> Except that, as you've been told several times, that was never submitted
>> to McGraw Hill.
> You're lying:
No, you're failing to read for comprehension.
> "Don't bother contacting the publisher; they apparently don't feel
> these errors are significant."
Right. I've already told you what happened:
1. I wrote them to say there were errors, and they should fix
them.
2. They offered me a small amount of money to do a technical
review.
3. I declined because I didn't think the money was good enough
to justify the effort.
4. I wrote up enough errors to make the point, posted it, and
forgot about it.
With the benefit of several years' professional writing and editing
experience, I now know that the money wasn't intended to be enough to
justify the effort, and I should have just taken them up on it and
fixed it. At the time, though, I didn't understand that part of the
process, so I made a poor decision.
However.
1. At no point did I submit a list of errata past a couple of things I
could describe as one-liners to anyone.
2. They never rejected my technical claims, they just didn't offer me an
amount of money that, at the time, I thought was reasonable for the amount
of work I'd have had to do to write up a more complete list.
The point might be a lot more relevant if the book I had looked at were
still in print, but it's not, so it hardly matters.
But as a pure matter of fact, it is worth pointing out that the errata were
never submitted to them, and there has never been any technical evaluation
that I know of by McGraw Hill of those claims.
(Interesting that your claimed sources of information about Schildt's feelings
about the matter don't include any coverage of our correspondence, though...
Almost as though you're just making it up and don't actually have any
information.)
-s
--
Nick Keighley
> On Nov 9, 1:24 am, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
> > On 2009-11-08, Malcolm McLean <regniz...@btinternet.com> wrote:
<snip>
> If Dennis Ritchie or Brian Kernighan had written an anti-Schildt rant
> we would take it seriously because both have a combination of
> verifiable academic qualifications and industrial experience to rank
> them ABOVE Schildt.
<snip>
> > > Sometimes it is helpful to skate over details for pedagogical
> > > purposes,
>
> > Agreed. However, Schildt's problems are not "skating over details".
>
> > Let me give you an example of "skating over details for pedagogical
> > purposes". I'm afraid it's from a shell book, 'cuz that's what I had
> > handy.
>
> > If you try to assign a value including spaces to a variable,
> > you will discover that the shell splits the line into words before
> > trying to assign variables. Thus, this doesn't work:
>
> > $ name = John Smith
> > sh: Smith: command not found
> > $ echo hello, $name
> > hello,
>
> > A brief explanation of what went wrong follows in the next section;
> > a full explanation of what went wrong is found in Chapter 3. For now,
> > the key lesson is that the assignment doesn't work, and you need a way
> > to prevent the shell from splitting words.
>
> > That's how you "skate over details". The reader is warned that there's
> > more lurking, but is given a workable first approximation.
>
> This approach doesn't work in the business world. Of course, the
> business world sucks since it's based on systematic inequality.
> Nonetheless, programmers confronted with a new language don't want to
> hear that "I will explain all this later since right now you swine are
> too stupid to get it".
"let us begin with a quick introduction to C. Our aim is to show the
essential elements of the language without getting bogged down in
details, rules, and exceptions. At this point we are not trying to be
complete or even precise [...]."
> Instead, they want a working model which they can examine.
<snip>
spinoza1111
> On 2009-11-09,spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > On Nov 5, 2:23 am, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
> >> Except that, as you've been told several times, that was never submitted
> >> to McGraw Hill.
> > You're lying:
>
> No, you're failing to read for comprehension.
>
> > "Don't bother contacting the publisher; they apparently don't feel
> > these errors are significant."
>
> Right. I've already told you what happened:
No, you haven't.
> 1. I wrote them to say there were errors, and they should fix
> them.
> 2. They offered me a small amount of money to do a technical
> review.
> 3. I declined because I didn't think the money was good enough
> to justify the effort.
> 4. I wrote up enough errors to make the point, posted it, and
> forgot about it.
The errors didn't make your point. You posted only twenty and most of
them were trivia. You said, in one and the same document, that those
were the known errors and that there were hundreds more (a
contradiction: a false statement: therefore, a prima facie lie).
You may have feared your review would be reviewed by genuine experts,
and quite possibly your fear (and your greed) caused you to bypass
this review and post the Vitriolic Tirade, where it became the viral
single source, other than Clive Feather's tirade against a later book,
for the Schildt urban legend and lie to get started.
>
> With the benefit of several years' professional writing and editing
> experience, I now know that the money wasn't intended to be enough to
> justify the effort, and I should have just taken them up on it and
> fixed it. At the time, though, I didn't understand that part of the
> process, so I made a poor decision.
Yes, you did. And you need to make amends by removing the document and
replacing it with an explanation and an apology to Herb for the damage
you have enabled.
>
> However.
>
> 1. At no point did I submit a list of errata past a couple of things I
> could describe as one-liners to anyone.
> 2. They never rejected my technical claims, they just didn't offer me an
> amount of money that, at the time, I thought was reasonable for the amount
> of work I'd have had to do to write up a more complete list.
What you say here contradicts your claim that McGraw Hill didn't think
the errors were important, therefore your article is ALSO an attack on
them...although I really don't care about the reputation of a
corporation. McGraw Hill thought the errors potentially important
because they welcomed you on-board with real money. However, your
submission to them would have had to pass a review by people senior to
you and this may have been your real reason for declining. Perhaps
more experienced people would have chortled at your concerns about
"what main returns".
>
> The point might be a lot more relevant if the book I had looked at were
> still in print, but it's not, so it hardly matters.
It still is, in a 4th edition.
>
> But as a pure matter of fact, it is worth pointing out that the errata were
> never submitted to them, and there has never been any technical evaluation
> that I know of by McGraw Hill of those claims.
That's not what you said in The Vitriolic Tirade.
>
> (Interesting that your claimed sources of information about Schildt's feelings
> about the matter don't include any coverage of our correspondence, though...
> Almost as though you're just making it up and don't actually have any
> information.)
I am not at liberty to disclose my sources on this matter. However, I
have confirmed that the campaign you enabled was personally
destructive to Schildt.
>
> -s
> --
John Kelly
<spino...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>On Nov 10, 12:39�am, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
>> With the benefit of several years' professional writing and editing
>I am not at liberty to disclose my sources on this matter.
>However, I have confirmed that the campaign you enabled was
>personally destructive to Schildt.
Funny that anyone who purports to be an author and editor can be so
cavalier about slander and libel. Certain jurisdictions in the US take
it seriously, nowadays to the point of penetrating online anonymity.
--
Webmail for Dialup Users
http://www.isp2dial.com/freeaccounts.html
spinoza1111
> On 2009-11-09,spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > All very true. However, you're missing something.
>
> No, I'm not.
>
> > We don't let non-teachers tell teachers what or how to teach in
> > general, and when we do, the results are about half the time pretty
> > bad.
>
> We do, however, let specialists in a field point out that a particular
> teacher doesn't know the field.
I do not think you have sufficient chops as a specialist in the field
to make and enable a serious personal attack on a man that included
the transformation of his patronym into a barnyard and playground
ephitet.
You had not at the time published a computer book, although I you have
published "Beginning Portable Shell Scripting" and co-authored a book
on Unix(R) in 2005. Neither of those books is on C. You also seem to
have been involved with C Unleashed, a rather silly book which is out
of print, and this would explain a lot of your bad behavior and
collusion with Heathfield in this thread.
You have not, by your own admission, taken a computer science class. I
understand that you said that in former years many experts such as
Dijkstra had not taken compsci, which was a very silly counterexample
(and grievously disrespectful to true pioneers). It was a silly
counterexample because those experts were creating computer science.
It was grievously disrespectful because people like Dijsktra were MEN
who had the courage to frame IDEAS which might OFFEND powerful
corporations: they didn't lash out against their colleaugues by name
like BOYS.
You have made some extremely silly claims based on your lack of
academic chops, such as telling Schildt not to say that C negatives
are [mostly] twos complement, and getting your panty hose in a tangle
about what main returns.
>
> > If Dennis Ritchie or Brian Kernighan had written an anti-Schildt rant
> > we would take it seriously because both have a combination of
> > verifiable academic qualifications and industrial experience to rank
> > them ABOVE Schildt.
>
> In other words, you don't care about truth, you care only about status.
I care about knowledge production, and based in part on my experience
as a wikipedia contributor (whose contributions survived editing prior
to 2006 and the invasion of the Hitlerpedians, and which still grace
the Adorno, Kant, IBM 1401 and other pages), I don't think that you
have access to the truth, only to cycles of self-referring texts. And
you ARE concerned with status, indeed in a vicious and evil way. As
opposed to respecting authorities, you make a fetish of creating
negative anti-authorities, dream figures like Schildt and me who
justify, in their own putative wrong doing and "insanity", your own
wrong-doing and what you think of as your sanity...merely because they
are different.
The status you seek is that of the Freudian Horde, of sons who kill
the father but will never succeed him.
> Fine.
>
> > You are in fact not a real programmer by your own admission,
>
> You know, your ability to read for comprehension is pretty minimal. I'm
> a programmer. The specific case in which I don't do programming but merely
> filter things is when I'm passing compiler bug reports on to a vendor...
> But note that even CREATING those bug reports is often programming beyond
> what most people would ever need to do. ;)
If you say so. But I need more detail. I already believed that like
any competent little techie, you create software tools to make your
life easier, and sure, if they are any good, your mates might use
them.
I don't like the term "script kiddie". But the question is if you
SHIP.
>
> > but some
> > sort of bug finder who may indeed program very good tools for your own
> > use and the use of your group, and you have no academic certification
> > in computer science.
>
> My code is run by all our customers, not just internally. :)
This contradicts what you've said. But you've only described a 5000
line tool. But even if you're a full scale programmer, which I'll
admit if you can give more evidence without violating non-disclosure,
I'll still be right based on the text of The Vitriolic Tirade. It
lists trivia, claims they are the known problems, and makes reference
like Joe McCarthy to "many more errors".
>
> > Whereas Herb was both employed as a programmer
> > and completed an MSCS.
>
> That's nice.
>
> > You have confirmed this when you foolishly mis-represented Michael L.
> > Scott, the author of Programming Language Pragmatics as writing about C
> > ++ on p. 111 of that book when he was writing about C,
>
> I did not represent him as anything, I merely pointed out that what was
> said wasn't true of C, but perhaps it was of another language.
But it IS true of C, as Michael Scott writes on p 111 of Programming
Language Pragmatics, that "If a language permits recursion, static
allocation of local variables is no longer an option, since the number
of instances of a variable that may need to exist at the same time is
conceptually unbounded. Fortunately, the natural nesting of subroutine
calls makes it easy to allocate space for locals on a stack." Scott is
talking about a class of languages which includes C. C permits
recursion. Luckily for C (to paraphrase Scott) we have a mechanism
that handles recursion.
It's possible that a nonstack method will be found to handle
recursion. I know of none. It's also possible that there's a highly
optimized, embedded compiler for C, written by some clown whose mother
was frightened by a stack when he was in her womb and who hates
stacks, which manages to flatten all recursion in most cases, and
which refuses to compile all other cases, and it's possible that this
clown was in on the development of the Standard...which doesn't
recognize the stack.
Flipping through Scott, by the way, I find statements that could be
subject, at-will, to the sort of deconstructive literary criticism
that you used on Schildt, where the goal is to (1) find a scenario
where the author might be wrong, and then (2) generalize this into a
charge that the author is ignorant of the material. For Scott writes,
of C: "Here the keyword const applies to the record to which r points;
the caller must pass the address of its record explicitly, but can be
assured that the callee will not change the record's contents".
The "assurance" here is real in one sense, not in another. Given the
zany logic you applied to Schildt, we can always find counter-examples
as if we were searching on the job for compiler bug reports. But a
book is not a program.
>
> > and you said on
> > two occasions that he was also wrong to speak of Forbidden Things,
> > such as "the" stack...when you haven't shown us how to implement C
> > runtime without a stack,
>
> But I have shown how to implement a C runtime without the thing Schildt
> actually describes, which is not "a" stack but "the" stack, and is
> specifically asserted to have very specific trait which are not universal.
No, you have not. If this runtime, which I have not seen because of
the large volume of posts on this matter, handles recursion, then it
implements, we have seen, a thing which is mathematically a stack.
>
> > Your errata was rejected by technical people at McGraw Hill
>
> This is not true. The document you see was never shown to any technical
> people at McGraw hill, or indeed, to anyone at McGraw Hill. They got
> a vague letter asserting that there appeared to be errors.
OK, I accept this explanation and withdraw the claim. You're still on
the hot seat.
>
> > yet to my
> > knowledge you have NOT ONCE sought confirmation of your claims by
> > having them reviewed by a real C programmer with academic
> > qualifications, writing experience, and knowledge of both Microsoft
> > and unix-based technology.
>
> I posted them on the Internet and have welcomed comments and feedback
> for fifteen years. In all that time, I've gotten no bug reports which
> withstood even casual analysis.
You've just gotten The Mother of all Bug Reports from me with buy in
from Kenny.
>
> > It's time to apologize and withdraw "C: the Complete Nonsense".
>
> When someone proves to me that the statements therein are false, sure.
Done. And they don't have to be false. They are also misleading and
offensive and small-minded and nasty.
Your problem, I think, is that all the fathers they've gone down, true
love they've been without it: and all their daughter put you down
because you don't think about it...to quote, yes, Dylan. That is:
something rather dramatic has happened to the human psyche.
The corporate-academic father of the fifties failed to show his sons
the way. The abandoned Freudian horde were left to their own devices
to create new systems of morality, for the corporate morality of the
"man in the grey flannel suit" was amoral and the son could see that.
Now, some of these sons evolved a sort of false techie morality of
"truth" because in their world, filled as politics and law are with
seemingly irreconcilable claims, where politicians, lawyers and
corporate types will believe anything and say anything for money,
nothing seemed true. They stumbled on an apparent truth machine or lie
detector, not quite realizing that this was just frozen labor like any
commodity (read Marx).
Like cargo cultists the abandoned Sons thought to construct a
libertarian world of pure "truth" but as productive forces evolved,
guys like Schildt with a job to do messed up their truth.
>
> > This approach doesn't work in the business world. Of course, the
> > business world sucks since it's based on systematic inequality.
>
> So fuck the business world. I am not interested in writing something
> based on systematic inequality; I am interested in writing something true.
You're in the business world. I am weary of the way in which little
computer programmers pretend they are not part of capitalism, because
they are embedded in it.
>
> > Nonetheless, programmers confronted with a new language don't want to
> > hear that "I will explain all this later since right now you swine are
> > too stupid to get it".
>
> Cite.
My training experience, in C, at Princeton and in Chicago, and the
unhappy experience of my Chicago client with a previous C trainer, and
their happiness with my results constitute a cite.
Students in calculus and C need above all to get started. Showing a
simplified but working model is an age-old pedagogical tool.
Have you ever taught? I see where you're a "fellow Apress
author" (which means you shouldn't be calling your mates insane: what
goes around comes around) but you don't seem to have classroom
experience.
>
> > Instead, they want a working model which they can examine.
>
> Cite.
I'm talking real world experience.
>
> > Any given time-slice of a classroom on a video or in a transcript will
> > consist of stops and starts and half-truths.
>
> Depends on the teacher.
>
> > "Don't be an ass. The POINT is that the stack and the heap are of
> > varying size with no apriori bound, dipshit, whereas the size of the
> > compiled code is fixed. Therefore, the IMPORTANT point is that the
> > stack and the heap have to occupy what's left over when my program is
> > given a fixed amount of memory on startup, a quantum which is not
> > modified in our OS."
>
> If that actually happened, you'd have a point. Howeve, Schildt made
> it clear that he was specifically talking about the directions and
> relationship of their growth.
M O D E L. They could have gone in the opposite direction, and any
fool can see that. Alternatively, a fixed max amount could have been
allocated for the stack and the heap separately.
But to add this complication would be like showing high school kids,
not Euclid's proof of the Pythagorean theorem, but Dijkstra's
generalization for oblique triangles (http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/
EWD/transcriptions/EWD09xx/EWD975.html).
>
> Consider: Schildt asserts that the stack can run into the heap. Why
> can it run into the heap, but not run into the program code? Because
> he's describing a specific system's implementation, but claiming it to
> be "how things work".
>
Bullshit. If his remit was to say "how things work" he'd write an
academic book on computer science.
Furthermore, you seem to be deficient even in your understanding of
comp sci. I say this because comp sci's natural and most effective
philosophy of mathematics isn't Platonism (the belief that mathematics
is based on timeless truths in a world of forms) it is
"constructivism" alternatively, "intuitionism", which DOESN'T ACCEPT
AS TRUE mathematical statements that can only be proved by way of
proof-by-contradiction.
Your Platonism causes you to treat negative propositions and barren
possibilities such as "C doesn't need twos complement" or "C might not
need the stack" as timeless and eternal Platonic forms, a mistake even
Plato didn't make.
Herb shows a constructive truth. To "prove" the existence of a stack
in all, or let's say nearly all, C runtimes, Herb constructs an
existence proof in the form of a working model.
This model, when the accidents such as growth in one direction or the
other are disregarded, PROVES that "C can be elegantly run using a
stack of some sort".
Contrast your Platonist, shading into Scholastic, "proof" that "Mom!
Herb is wrong"! It is to cite a standard almost as if the Standard is
Holy Writ. This is blasphemy even in religious terms, for the Standard
is just a horseshit work of fallen man, isn't it?
> > Had you focused on the genuine errors, where errors exist in most
> > large computer books with code examples, your errata would have been
> > accepted.
>
> I think I would have had to submit them.
And you didn't.
>
> -s
> --
spinoza1111
> In <f3c04da9-95ec-4275-a7ff-b45e7d987...@12g2000pri.googlegroups.com>,
>
> spinoza1111wrote:
> > On Nov 5, 2:23 am, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
> >> On 2009-11-04,spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> >> > It also causes the
> >> > autistic to be deficient at organizing material (in his Vicious
> >> > Tirade) in a sensible way, which caused McGraw Hill to reject it.
>
> >> Except that, as you've been told several times, that was never
> >> submitted to McGraw Hill.
>
> > You're lying:
>
> You have not demonstrated this.
>
> > "Don't bother contacting the publisher; they apparently don't feel
> > these errors are significant."
>
> Congratulations. You've actually produced some evidence in an attempt
> to buttress your claim. This is practically unheard of for you, so I
> suppose we should be suitably impressed. Unfortunately, the evidence
> is unconvincing, as it can adequately be explained by existing known
> information. If I recall correctly, they offered to pay him to
> produce an errata list, but he considered the amount insufficient for
> the amount of work involved. If they had felt the errors were
"He considered the amount insufficient for the amount of work
involved."
BUT: he WAS willing to do a little work for free, and this was list
the errors he knew, and add his unproven extrapolation that there were
lots more!
Seebach then posted this unrefereed and unreviewed material on the Web
and it became the single source for the Schildt Canard, along with
Feather's tirade...and, it may be that Feather was inspired to trash
Schildt based on the apparent authority of Seebach!
Seebach was unwilling to do the work, as a responsible adult, perhaps
not only because he wasn't getting a pile of cash but also because
Schildt himself would referee the errata!
Seebach made what appears to be a conscious choice not to let the
VICTIM of this behavior have a chance to answer the charges before
publishing them!
"Until this moment, Senator, I think I have never really gauged your
cruelty or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to
the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what
looks to be a brilliant career with us...(L)ittle did I dream you
could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It
is true that he will continue to be with Hale and Dorr (Welch's law
firm). It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall
always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power
to forgive you for your reckless cruelty I would do so. I like to
think that I am a gentle man, but your forgiveness will have to come
from someone other than me. ”
...
“Senator, may we not drop this? We know he belonged to the Lawyers
Guild...Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You've done
enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left
no sense of decency?”
...
“Mr. McCarthy, I will not discuss this further with you. You have sat
within six feet of me and could ask - could have asked me about Fred
Fisher. You have seen fit to bring it out. And if there is a God in
Heaven it will do neither you nor your cause any good. I will not
discuss it further. I will not ask Mr. Cohn any more questions. You,
Mr. Chairman, may, if you will, call the next witness"
Richard Heathfield
spinoza1111 wrote:
<snip>
> "He considered the amount insufficient for the amount of work
> involved."
>
> BUT: he WAS willing to do a little work for free,
Or more likely, he'd already /done/ a little work for free, and saw no
reason to waste it.
> and this was list
> the errors he knew, and add his unproven extrapolation that there
> were lots more!
There are lots more. Go find a few yourself - it's not hard.
> Seebach then posted this unrefereed and unreviewed material on the
> Web and it became the single source for the Schildt Canard,
No, the single source for the Schildt nonsense was Schildt.
<nonsense snipped>
> Seebach made what appears to be a conscious choice not to let the
> VICTIM of this behavior have a chance to answer the charges before
> publishing them!
If Schildt wants to take part in these discussions, he'd be very
welcome.
<nonsense snipped>
John Kelly
<spino...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>The corporate-academic father of the fifties failed to show his sons
>the way. The abandoned Freudian horde were left to their own devices
>to create new systems of morality, for the corporate morality of the
>"man in the grey flannel suit" was amoral and the son could see that.
>
>Now, some of these sons evolved a sort of false techie morality of
>"truth" because in their world, filled as politics and law are with
>seemingly irreconcilable claims, where politicians, lawyers and
>corporate types will believe anything and say anything for money,
>nothing seemed true. They stumbled on an apparent truth machine or lie
>detector, not quite realizing that this was just frozen labor like any
>commodity (read Marx).
>
>Like cargo cultists the abandoned Sons thought to construct a
>libertarian world of pure "truth" but as productive forces evolved,
>guys like Schildt with a job to do messed up their truth.
Some adults act like ill mannered juveniles who never emotionally
matured beyond the age of 16. I've met 40 year olds like that. It just
makes me wonder why a teenager looks so old.
John Kelly
<r...@see.sig.invalid> wrote:
>In <b79d332b-09d8-4dde...@j9g2000prh.googlegroups.com>,
>spinoza1111 wrote:
>> Seebach made what appears to be a conscious choice not to let the
>> VICTIM of this behavior have a chance to answer the charges before
>> publishing them!
>If Schildt wants to take part in these discussions, he'd be very
>welcome.
If I was a lawyer preparing a libel lawsuit, I would advise my client to
refrain from public comment on the matter.
Seebs
> In <b79d332b-09d8-4dde...@j9g2000prh.googlegroups.com>,
> spinoza1111 wrote:
>> Seebach made what appears to be a conscious choice not to let the
>> VICTIM of this behavior have a chance to answer the charges before
>> publishing them!
> If Schildt wants to take part in these discussions, he'd be very
> welcome.
Okay, this is from memory and it was like thirteen years ago, so I
could have it wrong, but the sequence of events, as I recall, was roughly:
1. Notice many errors described on Usenet.
2. Find spectacular examples (e.g., "if (x<>1)") in a coworker's copy.
3. Check current ed in bookstore, find many errors remaining.
4. Write McGraw Hill to complain.
5. Get answer back offering small honorarium for a tech review.
6. Send them a note saying that it would cost more than that. (An error
on my part, because I didn't understand publishing at all.)
7. Get a fax from them, containing a forwarded fax from Schildt, containing
two pages or so of standard quotes and poor arguments defending "void main".
8. Decide to just go ahead and write stuff up.
Schildt presumably has some kind of email and web access. It's been trivial
to contact me, and it's not as though I've never had people write me to tell
me about errors on my web pages.
But it's of particular note that I had confirmation in hand that Schildt
was unwilling to correct at least one error, but that his "answers" to the
charges were full of crap. (Note: I have no clue whether I still have
those pieces of paper. I had them in the last apartment we rented before
we moved to the house I moved out of a decade later, so we are talking
about a noticeable gap...)
-s
--
Seebs
> If I was a lawyer preparing a libel lawsuit, I would advise my client to
> refrain from public comment on the matter.
(s/was/were/, unless are talking about the specific factual question of
whether or not you have been at some point a lawyer preparing a libel
lawsuit.)
Having had a couple of cases where people did, in fact, threaten me with libel
lawsuits, I think you are missing a key point. A while back, I wrote an
article in which I accused a couple of people, naming their full names and
place of business, of stealing roughly $100,000 from a brain-damaged guy.
This became one of the higher ranking Google search results for some of the
participants; inexplicably, there came to be some unhappiness about this.
They threatened a libel suit, as a result of which I updated the page to
correct two small factual errors (e.g., one number changed from $319,000 to
$317,500).
But the interesting thing is: They contacted me IMMEDIATELY, because if
you were to go to court on defamation without having first tried to get
the error corrected, you'd not be scoring points with the judge.
-s
--
Seebs
> cavalier about slander and libel. Certain jurisdictions in the US take
> it seriously, nowadays to the point of penetrating online anonymity.
If there were any hint of anonymity in my writing, this would probably
have some kind of relevance.
However, the reason I'm cavalier about them is that I have a pretty decent
lawyer, and at least in the US, truth is an absolute defense against
defamation claims. I have no worries about that; I've had this content
vetted plenty of times, and gone over, and examined, and I'm simply not
worried.
-s
--
Nick
> On 2009-11-14, John Kelly <j...@isp2dial.com> wrote:
>> If I was a lawyer preparing a libel lawsuit, I would advise my client to
>> refrain from public comment on the matter.
>
> (s/was/were/, unless are talking about the specific factual question of
> whether or not you have been at some point a lawyer preparing a libel
> lawsuit.)
You see, this is why we can't avoid English discussion! The subjunctive
is practically dead in British English, so "was" is perfectly normal for
these meanings and "were" is starting to sound distinctly odd to British
ears. Not that i know that John in British, but I thought you might
like to know that.
Seebs
> You see, this is why we can't avoid English discussion! The subjunctive
> is practically dead in British English, so "was" is perfectly normal for
> these meanings and "were" is starting to sound distinctly odd to British
> ears.
That sounds confusing.
> Not that i know that John in British, but I thought you might
> like to know that.
Yes, I would. Thanks, I'll have to keep that in mind. One more thing
to put in the bin next to "moot" and "table" (which have opposite meanings
in meetingspeak between the UK and the US).
Seebs
> Ah, I know about the "table" business, but what's this about "moot"? To
> me a "moot point" is one no longer worth discussing, because some
> condition no longer obtains. E.g. if the Russians were still talking
> about beating the Americans to the moon.
Apparently (and I got this indirectly), to "moot" an issue is to bring
it up for discussion in UK English. Or at least sometimes is.
Richard Heathfield
> On 2009-11-14, Tim Streater <timst...@waitrose.com> wrote:
>> Ah, I know about the "table" business, but what's this about
>> "moot"? To me a "moot point" is one no longer worth discussing,
>> because some condition no longer obtains. E.g. if the Russians were
>> still talking about beating the Americans to the moon.
>
> Apparently (and I got this indirectly), to "moot" an issue is to
> bring it up for discussion in UK English.
UK English? Not sure I know what that is. It's hard enough to
understand someone from three streets away, let alone a different
county. And Scousers and Geordies have a language all their own.
> Or at least sometimes is.
Chambers lists two verb senses (of which the above is the first), one
adjectival sense; and two noun senses. See also "Entmoot" [Tolkien
1955].
Richard
> In <slrnhfu0pv.s62...@guild.seebs.net>, Seebs wrote:
>
>> On 2009-11-14, Tim Streater <timst...@waitrose.com> wrote:
>>> Ah, I know about the "table" business, but what's this about
>>> "moot"? To me a "moot point" is one no longer worth discussing,
>>> because some condition no longer obtains. E.g. if the Russians were
>>> still talking about beating the Americans to the moon.
>>
>> Apparently (and I got this indirectly), to "moot" an issue is to
>> bring it up for discussion in UK English.
>
> UK English? Not sure I know what that is. It's hard enough to
> understand someone from three streets away, let alone a different
> county. And Scousers and Geordies have a language all their own.
>
>> Or at least sometimes is.
>
> Chambers lists two verb senses (of which the above is the first), one
> adjectival sense; and two noun senses. See also "Entmoot" [Tolkien
> 1955].
Is this one of those subjects that is only "Off Topic" to non clique
members? I kind of figured it was.
--
"Avoid hyperbole at all costs, its the most destructive argument on
the planet" - Mark McIntyre in comp.lang.c
Nick
It's more that threads should start on topic, and can wander off. I
only arrived here a week or so ago, so can hardly be in a clique, but I
don't have any problem with the idea.