A note on computing thugs and coding bums
spinoza1111
directed at Herbert Schildt, author of The Complete C++ Reference
based on such "mistakes" as telling students that negative numbers are
[mostly] stored twos complement) is that it focused on Herb as a
person not to be trusted.
Several good-faith negative reviews were Amazon-posted in May 2004
about my own book, "Build Your Own .Net Language and Compiler"; but
these reviews called my book "mediocre" and laid out the readers'
expectations that I would have addressed compilation more to the .Net
environment, etc. Fair enough. Other reviewers liked the book.
However, at this time, I'm not worth mounting a deliberate campaign
with a key syntactical change: the shift from the focus on the product
to the focus on the person, and this is the shift that I objected to
in Herb's case. This isn't being conducted on Amazon because I take
steps when it occurs. It is occuring here in my case as well as that
of Herb.
It's Stalinist, it's Fascist, and a lot of other bad things. Kathy
Sierra says it's sexist, too, but it's not.
But, because it's so very unusual for people on electronic networks to
be even physically capable of expressing other than negative emotions
of hatred and rage, confronted as they are with the reification of
their subordination to abstract economic forces in the "workstation"
itself, I am being assaulted for speaking this truth: that it would be
possible to discuss Herb's errors in a specific book, such as the
omission of virtual base classes, without once using syntax of the
form "don't trust Herb" or "Herb is incompetent".
This is being done, I believe, by Richard Heathfield here as the
editor of an inferior and little-regarded book, C Unleashed, to
promote his sales in an inappropriately commercial misuse of usenet.
By "computing thugs" I mean people who unconscionably develop and
market software which makes decisions that controls lives without
elementary controls: people for example who have vended medical
"coverage" software that allows coverage to be denied easily but makes
authorization opaque, and reinsurance and derivative software without
verification that chains of reinsurance or derivatives do not contain
spirals such that the pricing of a reinsurance contract or derivative
ends up recursively depending on that contract or derivative
itself...with the provision of a simple control on this sort of cycle
being, in some shops, a termination offense.
The former type of software created the situation shown by Mike Moore
in his recent film Sicko. Contrary to perception, this film is NOT
about the numerous and growing numbers of uninsured Americans,
including many programmers grudgingly given "consultant" work despite
their skill and experience. It's about paid-up and insured people who
are denied coverage through software that was coded strictly in the
interests of people interested only in accumulating money by denying
coverage, software that should be developed by government and then
given to the companies for mandatory use, or that should be developed
open source.
By "coding bums" I mean the people who serve these thugs, and who've
had any delight or hedonia beaten out of them, who are filled with
rage, and who ignorantly view one or two posts here and then join a
cybernetic mob against the image of the person they feel they've
become: Leon Trotsky's *wildgewordene Kleinburger", the small
bourgeois run amok.
Richard Heathfield
> The key fact about the Schildt campaign (a campaign of criticism
> directed at Herbert Schildt, author of The Complete C++ Reference
> based on such "mistakes" as telling students that negative numbers are
> [mostly] stored twos complement) is that it focused on Herb as a
> person not to be trusted.
No, the key criticism of Schildt's books is that they contain many
technical errors.
> Several good-faith negative reviews were Amazon-posted in May 2004
> about my own book, "Build Your Own .Net Language and Compiler";
You'd be silly to treat them seriously, just as you'd be silly to treat any
positive Amazon reviews seriously, for reasons I have already explained in
a recent thread.
> However, at this time, I'm not worth mounting a deliberate campaign
> with a key syntactical change: the shift from the focus on the product
> to the focus on the person, and this is the shift that I objected to
> in Herb's case. This isn't being conducted on Amazon because I take
> steps when it occurs.
There Is No Campaign. Good books get good crits. Bad books get bad crits.
Schildt writes lots of bad books. Therefore Schildt gets lots of bad
crits.
> It is occuring here in my case as well as that of Herb.
It isn't occurring *at all*.
> But, because it's so very unusual for people on electronic networks to
> be even physically capable of expressing other than negative emotions
Rubbish. Just because *you* don't get to see such expression, that doesn't
mean it doesn't happen. And in fact I know that it does.
> I am being assaulted
Rubbish.
> for speaking this truth:
You wouldn't know truth if it bit you.
> that it would be
> possible to discuss Herb's errors in a specific book, such as the
> omission of virtual base classes, without once using syntax of the
> form "don't trust Herb" or "Herb is incompetent".
And indeed this has been done. Francis Glassborow has done it, and many
others have done it. But you don't get to dictate what other people say.
Some people are indeed able and willing to crit Schildt books patiently,
objectively, and dispassionately. Some people are less patient, especially
after they've uncovered a great many errors that *demonstrate* his
incompetence.
> This is being done, I believe, by Richard Heathfield here as the
> editor of an inferior and little-regarded book, C Unleashed, to
> promote his sales in an inappropriately commercial misuse of usenet.
If you claim that a book is inferior to the Schildt books with which you
are comparing it, you ought to explain why you think it's inferior. If you
claim that a book is little-regarded, you ought to explain why it got a
much better review at ACCU than the Schildt books with which you are
comparing it.
But somehow I feel that you're not going to do this. Whenever you are asked
to back up an assertion with facts, you seem to reply with half a dozen
more assertions, none of which are backed up with facts.
<usual sociology rant snipped>
--
Richard Heathfield <http://www.cpax.org.uk>
Email: -http://www. +rjh@
Google users: <http://www.cpax.org.uk/prg/writings/googly.php>
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999
user923005
Richard, you're being trolled. I think it is pretty obvious. I don't
think he believes one word of what he is saying. He's just pushing
hot buttons to see if he can get responses. Of course, he might
really be that thick, but I doubt it.
IMO-YMMV.
Richard Heathfield
<snip>
> Of course, he might really be that thick, but I doubt it.
Interesting. Tell me - do you have any evidence to justify your
uncertainty?
user923005
> user923005 said:
>
> <snip>
>
> > Of course, he might really be that thick, but I doubt it.
>
> Interesting. Tell me - do you have any evidence to justify your
> uncertainty?
Calling Schildt the author of "C Unleashed" is just a bit too clever
to be an accident.
spinoza1111
"This is being done, I believe, by Richard Heathfield here as the
editor of an inferior and little-regarded book, C Unleashed, to
promote his sales in an inappropriately commercial misuse of usenet."
You can't even read!
spinoza1111
>
> - Show quoted text -
I'm not trolling. My name is Edward G. Nilges. After a 30 year career
in programming, which started with compiler debugging in machine
language and included the development of several large systems and
assisting a Nobel winner, I am a teacher and writer in Hong Kong. I
have published on software since 1976, and I am the author of "Build
Your Own .Net Language and Compiler".
I used this ng in 2003 while writing my book and since that time have
been stalked and harassed by a group led by Richard Heathfield, the
editor of C Unleashed, an inferior and low-sales book. Basically, I
cannot post here, although I shall, without that post being vandalized
by a cybernetic mob incited by Mr. Heathfield who always seems to find
time in his busy schedule to insert a post questioning not content but
competence in a way deliberately designed to emotionally manipulate
the programmers at this site, most of whom are less than competent and
thereby filled with anxiety, an anxiety they cover up by bullying and
joining electronic Lynch mobs.
Richard's bad faith is indicating by his harassment of respected
industry figure Herbert Schildt who in 1989 showed how to write a
simple recursive descent parser for Tiny C, the ability to both write
and explain recursive descent being something that separates the men
from the boys, and the coding bums from the professionals...the former
preferring to make mountains of libel about such crimes as the use of
an invariant expression in a for loop. I also explain recursive
descent in Build Your Own, and I find thugs and authoritarian coding
bums uniquely unable to follow its logic, whence their rage and
anxiety.
I have recently suspended posting and shall resuspend again, because
I'm engaged in authoring an object-oriented riposte to Brian
Kernighan's claim, in the recent O'Reilly Media book Beautiful Code,
that an inferior solution authored in an hour by Rob Pike is
Beautiful...without once challenging Kernighan's competence or worth
as a person.
I repeatedly demonstrate the difference between criticising a person's
output and engaging in systematic campaigns of personal destruction
for economic gain, which appear to be Mr. Heathfield's hobby.
Next time, read posts with due diligence so you don't make stupid
mistakes. I identified Heathfield as the author of C Unleashed, and
Schildt as the author of The Complete C++ Reference. And before you
make wild accusations of trolling, do your homework. Otherwise, you're
just another slob who's found a mob to follow.
Richard Heathfield
> On Jan 9, 4:51 pm, user923005 <dcor...@connx.com> wrote:
<snip>
>> Calling Schildt the author of "C Unleashed" is just a bit too clever
>> to be an accident.
>
> "This is being done, I believe, by Richard Heathfield here as the
> editor of an inferior and little-regarded book, C Unleashed, to
> promote his sales in an inappropriately commercial misuse of usenet."
>
> You can't even read!
Which bit of the following did he mis-read?
From: spinoza1111 <spino...@yahoo.com>
Newsgroups: comp.programming
Subject: Article on Herbert Schildt, author of C Unleashed, repaired on
wikipedia
Date: Mon, 7 Jan 2008 18:58:26 -0800 (PST)
Organization: http://groups.google.com
Lines: 34
Message-ID:
<5eedc5fc-f484-4866...@i3g2000hsf.googlegroups.com>
(This was the first article in the thread, so we know that the subject line
was composed by the author of the message.)
user923005
> spinoza1111 said:
>
> > On Jan 9, 4:51 pm, user923005 <dcor...@connx.com> wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> >> Calling Schildt the author of "C Unleashed" is just a bit too clever
> >> to be an accident.
>
> > "This is being done, I believe, by Richard Heathfield here as the
> > editor of an inferior and little-regarded book, C Unleashed, to
> > promote his sales in an inappropriately commercial misuse of usenet."
>
> > You can't even read!
>
> Which bit of the following did he mis-read?
>
> Newsgroups: comp.programming
> Subject: Article on Herbert Schildt, author of C Unleashed, repaired on
> wikipedia
> Date: Mon, 7 Jan 2008 18:58:26 -0800 (PST)
> Organization:http://groups.google.com
> Lines: 34
> Message-ID:
> <5eedc5fc-f484-4866-a260-331558110...@i3g2000hsf.googlegroups.com>
>
> (This was the first article in the thread, so we know that the subject line
> was composed by the author of the message.)
Let me clarify:
I didn't read any of his posts in the "Article on Herbert Schildt,
author of C Unleashed, repaired on wikipedia" thread. I read the
title, saw the poster, and stopped.
Richard Heathfield
> On Jan 9, 4:19 pm, user923005 <dcor...@connx.com> wrote:
<snip>
>> Richard, you're being trolled. I think it is pretty obvious. I don't
>> think he believes one word of what he is saying. He's just pushing
>> hot buttons to see if he can get responses. Of course, he might
>> really be that thick, but I doubt it.
>
> I'm not trolling. My name is Edward G. Nilges. After a 30 year career
> in programming, which started with compiler debugging in machine
> language and included the development of several large systems and
> assisting a Nobel winner,
ROTFL! Are you still waving that old chestnut around? You are on record as
saying that you had two contacts with him, lasting a total of around an
hour. Even if this is true, which has not been established, it puts the
level of your "assistance" into perspective.
<snip>
> I used this ng in 2003 while writing my book and since that time have
> been stalked and harassed by a group led by Richard Heathfield,
You keep saying this, but it keeps on not being true. I'm not interested in
stalking or harassing anyone. But if you post falsehoods in public, it is
not unreasonable for people to post criticisms or corrections - and that
is all that I'm doing.
> the editor of C Unleashed, an inferior and low-sales book.
To what do you consider it inferior, and on what grounds? As for the sales
volume, you say it is low. Relative to what? Tolkien? Pratchett? K&R2?
Considering that C's days of being the latest fashion were long gone when
the book was published, it didn't do that badly compared to other techie
books of the same kind.
> Basically, I cannot post here,
> although I shall, without that post being vandalized
> by a cybernetic mob incited by Mr. Heathfield
Replying to a post does not constitute vandalism. Nor is there a mob. Nor
would I be inciting it, even if there were.
> who always seems to find
> time in his busy schedule to insert a post questioning not content but
> competence
Wrong. I mean, it's true that I question your competence, yes, but the
reason I question your competence is that my questioning of your content
almost inevitably leads to evasiveness on your part.
> in a way deliberately designed to emotionally manipulate
> the programmers at this site, most of whom are less than competent and
> thereby filled with anxiety, an anxiety they cover up by bullying and
> joining electronic Lynch mobs.
Don't be daft.
> Richard's bad faith is indicating by his harassment of respected
> industry figure Herbert Schildt
Respected by whom? You? Schildt's works are notoriously buggy and he
notoriously doesn't care.
<snip>
> I have recently suspended posting
Not so's anyone would notice.
<snip>
> I repeatedly demonstrate the difference between criticising a person's
> output and engaging in systematic campaigns of personal destruction
> for economic gain, which appear to be Mr. Heathfield's hobby.
Well, I've criticised your output and I've criticised Schildt's output, but
only because it's rubbish. As for the systematic campaign of personal
destruction for economic gain, I've already explained why that would
require me to invest in a time machine.
> Next time, read posts with due diligence so you don't make stupid
> mistakes. I identified Heathfield as the author of C Unleashed,
Next time, read YOUR OWN posts with due diligence so you don't make stupid
mistakes. You identified Schildt as the author of C Unleashed, in the
subject line of the message with ID:
<5eedc5fc-f484-4866...@i3g2000hsf.googlegroups.com>
> and
> Schildt as the author of The Complete C++ Reference.
Whilst it is true that there are several references to such a work on the
Web (thirteen, according to my search), I think you'll find that the title
is actually "C++ - The Complete Reference" (which gets 17000+ hits).
> And before you
> make wild accusations of trolling, do your homework. Otherwise, you're
> just another slob who's found a mob to follow.
You see, user923005? He really /is/ that stupid.
Stephen Howe
> possible to discuss Herb's errors in a specific book, such as the
> omission of virtual base classes, without once using syntax of the
> form "don't trust Herb" or "Herb is incompetent".
But people have reached those conclusions _AFTER_ reviewing _MANY_ books of
Herb, not 1 book.
It is not prejudice, it is postjudice.
I would interested to know if Herb's coverage of C#, Java or the STL is as
slipshod.
I could certainly check what he has to say about the STL and know if it is
any good.
> This is being done, I believe, by Richard Heathfield here as the
> editor of an inferior and little-regarded book, C Unleashed, to
> promote his sales in an inappropriately commercial misuse of usenet.
But it has been pointed out that distrust of Herb began _LONG BEFORE_
Richard's book.
I posted links which show distrust of Schildt back in 1995.
So are you believing FALSE FACTS CONTRARY TO EVIDENCE NILGE?
[Snip] "computing thugs" & "coding bums" subjective drivel, none of which I
recognise in many USENET programmers and I have been here since 1995.
Stephen Howe
Stephen Howe
>think he believes one word of what he is saying. He's just pushing
>hot buttons to see if he can get responses. Of course, he might
>really be that thick, but I doubt it.
I think not. He ignores evidence pointed out to him, but I have seen many
people on USENET do exactly this. And I dont beleive it is trolling.
They are genuinely "selectively blind" about which facts they choose to
accept even in the face of strong and overwhelming evidence.
Google on "Peter Olcott" and the the "Halting Problem".
Olcott was convinced that he had overturned Turing's proof on this (which
amazingly had stood for 72 years).
Eventually after a lot of patient work by USENET posters he became aware
that he was wrong, viewed as a crank and with every post of his, people were
laughing at him.
See David Ullrich's responses to Peter Olcott on
http://preview.tinyurl.com/ypyfpw
(Digression: My favourite all time post on USENET was out of this thread.
Brings tears to the eyes:
>>
>Peter Olcott wrote:
>> [...] I really do have
>> a (barely) genius IQ,
Ah, fortunately my barf-bag servo unit worked quickly on
encountering the two strings "olcott" and "genius" so that my
keyboard was not fouled.
>>
End Digression).
I would be interested to know if Nilge has ever taken soft or hard drugs.
Because all of my ex-drug addict friends show one key trait:
The inability to make good judgements from then on. They make decisions that
nobody sane would make.
Fortunately I have never felt the urge once to try drugs.
It definitely impairs judgement, a key programmer quality.
Stephen Howe
pete
>
> spinoza1111 said:
> > C Unleashed, to promote his sales
Isn't that book out of print?
--
pete
Richard Heathfield
Yup. But Mr Nilges is not one to let the facts confuse the issue.
Stephen Howe
>
> Isn't that book out of print?
It is. But I wanted a copy and if you try hard, you can get it :-)
Stephen Howe
Phlip
>> Richard, you're being trolled. I think it is pretty obvious. I don't
>> think he believes one word of what he is saying. He's just pushing
>> hot buttons to see if he can get responses. Of course, he might
>> really be that thick, but I doubt it.
>
> I think not. He ignores evidence pointed out to him, but I have seen many
> people on USENET do exactly this. And I dont beleive it is trolling.
Trolling is seeking negative attention.
Cranks want positive attention by claiming to solve some problem (such as
Fermat's Last Theorem), then appearing "needy" by forcing lectures.
Trolls want negative attention, so they find divisive topics and pretend to take
the minority position. "spinoza1111" compares favorably to people who claim
Assembler is more productive than C++, or MS-DOS is architected better than
Unix, or Object Oriented programming is a fraud, or "global warming" is a
socialist conspiracy.
Despite the occasional flashes of cleverness, these threads bring a newsgroup
down, and should be avoided.
--
Phlip
Randy Howard
(in article <camdnV8Ecac4Txna...@pipex.net>):
>>>> C Unleashed, to promote his sales
>>
>> Isn't that book out of print?
>
> It is. But I wanted a copy and if you try hard, you can get it :-)
It's worth a lot of money now? Want to buy one? ;-)
--
Randy Howard (2reply remove FOOBAR)
"The power of accurate observation is called cynicism by those
who have not got it." - George Bernard Shaw
Randy Howard
(in article <JpCdnXeyaoomKxna...@bt.com>):
> spinoza1111 said:
>
>> On Jan 9, 4:19 pm, user923005 <dcor...@connx.com> wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
>>> Richard, you're being trolled. I think it is pretty obvious. I don't
>>> think he believes one word of what he is saying. He's just pushing
>>> hot buttons to see if he can get responses. Of course, he might
>>> really be that thick, but I doubt it.
>>
>> I'm not trolling. My name is Edward G. Nilges. After a 30 year career
>> in programming, which started with compiler debugging in machine
>> language and included the development of several large systems and
>> assisting a Nobel winner,
>
> ROTFL! Are you still waving that old chestnut around? You are on record as
> saying that you had two contacts with him, lasting a total of around an
> hour. Even if this is true, which has not been established, it puts the
> level of your "assistance" into perspective.
Further digging into the events also revealed that the "assistance"
involving giving out incorrect information. Nilgewater is the comedy
gift that just keeps on giving...
> Respected by whom? You? Schildt's works are notoriously buggy and he
> notoriously doesn't care.
Perhaps Nilges would like to defend the recent post were you show an
example of Shildt's code in C. That should be entertaining.
>> I have recently suspended posting
>
> Not so's anyone would notice.
There is a pattern if you pay attention. He drops about 15 posts in a
big chunk. Hammers out 4 or 5 replies to those that respond. Then, if
a few of the responses are too hot for him to handle, he pretends that
he is going on "vacation" for a bit so he can ignore them and let them
cool off, then he comes back and starts fresh as if he has a clean
slate. Cowardice isn't really a strong enough word to describe the
pattern.
>> and
>> Schildt as the author of The Complete C++ Reference.
>
> Whilst it is true that there are several references to such a work on the
> Web (thirteen, according to my search), I think you'll find that the title
> is actually "C++ - The Complete Reference" (which gets 17000+ hits).
You don't actually expect him to get his facts straight do you?
Randy Howard
(in article <VN-dnbVoXLVkJBna...@pipex.net>):
>> ..., I am being assaulted for speaking this truth: that it would be
>> possible to discuss Herb's errors in a specific book, such as the
>> omission of virtual base classes, without once using syntax of the
>> form "don't trust Herb" or "Herb is incompetent".
>
> But people have reached those conclusions _AFTER_ reviewing _MANY_ books of
> Herb, not 1 book.
> It is not prejudice, it is postjudice.
> I would interested to know if Herb's coverage of C#, Java or the STL is as
> slipshod.
This is an interesting question. I used to do a lot of browsing in
physical bookstores, but I usually by online now most of the time.
When I am in a bookstore with a technical section, I thumb through a
lot of titles, and I've certainly cracked open quite a few of his books
over the years, in addition to those I confiscated over the years by
larval stage programmers that didn't know they were being poisoned.
;-)
So far, I've yet to encounter one in which you could not identify
multiple serious technical mistakes in a matter of a few minutes, quite
often as early as Chapter 1.
> I could certainly check what he has to say about the STL and know if it is
> any good.
This I am unsure of, not having any serious exposure to C++ for a long
span of years.
>> This is being done, I believe, by Richard Heathfield here as the
>> editor of an inferior and little-regarded book, C Unleashed, to
>> promote his sales in an inappropriately commercial misuse of usenet.
>
> But it has been pointed out that distrust of Herb began _LONG BEFORE_
> Richard's book.
It certainly did.
> I posted links which show distrust of Schildt back in 1995.
> So are you believing FALSE FACTS CONTRARY TO EVIDENCE NILGE?
He can't see it. Any question posed to him that requires a yes/no
answer, or an explanation of a previous claim is simply ignored.
For example, he has ignored at least four times now a request to simply
back up his claim from about a week or so ago, maybe two weeks now, in
which he claimed that there were multiple data types in C that are
inherently dangerous and should not be used. He won't go anywhere near
those posts. My suspicion is that he might actually know he can't back
it up, but he might just be as incompetent at using a newsreader as he
is with a C compiler. It's difficult to tell from here.
Rui Maciel
> Richard, you're being trolled. I think it is pretty obvious. I don't
> think he believes one word of what he is saying. He's just pushing
> hot buttons to see if he can get responses.
I also believe that the spinoza character is simply trolling but I wouldn't
say that he is going after Richard Heathfield alone. That spinoza character
makes a point at attacking not only Richard Heathfield but also, by
constantly labelling everyone as being mindlesss followers, all newsgroup
users. That, along with the incessant flood of off-topic posts filled with
personal attacks, purposedly going against the character's own
self-righteous complaints of being the target of personal attacks, and
purposedly veering away from the newsgroup topic, leads to believe that
this spinoza's character was created simply to troll. And he is succeeding.
Annoyingly.
So I would suggest that everyone should simply stop feeding the troll.
Moreover, I would also suggest that no one should pay any attention to the
spinoza character's claims of being any specific person or having written
any book. There's a serious risk for the reputation of an innocent man
being soiled for no good reason.
Rui Maciel
dj3v...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca.invalid
Richard Heathfield <r...@see.sig.invalid> wrote:
> Nor is there a mob. Nor
>would I be inciting it, even if there were.
You should try it sometime. It's really quite underrated.
I might even be able to find somebody who can recommend a local
supplier of pitchforks and torches, if you're interested.
dave
Mike
>
> By "computing thugs" I mean people who unconscionably develop and
> market software which makes decisions that controls lives without
> elementary controls:
Whereas others, who hoist themselves petards-wards as a prime examples of "ethical programmers", have in their past
assisted others who made significant contributions to Game Theory. Now isn't Game Theory just a tool for military
strategists to play dangerous non-zero-sum war games?
Some might suggest that such a work-history could reek of corruption and anti-humanism!
Mike
CBFalconer
>
... snip ...
>
> So I would suggest that everyone should simply stop feeding the
> troll. Moreover, I would also suggest that no one should pay any
> attention to the spinoza character's claims of being any specific
> person or having written any book. There's a serious risk for the
> reputation of an innocent man being soiled for no good reason.
Some users achieve enjoyment from irritating the Spinoza troll into
publishing further outlandish statements.
--
Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net)
<http://cbfalconer.home.att.net>
Try the download section.
--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com
spinoza1111
> In article <3b407112-e592-4e37-9b37-7a1dd4426...@v29g2000hsf.googlegroups.com>, spinoza1...@yahoo.com says...
>
>
>
> > By "computing thugs" I mean people who unconscionably develop and
> > market software which makes decisions that controls lives without
> > elementary controls:
>
> Whereas others, who hoist themselves petards-wards as a prime examples of "ethical programmers", have in their past
> assisted others who made significant contributions to Game Theory. Now isn't Game Theory just a tool for military
> strategists to play dangerous non-zero-sum war games?
Actually, no. Cf. Sylvia Nasar: A Beautiful Mind on Nash. Game theory
has uses throughout economics, not just in military science.
Even within military science, game theory and game practice on balance
prevents wars, in the manner of the (Chinese) inventor of the wargame,
Mencius: Mencius demonstrated to two warlords who would win and who,
lose, thereby causing them not to go to war.
spinoza1111
> > ..., I am being assaulted for speaking this truth: that it would be
> > possible to discuss Herb's errors in a specific book, such as the
> > omission of virtual base classes, without once using syntax of the
> > form "don't trust Herb" or "Herb is incompetent".
>
> But people have reached those conclusions _AFTER_ reviewing _MANY_ books of
> Herb, not 1 book.
> It is not prejudice, it is postjudice.
> I would interested to know if Herb's coverage of C#, Java or the STL is as
> slipshod.
> I could certainly check what he has to say about the STL and know if it is
> any good.
>
> > This is being done, I believe, by Richard Heathfield here as the
> > editor of an inferior and little-regarded book, C Unleashed, to
> > promote his sales in an inappropriately commercial misuse of usenet.
>
> But it has been pointed out that distrust of Herb began _LONG BEFORE_
> Richard's book.
> I posted links which show distrust of Schildt back in 1995.
> So are you believing FALSE FACTS CONTRARY TO EVIDENCE NILGE?
Almost every review mentions that he's a good writer, and then
proceeds to take him to task for not getting excited about C insider
information which is not needed by the beginner, and in the case of
insider information which is "standard" but not implemented on real
compilers, misleading...and then calls Herb misleading when he says
"negative numbers are twos complement" NOT as a statement about C, but
about the real world.
You "post links". Well, the Vandals' article on Herb in wikipedia
shows that on the Internet, anyone can "post links" elsethread to ruin
another person strictly by innuendo, without having to comprehend
thisthread defenses of that person's record (the inability to
comprehend English being already on display in this exchange by many
anti-Schildt persons). "Posting links" elsethread is nastily
reminiscent of a drunken Joe McCarthy waving empty slips of paper on
which a drunken Joe McCarthy claims he has the names of Communists.
I've already shown how to critique a person's work without trashing
him. Precisely because the Internet allows rumor to flourish, job one
should be protecting other peoples' reputations by discussing flaws,
not in them, but in their work.
In fact, all the errors in C++: The Complete Reference could be
identified as a comp.programming FAQ by anyone genuinely concerned
without a single fucking word about Schildt. As a computer author
who's not sought media fame or infamy other than by fulfilling to his
contractors, he's protected by US libel law against broad and global
charges of incompetence which could harm his employability. I hope he
sues your ass, in other words.
McGraw Hill didn't accept most of the errata because they seem like,
and are, the ravings of geeks with a hair up their skinny butts saying
"C must be and can be standardized" when in fact C is a coding bum
language that should only be used to maintain legacy C code. C++ may
also be a similar mistake.
>
> [Snip] "computing thugs" & "coding bums" subjective drivel, none of which I
> recognise in many USENET programmers and I have been here since 1995.
Richard Heathfield is a computing thug because he is misusing this
site for commercial gain. Randy Howard is a coding bum who doesn't
contribute much more than abuse and conventional wisdom. Both are
thugs also because they vandalize threads with opinions about
personalities.
>
> Stephen Howe
spinoza1111
> user923005 wrote:
> > Richard, you're being trolled. I think it is pretty obvious. I don't
> > think he believes one word of what he is saying. He's just pushing
> > hot buttons to see if he can get responses.
>
> I also believe that the spinoza character is simply trolling but I wouldn't
> say that he is going after Richard Heathfield alone. That spinoza character
> makes a point at attacking not only Richard Heathfield but also, by
> constantly labelling everyone as being mindlesss followers, all newsgroup
> users. That, along with the incessant flood of off-topic posts filled with
> personal attacks, purposedly going against the character's own
> self-righteous complaints of being the target of personal attacks, and
> purposedly veering away from the newsgroup topic, leads to believe that
> this spinoza's character was created simply to troll. And he is succeeding.
> Annoyingly.
As usual, you've read one or two posts on the surface and taken things
at face value.
Many people here ARE mindless followers because this is a lower middle
class medium to which too many people come here not to dialog and to
think, but to talk about personalities in the negative register and
steal code they don't understand.
FYI, I entered this month with the post "Brian Kernighan, Maybe I'm
not Worthy, Maybe I'm Scum".
This was a technical post describing my concern, with references, to
code presented as Beautiful which seemed to me Ugly because it didn't
even work for modern strings and had numerous other technical flaws.
I then bench-marked it in a C++ wrapper against a C sharp version
which fixed the flaws to discover that the C sharp version is about
3..5 times as slower...but actually works, which the Kernighan code
doesn't owing to Kernighan's and Pike's unfortunate, and C-psychology,
mindset.
This thread, with its humble title and no implication that I was doing
other than questioning Kernighan's judgement, was then systematically
vandalized by Richard Heathfield and Randy Howard with comments about
me based on previous contacts...in which I'd exceeded, by quite a
large margin, their cultural and programming knowledge based on
broader and deeper experience...experience in C alone which included
assisting John Nash with C.
You got your superficial impressions, which you have foolishly acted
upon, from the tenor of my replies. I did not go gently into that good
night, because after the harassment of Kathy Sierra (a Java author who
was threatened and hounded) and given Heathfield's participation in
the persecution of Schildt, I have come to believe that this newsgroup
has been highjacked by him as his own personal property and for gain,
in violation of usenet ethics.
You may be used to sucking up to people. I'm not.
>
> So I would suggest that everyone should simply stop feeding the troll.
> Moreover, I would also suggest that no one should pay any attention to the
> spinoza character's claims of being any specific person or having written
> any book. There's a serious risk for the reputation of an innocent man
> being soiled for no good reason.
I am indeed Edward G. Nilges, the author of "Build Your Own .Net
Language and Compiler", and as a computer author I think that what
happened to Schildt and Sierra was ugly. Therefore I speak out as
such.
It has long been possible to identify problems without calling a
person the problem. However, the out of control lower middle class has
taken over usenet to vent its misery by means of psychological
transference, which is why you can't get decent code here and why
people dare not discuss it openly. They are terrorized, given
surveillance and considerations of employability, of computing thugs
here trashing any thread they create by mocking them based NOT on
critical questions (such as what assertions are true at time t) but on
brutal shibboleths (such as void main) which have nothing to do with
programming as a serious profession for adults and everything to do
with tribal membership, to which people flee once, as we see hear,
reading comprehension, the ability to write, civility and basic
decency have fled.
Next time, do your homework.
>
> Rui Maciel
Richard Heathfield
<snip>
> Almost every review mentions that he's a good writer,
Right. There are many good writers. Being a good writer is a nice-to-have
for a C tutorial writer, but it is not sufficient of itself. A detailed
knowledge of C is also a requirement.
<snip>
> You "post links". Well, the Vandals' article on Herb in wikipedia
> shows that on the Internet, anyone can "post links" elsethread to ruin
> another person strictly by innuendo,
Nevertheless, both Clive Feather and Peter Seebach (each of whom either is
or was a member of the ISO C committee, and each of whom is well-respected
by other C experts) have provided detailed critiques of Schildt books,
demonstrating not by innuendo but by analysis that those books are deeply
flawed - the intent not being to "ruin another person" but to inform
people who wish to obtain a good C book precisely why Schildt's books do
not fall into that category.
<much raving snipped>
>> [Snip] "computing thugs" & "coding bums" subjective drivel, none of
>> [which I
>> recognise in many USENET programmers and I have been here since 1995.
>
> Richard Heathfield is a computing thug because he is misusing this
> site for commercial gain.
That is not true for several reasons:
(a) it's a newsgroup, not a Web site;
(b) I'm not misusing it (or even using it) for commercial gain;
(c) even if I were which I'm not, and even if it were which it isn't,
misusing a Web site for commercial gain is certainly opprobrious but you
have not demonstrated why it implies that those who do so are computing
thugs.
> Randy Howard is a coding bum who doesn't
> contribute much more than abuse and conventional wisdom.
He actually contributes quite a lot to this newsgroup. As for conventional
wisdom, I'd rather read articles containing conventional wisdom than those
containing unconventional stupidity.
> Both are
> thugs also because they vandalize threads with opinions about
> personalities.
If that argument is valid, then you are a thug, because you vandalise
threads with opinions about personalities. And where does that get us?
Nowhere.
Chris McDonald
>Richard Heathfield is a computing thug because he is misusing this
>site for commercial gain.
Commercial gain for an out-of-print book? Please explain how.
Or is Richard just building up an advantage for a prospective future book?
Oh, and while you're explaining things, you haven't yet provided your
evidence that you personally speak for Brian Kernighan, and that he
avoids these newsgroups for your fallacious reasons. ??
--
Chris.
Richard Heathfield
<snip>
> Many people here ARE mindless followers
Insulting your readership is unwise.
> because this is a lower middle
> class medium to which too many people come here not to dialog and to
> think,
Actually, it's a technical medium, where class is irrelevant, clear
thinking is valued, and assertions are supposed to be supported by
evidence. No wonder you struggle here.
Richard Heathfield
> spinoza1111 <spino...@yahoo.com> writes:
>
>>Richard Heathfield is a computing thug because he is misusing this
>>site for commercial gain.
>
>
> Commercial gain for an out-of-print book? Please explain how.
> Or is Richard just building up an advantage for a prospective future
> book?
Well, that's certainly what he thinks I *was* doing in the first half of
1999 (when I had not only not written a book, but was not writing a book
and had no particular ambition to write a book).
> Oh, and while you're explaining things, you haven't yet provided your
> evidence that you personally speak for Brian Kernighan, and that he
> avoids these newsgroups for your fallacious reasons. ??
Assertions are the thing. Evidence is somehow unscientific, I guess. The
idea is that, if he claims something enough times, people will eventually
believe it.
(There is some evidence to suggest that this "factoid absorption" does
actually happen. I vaguely recall something of the kind in the long 2003
discussion, where he made one particular (incorrect) claim so often that
even one of his opponents eventually took it as read that the claim was
correct!)
Stephen Howe
>Almost every review mentions that he's a good writer...
Like Fredrick Forsyth? Sure, clear English is a necessary point for a
technical writer.
But it is not sufficient. A technical writer has to accurate and correct.
>, and then
>proceeds to take him to task for not getting excited about C insider
>information which is not needed by the beginner...
But who is making that judgement call about "C insider information which is
not needed by the beginner"?
You?
Clive Feather and others on both C and C++ standardisation committes say
different.
And I respect their judgement about the necessity of correctness of "C
insider information" as you term it.
>..., and in the case of
>insider information which is "standard" but not implemented on real
>compilers, misleading...and then calls Herb misleading when he says
>"negative numbers are twos complement" NOT as a statement about C, but
>about the real world.
That is just nonsense.
Not every computer in the world is a PC (some percentage are Macs). And not
every person is Western.
I have done C programming on a DSP chip where chars were 16-bits.
C supports 1's complement and Sign-and-Magnitude system for negative
integers.
And floats & doubles are frequently IEEE 754 standard and that is
Sign-and-Magnitude for negative fp numbers and that is pretty ubiquituious.
So Herbert Schildt
>You "post links". Well, the Vandals' article on Herb in wikipedia
>shows that on the Internet, anyone can "post links" elsethread to ruin
>another person strictly by innuendo...
That depends on whether it is true or not.
Conrad Black, former press baron, has been convicted of 4 charges out of 13
for Crinimal fraud in the USA. That is not innuendo.
And nor are the people who altered his Wiki page vandals either.
Herbert Schildt has not been on trail, but the evidence of misleading
technical writing from his books is substantial, and the people who have
written about his errors are not Sensationalists.
They are sober members of the ISO C and C++ committees.
So this accusation of "vandalism" and "innuendo" is utter fabrication on
your part.
>, without having to comprehend
>thisthread defenses of that person's record (the inability to
>comprehend English being already on display in this exchange by many
>anti-Schildt persons).
Utter tosh. That is _YOUR_ ad-hominen attacks.
Herbert Schildt is not being taken to task as a poor member of the human
race, but instead of foisting inaccuarate books on C and C++ on an
unsuspecting public and making a fast buck in the process.
He is no different from a peddlar on the streets trying to flog cheap
perfume as if it was genuine Chanel.
If genuine Chanel representatives take the peddlar to task, you act as the
peddlar's human rights are being trampled upon rather than the fact the
peddlar is guilty of flogging fake perfume by association.
>"Posting links" elsethread is nastily
>reminiscent of a drunken Joe McCarthy waving empty slips of paper on
>which a drunken Joe McCarthy claims he has the names of Communists.
Poor comparison choice on your part.
It should be no crime to be a communist.
But it should be a crime to knowingly foist inaccurate technical books on a
unsuspecting public.
Who know where it might lead?
It could be some plane or medical software crashes because some programmer
was mislead by something Herbert Schildt wrote.
>I've already shown how to critique a person's work without trashing
>him. Precisely because the Internet allows rumor to flourish, job one
>should be protecting other peoples' reputations by discussing flaws,
>not in them, but in their work.
That was what was done.
>In fact, all the errors in C++: The Complete Reference could be
>identified as a comp.programming FAQ by anyone genuinely concerned
Oh? So all the people who have published articles on Schildts books are not
genuinely concerned?
>...without a single fucking word about Schildt.
And Schildt can carry on writing inaccurate book after inaccurate book with
no comeback?
>... As a computer author
>who's not sought media fame or infamy other than by fulfilling to his
>contractors...
Oh, I get it, Schildt is noble. He never did it for the money.
Take that prize off Al Gore and give it to Schildt.
What a service to humanity.
>, he's protected by US libel law against broad and global
>charges of incompetence which could harm his employability. I hope he
>sues your ass, in other words.
Oh right. So if you are crook in the States, you are permanently protected.
Cant have anyone denting your employability.
>McGraw Hill didn't accept most of the errata because they seem like,
>and are, the ravings of geeks with a hair up their skinny butts saying
>"C must be and can be standardized" when in fact C is a coding bum
>language that should only be used to maintain legacy C code. C++ may
>also be a similar mistake.
But genuine authors who I respect, who have connections to ISO C and C++
members and do do erratas:
Errata for Kernighan & Ritchie's, "The C Programming langauge, 2nd edition"
http://noutside.cs.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/cbook/2ediffs.html
Errata for Harbison & Steele's , "A C Reference manual, 5th edition "
http://careferencemanual.com/errata.htm
Errata for Bjarne Stroustrup's, "The C++ Programming langauge, 3rd edition"
http://www.research.att.com/~bs/3rd_errata.html
Errata for Scott Meyers, "Effective STL":
http://www.aristeia.com/BookErrata/estl1e-errata_frames.html
Errata for Scott Meyers, "Effective C++ 3rd edition":
http://www.aristeia.com/BookErrata/ec++3e-errata_frames.html
Errata for Scott Meyers, "More Effective C++":
http://www.aristeia.com/BookErrata/mec++-errata_frames.html
Errata for Herb Sutter & Andrei Alexandrescu's, "C++ coding standards"
http://www.gotw.ca/publications/c++cs-errata.htm
Errata for Nicolai Josuttis's, "The C++ library"
http://www.josuttis.com/libbook/errata1_14.html
Errata for Steve Dewhurst's, "C++ Gotcha's"
http://www.semantics.org/cpp_gotchas/index.html
Errata for Herb Sutter's "Exceptional C++"
http://www.gotw.ca/publications/xc++-errata.htm
Errata for Herb Sutter's "More Exceptional C++"
http://www.gotw.ca/publications/mxc++-errata.htm
Errata for Herb Sutter's "Exceptional C++ Style"
http://www.gotw.ca/publications/xc++s-errata.htm
Stephen Howe
Stephen Howe
To
> That is just nonsense.
> Not every computer in the world is a PC (some percentage are Macs). And
> not every person is Western.
> I have done C programming on a DSP chip where chars were 16-bits.
> C supports 1's complement and Sign-and-Magnitude system for negative
> integers.
> And floats & doubles are frequently IEEE 754 standard and that is
> Sign-and-Magnitude for negative fp numbers and that is pretty
> ubiquituious.
> So Herbert Schildt
add
"is doing a disservice by making unwarranted assumptions on C".
Change
> for Crinimal fraud in the USA.
to
> for Criminal fraud in the USA.
Stephen Howe
Stephen Howe
Any anybody accosting any inaccurate infomation I have spewed forth, well
they are a vandal, it is innunedo, an attack on my person and I should sue
them.
:-)
Stephen Howe
CBFalconer
The word is innuendo. Should I alert the lawyers now? :-)
spinoza1111
> spinoza1111 said:
>
> <snip>
>
> > Almost every review mentions that he's a good writer,
>
> Right. There are many good writers. Being a good writer is a nice-to-have
> for a C tutorial writer, but it is not sufficient of itself. A detailed
> knowledge of C is also a requirement.
I don't think you have that "detailed knowledge of C" and I believe
Herb has it, because knowing C isn't knowing a standard, it's knowing
both standard and non-standard implementations. C is a praxis.
>
> <snip>
>
> > You "post links". Well, the Vandals' article on Herb in wikipedia
> > shows that on the Internet, anyone can "post links" elsethread to ruin
> > another person strictly by innuendo,
>
> Nevertheless, both Clive Feather and Peter Seebach (each of whom either is
> or was a member of the ISO C committee, and each of whom is well-respected
> by other C experts) have provided detailed critiques of Schildt books,
> demonstrating not by innuendo but by analysis that those books are deeply
You are in the innuendo business, not they, because instead of
discussing issues here you continually refer to issues by name and not
by description. This is because you get easily confused and flustered
in online technical exchanges (as when you confused && and || in our
test last week) and it diminishes the false authority which you seek
to project to actually discuss C.
> flawed - the intent not being to "ruin another person" but to inform
> people who wish to obtain a good C book precisely why Schildt's books do
> not fall into that category.
>
> <much raving snipped>
I'm not "raving". A complex sentence isn't "raving". I can write and
you cannot.
>
> >> [Snip] "computing thugs" & "coding bums" subjective drivel, none of
> >> [which I
> >> recognise in many USENET programmers and I have been here since 1995.
>
> > Richard Heathfield is a computing thug because he is misusing this
> > site for commercial gain.
>
> That is not true for several reasons:
>
> (a) it's a newsgroup, not a Web site;
Master of Terminology strikes again
> (b) I'm not misusing it (or even using it) for commercial gain;
I believe you are. I believe you started using it in 1999 to trash
Schildt and present a false theory of C which ignores practice because
you wished to promote a book you could not even write, but had to
edit.
> (c) even if I were which I'm not, and even if it were which it isn't,
> misusing a Web site for commercial gain is certainly opprobrious but you
> have not demonstrated why it implies that those who do so are computing
> thugs.
If you cannot make that connection, you are indeed a thug, because to
the thug, everything is of interest only as an opportunity for his
personal gratification. You come here to ruin people and you are a
thug.
>
> > Randy Howard is a coding bum who doesn't
> > contribute much more than abuse and conventional wisdom.
>
> He actually contributes quite a lot to this newsgroup. As for conventional
> wisdom, I'd rather read articles containing conventional wisdom than those
> containing unconventional stupidity.
I'm sure you would. I'm sure you have a direct financial interest in
code with gnomic identifiers written to show off the author's
knowledge and not to solve a problem. This probably gives you
opportunities as a "consultant".
>
> > Both are
> > thugs also because they vandalize threads with opinions about
> > personalities.
>
> If that argument is valid, then you are a thug, because you vandalise
> threads with opinions about personalities. And where does that get us?
> Nowhere.
As you know, I have responded to your crap since the start of the year
in such a way that you compulsively and obsessively reply, not with
code examples as I have, but repetitious and almost canned answers to
save time, and you don't care that this creates threads in which the
original contribution is lost, and you certainly don't care when
people enter and draw false conclusions. Your INTENT is to vandalise
and fill the newgroup with a data smog of replies.
I've been working offline on continued research: you prefer to sit and
emit boring and tedious garbage because your intent is to trash and to
vandalize.
spinoza1111
> >Richard, you're being trolled. I think it is pretty obvious. I don't
> >think he believes one word of what he is saying. He's just pushing
> >hot buttons to see if he can get responses. Of course, he might
> >really be that thick, but I doubt it.
>
> I think not. He ignores evidence pointed out to him, but I have seen many
> people on USENET do exactly this. And I dont beleive it is trolling.
> They are genuinely "selectively blind" about which facts they choose to
> accept even in the face of strong and overwhelming evidence.
>
> Google on "Peter Olcott" and the the "Halting Problem".
> Olcott was convinced that he had overturned Turing's proof on this (which
> amazingly had stood for 72 years).
> Eventually after a lot of patient work by USENET posters he became aware
> that he was wrong, viewed as a crank and with every post of his, people were
> laughing at him.
>
> (Digression: My favourite all time post on USENET was out of this thread.
> Brings tears to the eyes:
>
>
>
> >Peter Olcott wrote:
> >> [...] I really do have
> >> a (barely) genius IQ,
>
> Ah, fortunately my barf-bag servo unit worked quickly on
> encountering the two strings "olcott" and "genius" so that my
> keyboard was not fouled.
>
> End Digression).
>
> I would be interested to know if Nilge has ever taken soft or hard drugs.
> Because all of my ex-drug addict friends show one key trait:
> The inability to make good judgements from then on. They make decisions that
> nobody sane would make.
> Fortunately I have never felt the urge once to try drugs.
> It definitely impairs judgement, a key programmer quality.
>
> Stephen Howe
Filth. You come in here disinterested in the ng topic and interested
ONLY in finding personalities that by seeming to you total losers,
somehow prove to you, in a logical fallacy, that YOU are not,
probably, a substance abuser. You have NO interest in ANYTHING apart
from shoring up a shaky self-image, and that is why you focus on
personalities.
Filth. *Wildgewordene Kleinburger*.
Ben Bacarisse
<snip>
> This was a technical post describing my concern, with references, to
> code presented as Beautiful which seemed to me Ugly because it didn't
Fairer to say that it is "old" code. Your C# "modern string" version
would not have been possible at the time. Technology marches on and
we stand, to some extent, on the shoulders of giants. Incidentally,
(talking of giants) the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode that has so helped
to make "modern strings" possible was designed and first implemented
by Ken Thompson -- prompted by Rob Pike.
> and had numerous other technical flaws.
Allegedly. In another post I tried to cut though the verbiage to find
them and I think they are minor.
> I then bench-marked it in a C++ [...]
I don't think is was C++. I don't know the details but it looked like
something else -- I suggested C++/CLI elsethread -- but you probably
know and could tell us.
> wrapper against a C sharp version
> which fixed the flaws to discover that the C sharp version is about
> 3..5 times as slower...
You'd be better off porting the exact original to C# as well (alleged
bug and all). You could then compare algorithms. I suspect the
slowdown you see is simply C# doing its stuff. You would then have
comparable numbers to see if your "fixes" have any real cost.
[See below for why "fixes" is in "quotes".]
> but actually works, which the Kernighan code
> doesn't owing to Kernighan's and Pike's unfortunate, and C-psychology,
> mindset.
No your re-hash of the original has broken it. You have so messed up
the neat C code it is hard to find where your bugs are but they are in
there.
I'll give you two examples. Try to match "a*ab" against "aab". You
should get a match (the Pike code does) but both the C++ and the C#
versions you posted disagree. The other is more dramatic: on my C# vm
matching a pattern like "a*" gives me a helpful crash and an array
bounds violation so the error was quite easy to find. For the fix for
both, refer to Rob Pike's "ugly" code.
--
Ben.
spinoza1111
Hey, if I can get laid here in China by BUYING that perfume and giving
it to my girlfriend, saying yo, baby, check it out, Chanel, and she
says ai-yah you so sweet...the fraud is washed away. Plus I get laid.
This is because Chanel itself has only a reputation built on cat
urine, which it has purchased using advertising, and its use is to
make people feel good. Its status is built on a series of rather
irrational propositions.
Likewise if Herb presents, as his enemies insist, information that is
wrong on monkishly obscure technical points but in so doing he enables
the student to use a range of conformant and non-conformant compilers
with success, in fact discovering along the way where Herb is wrong,
he has done the student a service Heathfield cannot perform.
He's engaged the reader in a dialogue.
Sure, compared to Bjarne, Herb is a homeboy, vending a knockoff
understanding, and in so doing exercising a right under the
Constitution of the United States. Semi-literate people with
authoritarian personality disorders HERE object to "verbose" technical
detail when it doesn't come from an Authority but pretend, when it
comes to Herb, that this is all they dine on. They vandalize technical
threads while pretending to be connysewers.
As such, they project a second-hand and false authority. By destroying
a person as opposed to quietly and politely addressing the technical
details of his work, as I did with Kernighan, they get a sour
satisfaction that although they might be computing thugs and coding
bums, at least they are not the person they've hounded and
scapegoated.
> If genuine Chanel representatives take the peddlar to task, you act as the
> peddlar's human rights are being trampled upon rather than the fact the
> peddlar is guilty of flogging fake perfume by association.
Fuck Chanel, OK? Even the status of genuinely accomplished people like
Stroustrup and Kernighan is based on acceptance of some irrationality,
namely that their choice of language (C or C++) was not itself a
criminal act after Algol, Pascal, Modula, .Net, Java, and Eiffel.
Dijkstra when alive pointed out the fact that you cannot pretend to
scientific authority and prestige unless you are willing to examine
foundations.
Your analogy is legal nonsense. Commercial law world-wide does indeed
control advertising free speech consistent with Constitutional free
speech, but a book is not covered by commercial law: for any book, no
matter how technical, the author has in the USA Constitutional
protection. He loses this protection, interestingly, in Leninist
societies like China. Perhaps you'd like that?
The analogy is further nonsense because you probably work for
organizations that in the USA are in violation of the Uniform
Commercial Code when they release buggy software. You persecute Herb
but are too cowardly to take on the real powers.
>
> >"Posting links" elsethread is nastily
> >reminiscent of a drunken Joe McCarthy waving empty slips of paper on
> >which a drunken Joe McCarthy claims he has the names of Communists.
>
> Poor comparison choice on your part.
> It should be no crime to be a communist.
> But it should be a crime to knowingly foist inaccurate technical books on a
> unsuspecting public.
> Who know where it might lead?
> It could be some plane or medical software crashes because some programmer
> was mislead by something Herbert Schildt wrote.
This alone show you need to learn alot about law.
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution makes it
impossible to criminalize "knowingly foist inaccurate technical books
on a[n] unsuspecting public" (article sound agreement, what a
concept).
In fact, knowingly foisting BUGGY SOFTWARE on people is something
software do all the time: yet because you people are frightened, as
you should be, by unemployability, you prefer to hound Schildt.
The Uniform Commercial Code in fact requires the vendor of a product
other than a book (on which it is superseded by First Amendment law)
to provide a product fit for use: but software vendors have violated
this repeatedly.
Any "programmer" of a contemporary life or mission critical system
shouldn't be using either C or C++: he should be using Ada, Eiffel,
Java, or .Net, so he, and not Herb, would be at fault if owing to the
wide differences in the behavior of C compilers and runtimes he
created a bug. No professional can be excused by claiming that "d'oh
it was in a book I saw".
>
> >I've already shown how to critique a person's work without trashing
> >him. Precisely because the Internet allows rumor to flourish, job one
> >should be protecting other peoples' reputations by discussing flaws,
> >not in them, but in their work.
>
> That was what was done.
No, it wasn't. It was all "schildt" all the time. Nobody made any due
diligence to see whether his errors were shared by other practitioners
using non-standard compilers.
>
> >In fact, all the errors in C++: The Complete Reference could be
> >identified as a comp.programming FAQ by anyone genuinely concerned
>
> Oh? So all the people who have published articles on Schildts books are not
> genuinely concerned?
I think the people who started the fun, including I believe
Heathfield, acted in bad faith for commercial gain, using the
unimplemented standard as a way to get authority they could not
acquire as either programmers or writers. For example, Heathfield has
confused && and ||, and seems not to know that despite the
indeterminacy in the standard as regards pathological constructs, they
have a determinate result on a virtual machine.
>
> >...without a single fucking word about Schildt.
>
> And Schildt can carry on writing inaccurate book after inaccurate book with
> no comeback?
You have the right to POLITELY review his books and to give them low
evaluations. You DON'T have the right, as professionals, to title
Amazon reviews like 14-year olds, as in "stay away from Schildt",
because by not extending mutual courtesy and solidarity you become not
professionals, but individual atoms and nasty little clerks who
maintain their status and employability by systematically turning on
their fellow man.
>
> >... As a computer author
> >who's not sought media fame or infamy other than by fulfilling to his
> >contractors...
>
> Oh, I get it, Schildt is noble. He never did it for the money.
> Take that prize off Al Gore and give it to Schildt.
> What a service to humanity.
No, he probably did it for the money, and perhaps to avoid having to
take some crappy job for some computing thug.
As to the possibility of nobility, well Al Gore has given us an
example, hasn't he?
>
> >, he's protected by US libel law against broad and global
> >charges of incompetence which could harm his employability. I hope he
> >sues your ass, in other words.
>
> Oh right. So if you are crook in the States, you are permanently protected.
> Cant have anyone denting your employability.
Under the First Amendment to the Constitution, under the European
constitution, under the British constitution, Schildt as a writer can
make mistakes without being a "crook". You have the right to call him
to account. Amazon provides that facility. But you make yourself look
like a fool when the problem and the question becomes not "whether you
may use void main, and why or why not" and "why the standard is silent
on the representation of negative numbers but the programmer has to
know", but "Schildt".
>
> >McGraw Hill didn't accept most of the errata because they seem like,
> >and are, the ravings of geeks with a hair up their skinny butts saying
> >"C must be and can be standardized" when in fact C is a coding bum
> >language that should only be used to maintain legacy C code. C++ may
> >also be a similar mistake.
>
> But genuine authors who I respect, who have connections to ISO C and C++
> members and do do erratas:
>
> Errata for Kernighan & Ritchie's, "The C Programming langauge, 2nd edition"http://noutside.cs.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/cbook/2ediffs.html
>
> Errata for Harbison & Steele's , "A C Reference manual, 5th edition "http://careferencemanual.com/errata.htm
>
> Errata for Bjarne Stroustrup's, "The C++ Programming langauge, 3rd edition"http://www.research.att.com/~bs/3rd_errata.html
My son contributed to this document...at the age of 12.
>
> Errata for Scott Meyers, "Effective STL":http://www.aristeia.com/BookErrata/estl1e-errata_frames.html
>
> Errata for Scott Meyers, "Effective C++ 3rd edition":http://www.aristeia.com/BookErrata/ec++3e-errata_frames.html
>
> Errata for Scott Meyers, "More Effective C++":http://www.aristeia.com/BookErrata/mec++-errata_frames.html
>
> Errata for Herb Sutter & Andrei Alexandrescu's, "C++ coding standards"http://www.gotw.ca/publications/c++cs-errata.htm
>
> Errata for Nicolai Josuttis's, "The C++ library"http://www.josuttis.com/libbook/errata1_14.html
>
> Errata for Steve Dewhurst's, "C++ Gotcha's"http://www.semantics.org/cpp_gotchas/index.html
>
> Errata for Herb Sutter's "Exceptional C++"http://www.gotw.ca/publications/xc++-errata.htm
>
> Errata for Herb Sutter's "More Exceptional C++"http://www.gotw.ca/publications/mxc++-errata.htm
>
> Errata for Herb Sutter's "Exceptional C++ Style"http://www.gotw.ca/publications/xc++s-errata.htm
>
> Stephen Howe
All of these books have errata. The question is whether "negative
numbers are stored twos-complement" is worthy of inclusion. The
question is whether Schildt's critics' monkish ravings are worthy of
inclusion.
Randy Howard
(in article <87bq7tj...@bsb.me.uk>):
> I'll give you two examples. Try to match "a*ab" against "aab". You
> should get a match (the Pike code does) but both the C++ and the C#
> versions you posted disagree. The other is more dramatic: on my C# vm
> matching a pattern like "a*" gives me a helpful crash and an array
> bounds violation so the error was quite easy to find. For the fix for
> both, refer to Rob Pike's "ugly" code.
Bravo. The comedy continues.
Randy Howard
(in article
<2d240115-f992-44ad...@k2g2000hse.googlegroups.com>):
> On Jan 11, 1:08 am, Richard Heathfield <r...@see.sig.invalid> wrote:
>> spinoza1111 said:
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>>> Almost every review mentions that he's a good writer,
>>
>> Right. There are many good writers. Being a good writer is a nice-to-have
>> for a C tutorial writer, but it is not sufficient of itself. A detailed
>> knowledge of C is also a requirement.
>
> I don't think you have that "detailed knowledge of C" and I believe
> Herb has it, because knowing C isn't knowing a standard, it's knowing
> both standard and non-standard implementations. C is a praxis.
Correct C means correct praxis. You haven't ever demonstrated it, and
neither has Schildt, frankly. Richard most definitely has and does.
Richard Heathfield
> On Jan 11, 1:08 am, Richard Heathfield <r...@see.sig.invalid> wrote:
>> spinoza1111 said:
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>> > Almost every review mentions that he's a good writer,
>>
>> Right. There are many good writers. Being a good writer is a
>> nice-to-have for a C tutorial writer, but it is not sufficient of
>> itself. A detailed knowledge of C is also a requirement.
>
> I don't think you have that "detailed knowledge of C"
You are certainly free to hold that opinion...
> and I believe Herb[ert Schildt] has it,
...and that one. My own view is that at least one of these opinions renders
you unable to be taken seriously by genuine C experts.
> because knowing C isn't knowing a standard, it's knowing
> both standard and non-standard implementations. C is a praxis.
Although I do not entirely agree with this (because I think knowing C /is/
about knowing a standard, in the sense that ignorance of the standard
means ignorance of C), it is certainly true that knowledge of standard
implementations is also necessary (for truly knowing C), and knowledge of
non-standard implementations can at least be useful. Your hero Herbert
Schildt said in the preface to "C - The Complete Reference", 2nd edition:
"the main emphasis is on the ANSI C standard". So Schildt, unlike you,
does at least seem to recognise the importance of the C Standard, even if
he doesn't understand its contents.
>> > You "post links". Well, the Vandals' article on Herb in wikipedia
>> > shows that on the Internet, anyone can "post links" elsethread to ruin
>> > another person strictly by innuendo,
>>
>> Nevertheless, both Clive Feather and Peter Seebach (each of whom either
>> is or was a member of the ISO C committee, and each of whom is
>> well-respected by other C experts) have provided detailed critiques of
>> Schildt books, demonstrating not by innuendo but by analysis that those
>> books are deeply
>
> You are in the innuendo business, not they, because instead of
> discussing issues here you continually refer to issues by name and not
> by description.
No, it's just that you don't bother to read, or don't admit to reading, the
bits where I describe the issues.
> This is because you get easily confused and flustered
> in online technical exchanges (as when you confused && and || in our
> test last week)
I have already dealt with this in the thread where it arose. Don't you read
the replies you get?
> and it diminishes the false authority which you seek
> to project to actually discuss C.
I don't seek to project anything, and I certainly don't seek any authority.
You're hung up on authority for some reason - possibly because you've
never had any?
>> flawed - the intent not being to "ruin another person" but to inform
>> people who wish to obtain a good C book precisely why Schildt's books do
>> not fall into that category.
>>
>> <much raving snipped>
>
> I'm not "raving".
Keep on denying it. That's important. As long as you can say to yourself
that you're not raving, there is still a little hope left.
> A complex sentence isn't "raving".
Nevertheless, raving can take the form of a complex sentence. But what I
snipped was not in fact a complex sentence. It was mere raving.
> I can write and you cannot.
I'm happy to leave that for others to decide. I can understand why you are
not, though.
>> >> [Snip] "computing thugs" & "coding bums" subjective drivel, none of
>> >> [which I
>> >> recognise in many USENET programmers and I have been here since 1995.
>>
>> > Richard Heathfield is a computing thug because he is misusing this
>> > site for commercial gain.
>>
>> That is not true for several reasons:
>>
>> (a) it's a newsgroup, not a Web site;
>
> Master of Terminology strikes again
Terminology is important. A good working knowledge of terminology isn't
sufficient to demonstrate technical excellence, but it is certainly a
prerequisite. Or perhaps I should put it monosyllabically: if you don't
use the right words, folks will think you don't know the things we use the
words for.
>
>> (b) I'm not misusing it (or even using it) for commercial gain;
>
> I believe you are.
Yes, I *know* you believe this. I wasn't saying you don't believe it. I was
saying it isn't *true*. There is a significant difference. This is a hard
lesson, I know, but really, just because you believe something, that
*doesn't* necessarily make it true. Really it doesn't.
> I believe you started using it in 1999
To be more precise, I started using Usenet in 1998; the first time I posted
an article in which I expressed an informed opinion of Schildt's books was
in comp.lang.c rather than in this group, but yes, it was in 1999.
> to trash Schildt
No, I posted an informed opinion of his books.
> and present a false theory of C which ignores practice
I don't know any theories of C, true or false. As for ignoring practice, my
understanding of C is largely built on practice; my study of the Standard
tidied up a few loose ends in my understanding, and corrected a few
misconceptions I had about the language.
> because
> you wished to promote a book you could not even write, but had to
> edit.
I don't think I've ever actively promoted the book on Usenet, actually.
I've mentioned it a few times, usually in response to someone else raising
the subject. But if I *were* seeking to promote it on Usenet, I would find
a better way to do this than to post critiques of an author with whose
books my own book was not even competing. ("C Unleashed" did not target
the same market as Schildt's books.)
It is certainly true that I did not write the whole of "C Unleashed".
Deadlines wouldn't permit that. But I did write around a quarter of it -
more than any of the several other contributing authors (who did an
excellent job, by the way). I'm sure I've told you this before, but there
seems little point in expecting you to remember facts.
>> (c) even if I were which I'm not, and even if it were which it isn't,
>> misusing a Web site for commercial gain is certainly opprobrious but you
>> have not demonstrated why it implies that those who do so are computing
>> thugs.
>
> If you cannot make that connection, you are indeed a thug,
Please clarify whether you think the failure to make that connection makes
*anyone* a thug, or whether you think it's just me. If the former, then
please explain why J Random Lurker is a thug just for failing to follow
your bizarre leaps of illogic. If the latter, please explain why.
> because to
> the thug, everything is of interest only as an opportunity for his
> personal gratification.
Oh, I see - begging the question. But since I'm *not* misusing Usenet to
promote the book and since I'm here to help others to learn about
programming in general and C in particular rather than for personal
gratification, your argument falls.
> You come here to ruin people and you are a thug.
False premise, false conclusion.
>> > Randy Howard is a coding bum who doesn't
>> > contribute much more than abuse and conventional wisdom.
>>
>> He actually contributes quite a lot to this newsgroup. As for
>> conventional wisdom, I'd rather read articles containing conventional
>> wisdom than those containing unconventional stupidity.
>
>
> I'm sure you would.
Yes. You seem to be trying to imply that conventional wisdom is somehow
worse than unconventional stupidity. Of course, I *could* be wrong about
that.
> I'm sure you have a direct financial interest in
> code with gnomic identifiers written to show off the author's
> knowledge and not to solve a problem.
So you're sure. Fine. And you're also fairly sure I work for MI5, right?
This gives some indication of how valuable your certainty is as a measure
of truth.
> This probably gives you opportunities as a "consultant".
Really? Sure about that, too, are you? Ah wait - you said "probably" - so
you're about as sure of it as you are about my working for MI5? Would that
be fair?
>> > Both are
>> > thugs also because they vandalize threads with opinions about
>> > personalities.
>>
>> If that argument is valid, then you are a thug, because you vandalise
>> threads with opinions about personalities. And where does that get us?
>> Nowhere.
>
> As you know, I have responded to your crap since the start of the year
> in such a way that you compulsively and obsessively reply,
I correct your mistakes, as far as I am able and as far as I can spot them
and as far as I don't lose patience with them. You can use whatever
psychiatry buzzwords you like to describe the fact of people correcting
your mistakes, but the corrections remain corrections, and they would be
rendered unnecessary if only you would refrain from making mistakes.
> not with code examples as I have,
How on earth does one reply to a false claim about misuse of Usenet for
book promotion with a *code example*?
In any case, I have posted a fair amount of code to this newsgroup, not to
make political points about Brian Kernighan but to help specific people
who have asked specific questions about programming. I am not concerned
about my code ratio here, at least not at present.
> but repetitious and almost canned answers to
> save time, and you don't care that this creates threads in which the
> original contribution is lost, and you certainly don't care when
> people enter and draw false conclusions.
It is because I do care about the risk of people entering and drawing false
conclusions that I continually refer people back to source material that
demonstrates your evasive nature, your continual refusal to back up your
lunatic assertions with evidence, and your ability to ignore facts in
favour of some bizarre kind of dialectic. Such references give people the
opportunity to reach their own conclusions, based on the facts. I am not
surprised that you are opposed to this.
> Your INTENT is to vandalise
> and fill the newgroup with a data smog of replies.
In fact, I deliberately refrain from replying to *all* the mistakes you
make, partly because I don't have time - you make so many - and partly
because I don't want to clutter the newsgroup. But of course, when you
launch your petty and pointless vendetta against me, it is occasionally
necessary to reply.
> I've been working offline on continued research:
The world awaits the results in fear and trepidation, I expect.
> you prefer to sit and
> emit boring and tedious garbage because your intent is to trash and to
> vandalize.
I am not surprised that you consider the presentation of facts to be
"boring and tedious garbage". As for my intent, it is not your place to
say what my intent is, and in fact you are mistaken about it. My intent in
posting replies to your articles is to point out where you are mistaken.
Technically competent people tend to welcome corrections. No wonder, then,
that you do not.
Richard Heathfield
> On Jan 11, 5:39 am, "Stephen Howe" <sjhoweATdialDOTpipexDOTcom> wrote:
<lots of typical ranting and raving snipped>
>> >I've already shown how to critique a person's work without trashing
>> >him. Precisely because the Internet allows rumor to flourish, job one
>> >should be protecting other peoples' reputations by discussing flaws,
>> >not in them, but in their work.
>>
>> That was what was done.
>
> No, it wasn't. It was all "schildt" all the time. Nobody made any due
> diligence to see whether his errors were shared by other practitioners
> using non-standard compilers.
There are a good many C books that demonstrate that, like Schildt, their
authors don't know the language all that well. People have in fact
published critiques of such books, very often en passant in Usenet
articles. I suspect that Schildt's works have attracted particular
attention because of the volume issue - a great many people have been
caught out by his mistakes and have sought help on Usenet, so his name
comes to the attention of critics more easily than that of, say, Dan
Gookin (the author of "C for Dummies", which at least has the merit of
being open about its intended target audience).
>> >In fact, all the errors in C++: The Complete Reference could be
>> >identified as a comp.programming FAQ by anyone genuinely concerned
>>
>> Oh? So all the people who have published articles on Schildts books are
>> not genuinely concerned?
>
> I think the people who started the fun, including I believe
> Heathfield,
Check the archives. Critiques of Schildt were well under way on Usenet
several years before I started posting in 1998. I have already explained
this.
> acted in bad faith for commercial gain, using the
> unimplemented standard as a way to get authority they could not
> acquire as either programmers or writers. For example, Heathfield has
> confused && and ||,
I have dealt with that charge in the thread where it first arose.
> and seems not to know that despite the
> indeterminacy in the standard as regards pathological constructs, they
> have a determinate result on a virtual machine.
There speaks the one-machine programmer. "All the world's a VAX" was the
ancient cry. Now it's "All the world runs Windows", of course, but it's
the same mentality nonetheless. When you start writing programs that have
to work correctly even on machines you've never heard of, perhaps you'll
begin to get some insight into why the C Standard is important and useful.
<snip>
> You have the right to POLITELY review his books and to give them low
> evaluations.
This has indeed been done, by two ISO C Committee members.
> You DON'T have the right, as professionals, to title
> Amazon reviews like 14-year olds, as in "stay away from Schildt",
Personally, I've never written any Amazon reviews. But I think people do
actually have the right to post Amazon reviews with the title of their
choice, no matter what your or my opinion of that title might be.
<snip>
>> Errata for Bjarne Stroustrup's, "The C++ Programming langauge, 3rd
>> edition"http://www.research.att.com/~bs/3rd_errata.html
>
> My son contributed to this document...at the age of 12.
If that is true - and we have no reason to believe you, given your
demonstrably tenuous hold on facts - then your son recognises what you
apparently do not: the importance of correctness in reference and tutorial
books.
<snip>
Willem
) Filth. *Wildgewordene Kleinburger*.
I wondered when he was going to pull out the foreign language insults
again. I guess he lifted it off some webpage, otherwise he would have
conjugated it correctly.
SaSW, Willem
--
Disclaimer: I am in no way responsible for any of the statements
made in the above text. For all I know I might be
drugged or something..
No I'm not paranoid. You all think I'm paranoid, don't you !
#EOT
spinoza1111
wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Jan 2008 23:08:32 -0600, Ben Bacarisse wrote
>
> > I'll give you two examples. Try to match "a*ab" against "aab". You
> > should get a match (the Pike code does) but both the C++ and the C#
> > versions you posted disagree. The other is more dramatic: on my C# vm
> > matching a pattern like "a*" gives me a helpful crash and an array
> > bounds violation so the error was quite easy to find. For the fix for
> > both, refer to Rob Pike's "ugly" code.
>
> Bravo. The comedy continues.
Hey, asshole, this is a tech thread. Stop vandalizing a discussion
between Bacarisse and myself about whether there are flaws in either
program. It's people like you who are responsible for silencing
discussions about such flaws and in effect, the flaws.
spinoza1111
wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Jan 2008 21:31:58 -0600, spinoza1111 wrote
> (in article
>
> > On Jan 11, 1:08 am, Richard Heathfield <r...@see.sig.invalid> wrote:
> >> spinoza1111 said:
>
> >> <snip>
>
> >>> Almost every review mentions that he's a good writer,
>
> >> Right. There are many good writers. Being a good writer is a nice-to-have
> >> for a C tutorial writer, but it is not sufficient of itself. A detailed
> >> knowledge of C is also a requirement.
>
> > I don't think you have that "detailed knowledge of C" and I believe
> > Herb has it, because knowing C isn't knowing a standard, it's knowing
> > both standard and non-standard implementations. C is a praxis.
>
> Correct C means correct praxis. You haven't ever demonstrated it, and
> neither has Schildt, frankly. Richard most definitely has and does.
By confusing && and ||?
spinoza1111
The bug originated in Rob Pike's ugly code.
Rob Pike's code makes a final call at the point of failure to
matchStar with the pointer to regex pointing past the end of the
string. However, in C, this is "usually" a Nul character, and
matchStar executes with a null string.
However, C makes no provision for preventing a pathological address of
a "string" or memory block with no terminating Nul prior to a memory
fault, and this in fact a major reason why C should not be used for
modern development. You've demonstrated a flaw in C.
It was my error not to spot the fact that for a wide class of regular
expressions, this error would occur in the C sharp transliteration of
the C code, a transliteration made as close as possible to the
original simply to get a comparative performance number, not to be
"perfect"...to determine, in fact, whether the supposed advantages of
a globally buggy claim that the Pike code "does regular expressions",
handles "strings", and is at all Beautiful are worth poor
practice...including relying on addresses of strings being passed, and
on all strings being representable in 8 bit bytes.
In fact, my error demonstrates why I don't believe in code snippets,
and why the 26000 lines of code I shipped for my book "Build Your
Own .Net Language and Compiler" included complete self- and stress-
testing facilities that were praised by a reviewer. I don't expect to
be always able to post bug free code when merely making a point, that
being here that the "beauty" of Pike's code is an
illusion...especially when being deliberately and with malign and
libelous intent harassed by jerks.
I will of course fix the problem you have pointed out, and post the
next version, with an additional feature to get and use the handle as
I have described.
Thanks for pointing this out, and also for a reasonable amount of
civility and self-restraint, as well as hard work, that isn't being
shown by Heathfield or Howard.
Richard Heathfield
> On Jan 11, 3:28 pm, Randy Howard <randyhow...@FOOverizonBAR.net>
> wrote:
<snip>
>>
>> Correct C means correct praxis. You haven't ever demonstrated it, and
>> neither has Schildt, frankly. Richard most definitely has and does.
>
> By confusing && and ||?
I addressed this in the thread where it arose. I refer you to my earlier
reply.
spinoza1111
> spinoza1111said:
Jesus H. Fuck, guy, don't you have a life? Don't you have a job?
You have produced reams of output containing actionable civil and
criminal libel, no usable code and no usable tips beyong unsafe
conventional wisdom and when cornered, like a rat, you refer to
offline documents that none of us have time to verify.
You use this ng for personal gain and to trash the reputations of MEN
who have the BALLS to emit CODE and write (not edit) BOOKS that of
course might contain ERRORS, because even with errors, code and
writing demonstrate truth to the intelligent reader and participates
in a scientific adventure, one in which you are uninterested because
Job One, for Dickie Heathfield, is that no-one think he is the little
rotter he feels, perhaps knows, he is.
You remind me of the Fat Bastards who last year called me a liar when
in the company of a mate, I climbed the tallest mountain on Lamma
Island and posted a description of my climb: Fat Bastards who
themselves can barely hoist themselves off a barstool to log in to the
wireless site and spew their vile shit over the reputations of MEN.
You sit in your shit and you VANDALIZE technical discussions. The
first person to notice the error in my transliteration of the C code
was not you, it was Ben Bacarisse, and his find is hidden by your
thread vandalism and that of Randy Howard to all newbies who haven't
learned to put you in their killfiles.
spinoza1111
> spinoza1111wrote:
>
> ) Filth. *Wildgewordene Kleinburger*.
>
> I wondered when he was going to pull out the foreign language insults
> again. I guess he lifted it off some webpage, otherwise he would have
> conjugated it correctly.
>
> SaSW, Willem
I usually address the group, not the individual, when I flame, and the
word is lifted from Trotsky, the Prophet Outcast, by Isaac Deutscher.
Your facility with the details of a foreign language doesn't interest
me, because you aren't man enough to post the correct "conjugation"
because you're afraid of making a further error.
I am familiar with the nasty habit of German speaking people to treat
their language or rural dialect or argot as Holy Writ (heiliger
schrift, hein?) and to attack people for its "misuse", usually from
behind safe cover, in the same spirit as Germans liked circa 1938 to
beat up Jews. It's a game I won't play because I don't pretend to be a
German speaker, only to appropriate concepts and package them in
foreign words.
The important point being that you are, the, in good old English, with
a borrowing from Indo-British, then, a nasty clerk run amok.
This newsgroup is about programming, jerk face. I am in the process of
making it safe for programming by focusing on the Augean task of
getting rid of the shit (scheisse, hein?) that you, Randy Howard, and
Richard Heathfield spew on an hourly basis.
George Peter Staplin
> In article <3b407112-e592-4e37...@v29g2000hsf.googlegroups.com>, spino...@yahoo.com says...
>>
>> By "computing thugs" I mean people who unconscionably develop and
>> market software which makes decisions that controls lives without
>> elementary controls:
>
> Whereas others, who hoist themselves petards-wards as a prime examples of "ethical programmers", have in their past
> assisted others who made significant contributions to Game Theory. Now isn't Game Theory just a tool for military
> strategists to play dangerous non-zero-sum war games?
>
> Some might suggest that such a work-history could reek of corruption and anti-humanism!
anti-humanism isn't necessarily a bad thing, unless you want to kill
people.
Humans have done an awful lot of horrible things to each other, and
animals.
George
--
To roar without jackals. To be a beast without a field. To be
a human without humanity.
Randy Howard
(in article
<23e587c6-4ea0-473e...@e10g2000prf.googlegroups.com>):
> Hey, asshole, this is a tech thread.
More of the polite professional I see.
> Stop vandalizing a discussion
> between Bacarisse and myself about whether there are flaws in either
> program. It's people like you who are responsible for silencing
> discussions about such flaws and in effect, the flaws.
It's my fault your version(s) of the code, both the C++/whatever that
you /claimed/ was C, and the .NET whatever both do not work properly?
You wish. Your perfect record of posting nothing but broken code
continues.
spinoza1111
flaws in the code and address my points without Schildt-like attacks
on people.
Randy Howard, Richard Heathfield, and Willem, either emulate him or
leave.
Here's my response including a bug fix.
On Jan 11, 1:08 pm, Ben Bacarisse <ben.use...@bsb.me.uk> wrote:
> spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> writes:
>
> <snip>
>
> > This was a technical post describing my concern, with references, to
> > code presented as Beautiful which seemed to me Ugly because it didn't
> > even work for modern strings [...]
>
> Fairer to say that it is "old" code. Your C# "modern string" version
> would not have been possible at the time. Technology marches on and
The problem here is that the publication date of the book Beautiful
Code was 2007. It is intellectually dishonest to maintain that
something as pragmatic, as applied, as code can be beautiful, at least
without an explicit statement from Kernighan that "I ignore
international characters", a statement he did not make.
> we stand, to some extent, on the shoulders of giants. Incidentally,
> (talking of giants) the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode that has so helped
> to make "modern strings" possible was designed and first implemented
> by Ken Thompson -- prompted by Rob Pike.
Which makes Kernighan's omission even more pernicious.
American computer scientists and their fellow-travelers all over the
world insist on using C to talk about algorithms, and this is a
serious mistake, as exhibited by the ease in which I transliterated
the code and created thereby an out of bounds bug (immediately caught
by the runtime, as it would be in production) for the regex A*.
Pike's code is bug-free, it appears (although I have no proof of this,
and haven't seen it run bug-free according to its own charter). This
is not because he's a demigod. My own experience between 1970 and
1975, a period in which I used assembler exclusively, was that by dint
of constant work with a language you avoid making stupid mistakes. I
had this same experience when I used C heavily between 1987 and 1992,
yet I blundered when returning to it...for example, I calculated with
invariants in a for loop header.
But all this means is that C unnaturally imposes tics and expectations
on the programmer coming out of a specific place and time.
It is bad teaching practice to teach, as good computer science, in a
notation that requires the student to know and remember (1) value
parameters can be written safely in C and (2) no sweat if you're off
by one, Nul saves you.
In particular, the latter "feature" creates a coding bum who simply
doesn't worry about such errors.
When I saw the code passing an incremented but unchecked regex, I was
astonished at Pike's and Kernighan's silence on what essentially was
the presentation of pathology as Beauty, for the same reason I was
astonished by the pathology and silence of using a value parm as a
work area. More than this, the arrogance of the pathology, the
arrogance of the brutal silence, and the arrogance of the praxis made
me physically ill.
Now, I am aware that Princeton University, where Kernighan teaches, C
is a required language for majors in computer science. In fact, it is
not taught for the same reason Princeton's math classes start with
calculus. I know this because part of my job at Princeton between 1987
and 1992 was teaching C, during a period in which I used it and
assisted Nash, and became aware of its unusability (Nash switched to
Mathematica).
But during that time, I found myself needing to create a systematic
set of functions associated with structs merely to convert their
contents to strings, to compare them, and to duplicate them. These
were of course precursors of modern, object-oriented, methods such as
toString(), compare() and clone().
It seemed, to use a Shakespearean turn of phrase, a waste of spirit in
an expense of shame to create separate but equal functions, each of
which posed a danger in turn. I could see, easily enough, that the
process had a finite bound. But compared to what I knew of
mathematical work, it seemed utterly pointless.
My mates also seemed strangely infantilized by C. If passed a string
not terminated by Nul, it was always "the user's fault". Some of them
seemed to manifest control-freak psychoses because their little plans,
for example to preallocate arrays with secret bounds, were always
screwing up their lives when in actual production, the need was for a
larger array allocated using malloc. It always seemed for them "too
much work" to at all religiously allocate variable-size objects not on
the stack with some sort of check on the return value to make sure it
was not null.
Whereas today I can try and I can catch.
Which means that in the Princeton CS program, the students have had to
acquire as a condition for success a set of tics that they will, as
undergraduates and beyond, confuse with knowledge, making them less
than they could be.
They will believe false propositions such as "runtime bounds checks
are unmanly and inefficient, for sissies and script kiddies and
girls", "don't worry about off by one", and "all my callers will send
me strings using English-language characters properly bound by Nul",
and "if they don't, call Homeland Security".
An American-centric and political narrowness and xenophobia is the
direct result.
They will use a language for thinking about algorithms ridden with
clap trap and later on, as distinguished researchers, they will close
their ears to anything else.
>
> > and had numerous other technical flaws.
>
> Allegedly. In another post I tried to cut though the verbiage to find
> them and I think they are minor.
They are not minor. C imposes a psychology that causes bugs.
>
> > I then bench-marked it in a C++ [...]
>
> I don't think is was C++. I don't know the details but it looked like
> something else -- I suggested C++/CLI elsethread -- but you probably
> know and could tell us.
Visual C++ Express to generate a command line executable.
>
> > wrapper against a C sharp version
> > which fixed the flaws to discover that the C sharp version is about
> > 3..5 times as slower...
>
> You'd be better off porting the exact original to C# as well (alleged
> bug and all). You could then compare algorithms. I suspect the
> slowdown you see is simply C# doing its stuff. You would then have
> comparable numbers to see if your "fixes" have any real cost.
> [See below for why "fixes" is in "quotes".]
I've already addressed this. The C Sharp version is about 5 times as
slow. But it will work, I believe, when the bugs you found are fixed,
while the Pike code will NEVER work...for international strings.
>
> > but actually works, which the Kernighan code
> > doesn't owing to Kernighan's and Pike's unfortunate, and C-psychology,
> > mindset.
>
> No your re-hash of the original has broken it. You have so messed up
> the neat C code it is hard to find where your bugs are but they are in
> there.
No, I added output to fully explain what was being done to forestall
stupid questions. The Beautiful code runs to two pages.
>
> I'll give you two examples. Try to match "a*ab" against "aab". You
> should get a match (the Pike code does) but both the C++ and the C#
> versions you posted disagree. The other is more dramatic: on my C# vm
> matching a pattern like "a*" gives me a helpful crash and an array
> bounds violation so the error was quite easy to find. For the fix for
> both, refer to Rob Pike's "ugly" code.
Yes, it appears I buttfucked the typing-in of the Pike code and made a
further error (in addition to the one I've identified) in my desire to
get a quick view of *how much* slower C sharp runs. I am traveling on
business, and I do not have the Beautiful Code book with me.
On Saturday evening, I shall review the C++ copy of the Pike code for
errors in typing and, time permitting, get a native purely C compiler
to run it for timings closer to pure C. I will also examine the
behavior of the C Sharp code.
I am also writing a regex in the style of "Build Your Own .Net
Language and Compiler", which embeds tests in the same way such that I
can run hundreds of tests before submitting it.
Thanks for your contribution. I'll discount your smart remarks.
At this time, I stand by my original claim: a factor of five doesn't
justify presenting code that doesn't work for real, international
strings, and calling a grepper a regular expression processor. The
"inefficiency" of Java and .Net is an Urban Legend.
>
> --
> Ben.
Randy Howard
(in article
<bb972460-46e9-4248...@s27g2000prg.googlegroups.com>):
> On Jan 11, 3:28 pm, Randy Howard <randyhow...@FOOverizonBAR.net>
> wrote:
>> On Thu, 10 Jan 2008 21:31:58 -0600, spinoza1111 wrote
>> (in article
>> <2d240115-f992-44ad-aa42-9c15d22f1...@k2g2000hse.googlegroups.com>):
>>
>>> On Jan 11, 1:08 am, Richard Heathfield <r...@see.sig.invalid> wrote:
>>>> spinoza1111 said:
>>
>>>> <snip>
>>
>>>>> Almost every review mentions that he's a good writer,
>>
>>>> Right. There are many good writers. Being a good writer is a nice-to-have
>>>> for a C tutorial writer, but it is not sufficient of itself. A detailed
>>>> knowledge of C is also a requirement.
>>
>>> I don't think you have that "detailed knowledge of C" and I believe
>>> Herb has it, because knowing C isn't knowing a standard, it's knowing
>>> both standard and non-standard implementations. C is a praxis.
>>
>> Correct C means correct praxis. You haven't ever demonstrated it, and
>> neither has Schildt, frankly. Richard most definitely has and does.
>
> By confusing && and ||?
Since that one mistake by Richard, already explained a dozen times, is
all you have, you're going to keep grasping at that straw forever.
And you dare tell him to "get a life" when he replies to your attacks.
Meanwhile we have reams of evidence of your lack of knowledge of C,
even more thanks to Ben, along with Schildt's many documented errors in
his books.
Richard Heathfield
> You have produced reams of output containing actionable civil and
> criminal libel,
If you truly believe that, why haven't you sued me? Put up or shut up.
> no usable code
I have posted a fair amount of usable code here in comp.programming - I
rarely post usable code in replies to you because normally my replies to
you are corrections of factual errors that you have made. Since most of
your verbiage is non-code-related, most of your errors are likewise
non-code-related, and thus so are my corrections. If you want to see
usable code from me, look in threads in which you have *not* participated.
> and no usable tips beyong unsafe
> conventional wisdom and when cornered, like a rat, you refer to
> offline documents that none of us have time to verify.
Many of the documents to which I refer when pointing out your errors and
evasions are Usenet articles that you wrote yourself, and they can be
found online in the Usenet archive maintained by Google, at its "Google
Groups" site. The only documents I can recall mentioning that are offline
are ISO/IEC 9899:1990 and ISO/IEC 14882:1998, both of which are highly
relevant and to which many expert C and C++ programmers will have access;
nevertheless, these documents are not free, it is true - but you will find
that the draft versions of those documents vary only in trivial detail
from the final versions, and the drafts *are* available online.
So, yet again, the facts are against you, and the due diligence you demand
from others you yourself eschew.
> You use this ng for personal gain
No, I don't. I use this newsgroup for discussing computer programming (when
I'm not rebutting idiot claims, that is).
> and to trash the reputations of MEN
> who have the BALLS to emit CODE
If you actually look for code I have posted to this group, you will have no
difficulty finding it unless you are astoundingly incompetent.
> and write (not edit) BOOKS
I note from a quick check at Amazon that your own book is 408 pages long.
Clearly you consider yourself to have written that book.
"C Unleashed" comprises around 1250 pages not including the index, of which
I wrote around 350. "The Unix Programming Environment", by Kernighan and
Pike, is about 350 pages long. So is "Expert C Programming", by Peter van
der Linden. (K&R2 is 272 pages, including index.)
So the amount of material I contributed directly to "C Unleashed" is
comparable to the amount of material available in other programming books,
*and* the book also contains another 900 pages or so of material by other
authors.
I was not the editor of "C Unleashed", a false claim that you keep making.
It is true that I did help out one of the contributing authors who knew
his subject just fine but did sometimes struggle to put it into words. (I
will not be identifying which author it was, for obvious reasons.) The
book's development editor was Gus Miklos, who did a fine job, by the way.
> that of course might contain ERRORS,
All books contain errors. The issue here is the promulgation of errors in
future editions and future titles, *after* those errors have been brought
to the author's attention.
> because even with errors, code and
> writing demonstrate truth to the intelligent reader and participates
> in a scientific adventure, one in which you are uninterested because
> Job One, for Dickie Heathfield, is that no-one think he is the little
> rotter he feels, perhaps knows, he is.
If it makes you feel big and tough to mock other people's names, well,
that's up to you. But it doesn't make you *look* big and tough.
<snip>
> You sit in your shit and you VANDALIZE technical discussions.
You don't /have/ technical discussions. Whenever we get technical, you go
all sociological.
> The
> first person to notice the error in my transliteration of the C code
> was not you, it was Ben Bacarisse,
All credit to Ben for that, but finding bugs in your code is hardly
difficult.
Ben Bacarisse
> On Jan 11, 1:08 pm, Ben Bacarisse <ben.use...@bsb.me.uk> wrote:
>> spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@yahoo.com> writes:
<snip>
>> > but actually works, which the Kernighan code
>> > doesn't owing to Kernighan's and Pike's unfortunate, and C-psychology,
>> > mindset.
>>
>> No your re-hash of the original has broken it. You have so messed up
>> the neat C code it is hard to find where your bugs are but they are in
>> there.
>>
>> I'll give you two examples. Try to match "a*ab" against "aab". You
>> should get a match (the Pike code does) but both the C++ and the C#
>> versions you posted disagree. The other is more dramatic: on my C# vm
>> matching a pattern like "a*" gives me a helpful crash and an array
>> bounds violation so the error was quite easy to find. For the fix for
>> both, refer to Rob Pike's "ugly" code.
>
> The bug originated in Rob Pike's ugly code.
"The" bug? The two I cite are different. One affects both your
quasi-C++ (what is it, BTW, I know it is not C++ but don't know what
it really is) and your C#. The second error you introduce is only in
C# version.
We can't have much of a technical discussion until you say which of
these two you are talking about.
> Rob Pike's code makes a final call at the point of failure to
> matchStar with the pointer to regex pointing past the end of the
> string. However, in C, this is "usually" a Nul character, and
> matchStar executes with a null string.
I think this means the original code correctly loops (and recurses)
until the pattern and the string are exhausted. What else would a
correct matcher do?
> However, C makes no provision for preventing a pathological address of
> a "string" or memory block with no terminating Nul prior to a memory
> fault,
So? C# has not provision for preventing pathological array indexes
that are out of bounds, as your code demonstrates. Correct programs
are hard to write, but the point is you took a correct one and added
at least two errors.
> and this in fact a major reason why C should not be used for
> modern development. You've demonstrated a flaw in C.
All programming languages have flaws (except Haskell, of course!) but
the art of programming is write correct programs despite this
drawback. Pike was able to do that in C but you have not been able to
demonstrate that in C# (or the C++ish language you also posted in).
Your claim was that you had removed flaws in the code to produce a
program "that actually works". You have not made a good case for
there being flaws in the original, but your rewrite definitely has
flaws and patently does not work in many cases.
<snip>
> In fact, my error demonstrates why I don't believe in code snippets,
Then you should not have commented on a code snippet (except, perhaps
to say you don't believe in them) and you certainly should not have
posted two more that claimed to be corrections.
--
Ben.
Randy Howard
(in article
<c67c62ba-0daa-4c8b...@d4g2000prg.googlegroups.com>):
> Ben's posts are examples of what I'm talking about! He's able to find
> flaws in the code and address my points without Schildt-like attacks
> on people.
Lies. When others find fault in your code, historically you deny them
as flaws, blame them on others, or insult them. Don't pretend like
this has changed.
> Here's my response including a bug fix.
>>
>> Fairer to say that it is "old" code. Your C# "modern string" version
>> would not have been possible at the time. Technology marches on and
>
> The problem here is that the publication date of the book Beautiful
> Code was 2007. It is intellectually dishonest to maintain that
> something as pragmatic, as applied, as code can be beautiful, at least
> without an explicit statement from Kernighan that "I ignore
> international characters", a statement he did not make.
Since it is obvious to anyone reading the code that knows C that it
does not support international characters, it doesn't need to be said.
> American computer scientists and their fellow-travelers all over the
> world insist on using C to talk about algorithms, and this is a
> serious mistake, as exhibited by the ease in which I transliterated
> the code and created thereby an out of bounds bug (immediately caught
> by the runtime, as it would be in production) for the regex A*.
It wasn't immediately caught by you, since you didn't even bother to
test it. Someone else tested it for you and caught you by surprise.
> Pike's code is bug-free, it appears
Hardly surprising. Your incarnation of it, which you were claiming was
in C, but was /not/ in C is not bug-free. Also not surprising. You've
yet to post anything here that was not broken.
> This is not because he's a demigod.
Right. It's because he is a competent programmer.
> I had this same experience when I used C heavily between 1987 and 1992,
> yet I blundered when returning to it...for example, I calculated with
> invariants in a for loop header.
Interesting. After four years you finally correct your previous lie
that you did it intentionally to make the code more readable, and now
we have your admission at long last that you just blew it.
Congratulations on finding the spine to admit it.
> But all this means is that C unnaturally imposes tics and expectations
> on the programmer coming out of a specific place and time.
It means nothing of the kind. Any programming language, and especially
a low-level one requires competency. It's that simple.
>>> wrapper against a C sharp version
>>> which fixed the flaws to discover that the C sharp version is about
>>> 3..5 times as slower...
>>
>> You'd be better off porting the exact original to C# as well (alleged
>> bug and all). You could then compare algorithms. I suspect the
>> slowdown you see is simply C# doing its stuff. You would then have
>> comparable numbers to see if your "fixes" have any real cost.
>> [See below for why "fixes" is in "quotes".]
>
> I've already addressed this. The C Sharp version is about 5 times as
> slow. But it will work, I believe, when the bugs you found are fixed,
> while the Pike code will NEVER work...for international strings.
Since the original code was not designed to work with international
strings, this is a classic case of moving the goal posts.
>>> but actually works, which the Kernighan code
>>> doesn't owing to Kernighan's and Pike's unfortunate, and C-psychology,
>>> mindset.
>>
>> No your re-hash of the original has broken it. You have so messed up
>> the neat C code it is hard to find where your bugs are but they are in
>> there.
>
> No, I added output to fully explain what was being done to forestall
> stupid questions.
You added bugs to forestall stupid questions, you mean. ;-)
The Beautiful code runs to two pages.
And it does so incorrectly.
spinoza1111
> spinoza1111said:
>
This is a lie. Programmer Dude in 2003 and Ben Bacarisse today correct
my mistakes. Ben does a better job than Dude because he doesn't
confuse his stylistic prejudices with reality.
From day one, you began by calling my placing "programmer
professionalism" in context off-topic, not because it was, but because
you lacked sufficient education to understand it, and this threatened
your dominance of this newsgroup. In 2003, it was the Dude who noticed
an error which I fixed independently and then, following your lead,
posted objections offline rather than engaging in dialog; but, it was
he who did the work.
You had the opportunity as a C/C++ expert to examine the code posted
in "Brian Kernighan, maybe I'm not worthy, maybe I'm scum" to find its
errors. Instead of doing this, you vandalized the thread because
you're not man enough to make a statement that might be useful, that
might move the conversation along in a collective search for truth,
because this might expose your weakness, and as a bully you fear and
you hound weakness in others because of your fear of your own
inadequcy.
> and as far as I don't lose patience with them. You can use whatever
> psychiatry buzzwords you like to describe the fact of people correcting
> your mistakes, but the corrections remain corrections, and they would be
> rendered unnecessary if only you would refrain from making mistakes.
This is a uniquely clerkish perspective, and one made in an industry
most famous for institutional mistakes constituted in shipment of
software with countless errors, one made in an industry that from DAY
ONE has had to acknowledge the ubiquity of mistake-making. Your fear
of "making mistakes" has made you into a technical bully of the sort
that in real companies causes errors by nastily interrupting
structured walkthroughs with foul language and with job-related
threats.
You're the problem person here and you need to leave.
>
> > not with code examples as I have,
>
> How on earth does one reply to a false claim about misuse of Usenet for
> book promotion with a *code example*?
Are you as stupid as you seem to be? I am saying that you DON'T post
code because you're afraid of being mocked by organized thug campaigns
of the sort you have marshaled against people in the past.
No competent people, except myself and occasionally Godwin, visit this
site. Do you know why? It's because if someone with Kernighan's
competence and star power were to enter, he would attract zero-sum
people who get their rocks off, not by engaging in a reasonably civil
technical conversation, but by "proving" that they are "smarter" than
Schildt.
I'm not attempting to "prove" that I'm "smarter than" Kernighan. Part
of the problem, identified by Marcuse, is precisely the idea that we
must find our place in the ranks of a One-Dimensional, militarized and
garrison society, and not seek the truth, there being no truth to the
hopeless and self-hating *wildgeword kleinburger*, just money, and not
much of that either.
But you came here in 1998 to take Schildt down and raise yourself up,
despite the fact that you simply don't have his culture and his
humanity.
You don't hate his errors. You probably hate his picture on the cover
of born to code. It's all personalities to you, and the impossible
task of relieving your own feelings of professional, personal, and
sexual inadequacy.
>
> In any case, I have posted a fair amount of code to this newsgroup, not to
> make political points about Brian Kernighan but to help specific people
> who have asked specific questions about programming. I am not concerned
> about my code ratio here, at least not at present.
>
> > but repetitious and almost canned answers to
> > save time, and you don't care that this creates threads in which the
> > original contribution is lost, and you certainly don't care when
> > people enter and draw false conclusions.
>
> It is because I do care about the risk of people entering and drawing false
> conclusions that I continually refer people back to source material that
> demonstrates your evasive nature, your continual refusal to back up your
> lunatic assertions with evidence, and your ability to ignore facts in
> favour of some bizarre kind of dialectic. Such references give people the
> opportunity to reach their own conclusions, based on the facts. I am not
> surprised that you are opposed to this.
No, you are physically incapable of writing without help, offline, and
in secret. I'd make mincemeat of you person to person. Care to arrange
a meeting?
>
> > Your INTENT is to vandalise
> > and fill the newgroup with a data smog of replies.
>
> In fact, I ...
>
> read more »
Randy Howard
(in article
<e654dafc-9e3a-4120...@l6g2000prm.googlegroups.com>):
> On Jan 11, 4:25 pm, Richard Heathfield <r...@see.sig.invalid> wrote:
>> How on earth does one reply to a false claim about misuse of Usenet for
>> book promotion with a *code example*?
>
> Are you as stupid as you seem to be? I am saying that you DON'T post
> code because you're afraid of being mocked by organized thug campaigns
> of the sort you have marshaled against people in the past.
You obviously don't pay much attention then. That, or you are lying
intentionally. Richard probably posts more C code than than anyone
else participating in c.p or c.l.c. Much of it off the cuff, posted
minutes after an inquiry is posted about how to do something in C.
> No competent people, except myself and occasionally Godwin, visit this
> site.
What site? You mean this usenet newsgroup, or are you referring to
some web page?
> Do you know why? It's because if someone with Kernighan's
> competence and star power were to enter, he would attract zero-sum
> people who get their rocks off, not by engaging in a reasonably civil
> technical conversation, but by "proving" that they are "smarter" than
> Schildt.
Are you trying to imply that Schildt has Kernighan's "competence"? I
hope not.
> I'm not attempting to "prove" that I'm "smarter than" Kernighan.
That's good.
>> It is because I do care about the risk of people entering and drawing false
>> conclusions that I continually refer people back to source material that
>> demonstrates your evasive nature, your continual refusal to back up your
>> lunatic assertions with evidence, and your ability to ignore facts in
>> favour of some bizarre kind of dialectic. Such references give people the
>> opportunity to reach their own conclusions, based on the facts. I am not
>> surprised that you are opposed to this.
>
> No, you are physically incapable of writing without help, offline, and
> in secret.
Hint: All usenet posts are made "offline". They are submitted when
complete "online". If you need a pointer to NNTP docs, just ask.
As for "secret", I can't begin to imagine how you think that is
relevant. Do you sit on a street corner and yell for people to come
watch you type in your posts here?
> I'd make mincemeat of you person to person. Care to arrange
> a meeting?
Psycho Detected. It was bound to happen, but you just clinched it.
spinoza1111
wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Jan 2008 08:49:19 -0600,spinoza1111wrote
> (in article
>
> > Ben's posts are examples of what I'm talking about! He's able to find
> > flaws in the code and address my points without Schildt-like attacks
> > on people.
>
> Lies. When others find fault in your code, historically you deny them
> as flaws, blame them on others, or insult them. Don't pretend like
> this has changed.
Read my replies to Bacarisse, asshole. He does his homework and is
reasonably civil. You don't, and I'm gonna get mediaeval on you.
>
> > Here's my response including a bug fix.
>
> >> Fairer to say that it is "old" code. Your C# "modern string" version
> >> would not have been possible at the time. Technology marches on and
>
> > The problem here is that the publication date of the book Beautiful
> > Code was 2007. It is intellectually dishonest to maintain that
> > something as pragmatic, as applied, as code can be beautiful, at least
> > without an explicit statement from Kernighan that "I ignore
> > international characters", a statement he did not make.
>
> Since it is obvious to anyone reading the code that knows C that it
> does not support international characters, it doesn't need to be said.
Hey, asshole, the book was vended by O'Reilly as a generalist book.
>
> > American computer scientists and their fellow-travelers all over the
> > world insist on using C to talk about algorithms, and this is a
> > serious mistake, as exhibited by the ease in which I transliterated
> > the code and created thereby an out of bounds bug (immediately caught
> > by the runtime, as it would be in production) for the regex A*.
>
> It wasn't immediately caught by you, since you didn't even bother to
> test it. Someone else tested it for you and caught you by surprise.
At the time, asshole, I was primarily concerned with a crude
comparision. If you wouldn't waste my time, I would have done far
more, and I am writing, using the methodology in my book to prevent
errors and test with hundreds of cases, a better solution.
>
> > Pike's code is bug-free, it appears
>
> Hardly surprising. Your incarnation of it, which you were claiming was
> in C, but was /not/ in C is not bug-free. Also not surprising. You've
> yet to post anything here that was not broken.
I haven't seen anything from you, asshole, that was not a direct
attack on another person. News flash, asshole. I think that people's
feelings ARE more important than code not intended for delivery to a
paying client, and that buggy code is part of a dialog, that invites
civil correction, not global attacks.
You see, asshole, I'm a humanist. I think most computer software is
garbage even if bug free because it is written to control people in
the interest of the wealthy and powerful. But at a minimum, it should
serve human needs.
Here, asshole, the human need is for a civil dialog, not mythical "bug
free code" which you cannot and do not produce in all probability,
especially after your client pays you.
This need is parsecs more important than the calculation of a limit
using invariants in a for loop, asshole.
As a private person with a family, asshole, and not a person who
sought media fame even on the level of Wikipedia, NONE of Herbert
Schildt's obscure errors merit his being made notorious by creeps,
with time on their hands, because people are far more important than
what main() returns.
For the same reason, asshole, I didn't deserve my literate style, a
style you could not emulate in a thousand years, being placed on
wikipedia as "Nilgewater", and I got rid of your shit for this reason.
>
> > This is not because he's a demigod.
>
> Right. It's because he is a competent programmer.
I see no sign that you are one.
>
> > I had this same experience when I used C heavily between 1987 and 1992,
> > yet I blundered when returning to it...for example, I calculated with
> > invariants in a for loop header.
>
> Interesting. After four years you finally correct your previous lie
> that you did it intentionally to make the code more readable, and now
> we have your admission at long last that you just blew it.
> Congratulations on finding the spine to admit it.
I said that in 2003 in so many words, asshole. I guessed you missed
it, asshole.
>
> > But all this means is that C unnaturally imposes tics and expectations
> > on the programmer coming out of a specific place and time.
>
> It means nothing of the kind. Any programming language, and especially
> a low-level one requires competency. It's that simple.
For you, asshole, "competence" has little to do with mathematics or
code. It's really the willingness and the ability to open your big yap
and throw your weight around. You obsessively stalk and harass people
on usenet while claiming, with utter absurdity, to ignore them because
as opposed to the job you may or may not currently hold in Austin,
people here can't be destroyed by your big yap, perhaps your fists,
and just perhaps your gun.
>
> >>> wrapper against a C sharp version
> >>> which fixed the flaws to discover that the C sharp version is about
> >>> 3..5 times as slower...
>
> >> You'd be better off porting the exact original to C# as well (alleged
> >> bug and all). You could then compare algorithms. I suspect the
> >> slowdown you see is simply C# doing its stuff. You would then have
> >> comparable numbers to see if your "fixes" have any real cost.
> >> [See below for why "fixes" is in "quotes".]
>
> > I've already addressed this. The C Sharp version is about 5 times as
> > slow. But it will work, I believe, when the bugs you found are fixed,
> > while the Pike code will NEVER work...for international strings.
>
> Since the original code was not designed to work with international
> strings, this is a classic case of moving the goal posts.
Reread the original post, asshole. Kernighan didn't have the sense to
even mention the issue because he's "matured" into a person able to
ignore competing paradigms, and unlike Dijkstra has lost his
intellectual honesty.
>
> >>> but actually works, which the Kernighan code
> >>> doesn't owing to Kernighan's and Pike's unfortunate, and C-psychology,
> >>> mindset.
>
> >> No your re-hash of the original has broken it. You have so messed up
> >> the neat C code it is hard to find where your bugs are but they are in
> >> there.
>
> > No, I added output to fully explain what was being done to forestall
> > stupid questions.
>
> You added bugs to forestall stupid questions, you mean. ;-)
>
> The Beautiful code runs to two pages.
>
> And it does so incorrectly.
No, asshole, learn to read. The original Pike code runs to two pages.
Phlip
> asshole
Could all the responsible people here PLEEEEASE let this jerkoff have the last
word??
Richard Heathfield
> On Jan 11, 4:25 pm, Richard Heathfield <r...@see.sig.invalid> wrote:
>> spinoza1111said:
<snip>
>> > As you know, I have responded to your crap since the start of the year
>> > in such a way that you compulsively and obsessively reply,
>>
>> I correct your mistakes, as far as I am able and as far as I can spot
>> them
>
> This is a lie.
Assuming you refer to my comment rather than to your own, I disagree.
> Programmer Dude in 2003 and Ben Bacarisse today correct
> my mistakes.
It is certainly the case that Programmer Dude in 2003 and Ben Bacarisse
today have corrected mistakes that you have made. It is also the case that
I have corrected mistakes that you have made. Your inability to recognise
this does not change its truth. If you want to find out which of your
mistakes I have corrected, you will find ample evidence in my previous
postings to this newsgroup in threads in which you have participated.
> Ben does a better job than Dude because he doesn't
> confuse his stylistic prejudices with reality.
Ben does a fine job. Chris ("Programmer Dude") also did a fine job.
> From day one, you began by calling my placing "programmer
> professionalism" in context off-topic, not because it was, but because
> you lacked sufficient education to understand it, and this threatened
> your dominance of this newsgroup.
So you choose to believe.
> In 2003, it was the Dude who noticed
> an error which I fixed independently and then, following your lead,
> posted objections offline rather than engaging in dialog; but, it was
> he who did the work.
I refer you to these two of many counter-examples:
<3D19FAEA...@eton.powernet.co.uk>
<3D1A361C...@eton.powernet.co.uk>
You should have no difficulty in finding them. Oh, but wait - it's you.
Maybe you're too stupid. Okay, I'll post links - but these are links to
Usenet articles that **I posted to this newsgroup** in 2003 - so they were
posted ON-LINE, in direct contradiction to your above claim:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.programming/msg/f014bdf8b0675e9a
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.programming/msg/15fb4f05b0be558e
> You had the opportunity as a C/C++ expert to examine the code posted
> in "Brian Kernighan, maybe I'm not worthy, maybe I'm scum" to find its
> errors.
I do not claim to be a C++ expert. I don't even claim to be a C expert,
actually, but I know more about C than I do about C++. Your code was
neither C nor C++, so I'm not sure why either C or C++ expertise would be
relevant.
It is true that I had the opportunity to examine the code. It is also true
that I didn't bother. After all, you have posted buggy code before, and no
doubt you will post buggy code again. Your reaction to corrections is so
hostile that it is evident that attempting to educate you is a pointless
task; even if that weren't true, it would be silly of me to make the
attempt without first learning C# (or whatever language it is - it looks
to me like C#, but <shrug>). I see no value to anyone in my commenting on
a program written in a language that I haven't studied in some depth.
<same ol' same ol' snipped>
> Your fear
> of "making mistakes"
I'm not afraid of making mistakes. If I were, I wouldn't make so many. But
when I make a mistake, and people notice it and point it out to me, I
check that they're correct and then thank them. Correctly pointing out
other people's mistakes is a *service*, and when people perform that
service for me, I am glad and grateful.
> You're the problem person here and you need to leave.
You don't get to choose who posts here any more than I do.
>> > not with code examples as I have,
>>
>> How on earth does one reply to a false claim about misuse of Usenet for
>> book promotion with a *code example*?
>
> Are you as stupid as you seem to be?
Mu.
> I am saying that you DON'T post code
Yeah, you keep saying stuff that isn't true. I do actually post code here,
generally when I consider it useful as an adjunct to a reply to a plea for
help.
> No competent people, except myself
Excuse me while I laugh.
> and occasionally Godwin, visit this
> site.
You just managed to insult the entire group (except for Mike Godwin, and
even then I suspect he'd object to being lumped into any set where you are
the only other member).
> Do you know why? It's because if someone with Kernighan's
> competence and star power were to enter, he would attract zero-sum
> people who get their rocks off, not by engaging in a reasonably civil
> technical conversation, but by "proving" that they are "smarter" than
> Schildt.
Bjarne Stroustrup (who, I would suggest, is of comparable competence and
"star power" to Kernighan) posts here sometimes, and he contributes to
very civil technical discussions indeed.
<snip>
> But you came here in 1998 to take Schildt down
No, I didn't. I started using Usenet in 1998 out of sheer curiosity,
wanting to know what it was and how it worked. My first Usenet comments on
Schildt, which you appear not to have read, date from 1999.
>> > [...] you certainly don't care when
>> > people enter and draw false conclusions.
>>
>> It is because I do care about the risk of people entering and drawing
>> false conclusions that I continually refer people back to source
>> material that demonstrates your evasive nature, your continual refusal
>> to back up your lunatic assertions with evidence, and your ability to
>> ignore facts in favour of some bizarre kind of dialectic. Such
>> references give people the opportunity to reach their own conclusions,
>> based on the facts. I am not surprised that you are opposed to this.
>
> No, you are physically incapable of writing without help, offline, and
> in secret.
You are of course entitled to hold that opinion. I will leave it to others
to decide whether they share it.
> I'd make mincemeat of you person to person.
That appears to be a threat of physical violence. You are, I think, the
second person on Usenet to make threats against my person. The other guy
was a bozo too.
> Care to arrange a meeting?
I'd rather kiss a Wookiee.
Richard Heathfield
Sorry, Phlip. Yep, will do.
Walter Banks
spinoza1111 wrote:
> Ben's posts are examples of what I'm talking about! He's able to find
> flaws in the code and address my points without Schildt-like attacks
> on people.
< rant> removed
What part of this off topic rant have we not heard before. Now
Schildt is being accused of attacking people.
The C# implementation of regex is flawed and the testing results
that were posted can't be reproduced.
Enough already.
w..
Richard Harter
wrote:
Evidently not. I opine that it is poor sport myself, too much
like taunting the village idiot, but boys will be boys.
Willem
) I am familiar with the nasty habit of German speaking people to treat
) their language or rural dialect or argot as Holy Writ (heiliger
) schrift, hein?) and to attack people for its "misuse", usually from
) behind safe cover, in the same spirit as Germans liked circa 1938 to
) beat up Jews.
Are you calling me a Nazi ?
SaSW, Willem
CBFalconer
> spinoza1111 wrote
>
... extensive snip ...
>
>> No, you are physically incapable of writing without help, offline,
>> and in secret.
>
> Hint: All usenet posts are made "offline". They are submitted when
> complete "online". If you need a pointer to NNTP docs, just ask.
> As for "secret", I can't begin to imagine how you think that is
> relevant. Do you sit on a street corner and yell for people to
> come watch you type in your posts here?
Just to shorten this nonsense, here's a reference to NNTP docs.
Publicly available, and has been for a considererable time.
<http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc850.txt>
--
Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net)
<http://cbfalconer.home.att.net>
Try the download section.
--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com
CBFalconer
> spinoza1111 wrote
>
>
>> Stop vandalizing a discussion between Bacarisse and myself about
>> whether there are flaws in either program. It's people like you
>> who are responsible for silencing discussions about such flaws
>> and in effect, the flaws.
>
> It's my fault your version(s) of the code, both the C++/whatever
> that you /claimed/ was C, and the .NET whatever both do not work
> properly?
You might consider pointing out that "a discussion between
Bacarisse and myself" (where myself refers to Spinoza1111) has no
business on a public Usenet newsgroup, but belongs in email.
Putting it here is pure thuggery and vandalization.
Stephen Howe
>>
I am familiar with the nasty habit of German speaking people to treat
their language or rural dialect or argot as Holy Writ (heiliger
schrift, hein?) and to attack people for its "misuse", usually from
behind safe cover, in the same spirit as Germans liked circa 1938 to
beat up Jews. It's a game I won't play because I don't pretend to be a
German speaker, only to appropriate concepts and package them in
foreign words.
>>
To me, it looks like he is Dutch.
Stephen Howe
Ben Bacarisse
> Randy Howard, Richard Heathfield, and Willem, either emulate him or
> leave.
If you had misrepresented and abused me in the way you have done to
Richard Heathfield, I doubt I would be able to keep my head as he has
done.
> Here's my response including a bug fix.
>
> On Jan 11, 1:08 pm, Ben Bacarisse <ben.use...@bsb.me.uk> wrote:
>> spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> writes:
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>> > This was a technical post describing my concern, with references, to
>> > code presented as Beautiful which seemed to me Ugly because it didn't
>> > even work for modern strings [...]
>>
>> Fairer to say that it is "old" code. Your C# "modern string" version
>> would not have been possible at the time. Technology marches on and
>
> The problem here is that the publication date of the book Beautiful
> Code was 2007. It is intellectually dishonest to maintain that
> something as pragmatic, as applied, as code can be beautiful, at least
> without an explicit statement from Kernighan that "I ignore
> international characters", a statement he did not make.
The error of this logic has been pointed out already (I think by
Richard Heathfield, in fact). The code is valid for any character set
at all. It does not work for certain encodings, but then neither does
yours. Most C systems have a narrow char, but that is not required.
It would handle international characters if the execution character
set included them and so you are criticising Kernighan for not making
a statement that would be false.
If you had said "I'd prefer the code to use wchar_t" then I could
agree with that, but it is a trivial change make and not a major
criticism.
There are important regex issues the relate to internationalisation
but you have not addressed these in you code.
> American computer scientists and their fellow-travelers all over the
> world insist on using C to talk about algorithms, and this is a
> serious mistake, as exhibited by the ease in which I transliterated
> the code and created thereby an out of bounds bug (immediately caught
> by the runtime, as it would be in production) for the regex A*.
That is and extraordinary thing to say. You turned the correct, clear,
and simple:
if (regexp[1] == '*')
return matchstar(regexp[0], regexp+2, text);
into this buggy and unclear mess:
int index;
if ((index = regexIndex + 1) < regex.Length && regex[index] == '*')
{
regexIndex += 2;
return matchstar(regex[regexIndex], regex, ref regexIndex, text,
ref textIndex);
}
and you are blaming C for this?
> Pike's code is bug-free, it appears (although I have no proof of this,
> and haven't seen it run bug-free according to its own charter).
Of course you have no proof, and neither do I, but the code has the
merit of being short, clear, and concise *and *of having had many eyes
on it for many years. Unless you can show a bug, saying that you
"have not seen it run big-free" just sounds petty and somewhat snide.
> It is bad teaching practice to teach, as good computer science, in a
> notation that requires the student to know and remember (1) value
> parameters can be written safely in C and
Eh? If you dislike it from a style point of view, so be it (I don't
like style arguments) but very few languages prevent it as a matter of
course. What language do you suggest from this point of view?
Interesting, both C and C++, *can* enforce this discipline,
but you did not use that assistance (declaring the parameter const).
This seems so odd that I think I have missed your point. If I have,
what is problem of these safely writable parameters? A code snippet
will be need to know what you are talking about.
> (2) no sweat if you're off by one, Nul saves you.
>
> In particular, the latter "feature" creates a coding bum who simply
> doesn't worry about such errors.
Are you saying that is why you made the indexing error above? Has C
turned you into a "coding bum" (whatever that is)? My experience
(limited, I agree) is that C tends to make for very careful and
precise coders. I find it hard to believe that C has damaged your
coding to such an extent. If I am right about that, the error is a
simple slip-up caused by not thinking though what needs to happen at
this stage in the algorithm -- i.e. a plain old bug·
<snip>
> Which means that in the Princeton CS program, the students have had to
> acquire as a condition for success a set of tics that they will, as
> undergraduates and beyond, confuse with knowledge, making them less
> than they could be.
>
> They will believe false propositions such as "runtime bounds checks
> are unmanly and inefficient, for sissies and script kiddies and
> girls", "don't worry about off by one", and "all my callers will send
> me strings using English-language characters properly bound by Nul",
> and "if they don't, call Homeland Security".
Has anyone bere, especially the author you originally criticised, ever
stated any of these silly points of view?
In all these long related threads, only two examples have appeared
that suggest a casual attitude to off-by-one errors: your C# code and
the Shildt function posted by RH. I say "suggest" because I am sure
you do care, but you can't have missed the irony.
<snip polemic>
>> I don't think is was C++. I don't know the details but it looked like
>> something else -- I suggested C++/CLI elsethread -- but you probably
>> know and could tell us.
>
> Visual C++ Express to generate a command line executable.
I meant what language was it. I does not go though a plain C++
compiler.
> Yes, it appears I buttfucked
Let's not go there.
> the typing-in of the Pike code
<snip>
> Thanks for your contribution. I'll discount your smart remarks.
You are welcome. As you can see, I have discounted your polemical
remarks. I can't help being a smart Alec and I don't think you can
help being polemical. Let's continue to ignore the bits we don't like.
> At this time, I stand by my original claim: a factor of five doesn't
> justify presenting code that doesn't work for real, international
> strings,
I am happy to make a simple type change and pay no penalty.
Ben Bacarisse
> On Jan 11, 11:06 pm, Randy Howard <randyhow...@FOOverizonBAR.net>
> wrote:
>> On Fri, 11 Jan 2008 08:49:19 -0600,spinoza1111wrote
>> (in article
>> <c67c62ba-0daa-4c8b-bb67-3a5ba720d...@d4g2000prg.googlegroups.com>):
>>
>> > Ben's posts are examples of what I'm talking about! He's able to find
>> > flaws in the code and address my points without Schildt-like attacks
>> > on people.
>>
>> Lies. When others find fault in your code, historically you deny them
>> as flaws, blame them on others, or insult them. Don't pretend like
>> this has changed.
[assume <snip> between all these:]
> Read my replies to Bacarisse, asshole.
> Hey, asshole, the book was vended by O'Reilly as a generalist book.
> At the time, asshole, I was primarily concerned with a crude
> I haven't seen anything from you, asshole, that was not a direct
> You see, asshole, I'm a humanist. I think most computer software is
> Here, asshole, the human need is for a civil dialog, not mythical "bug
> using invariants in a for loop, asshole.
> As a private person with a family, asshole, and not a person who
> For the same reason, asshole, I didn't deserve my literate style, a
> it, asshole.
> For you, asshole, "competence" has little to do with mathematics or
> Reread the original post, asshole. Kernighan didn't have the sense to
> No, asshole, learn to read. The original Pike code runs to two
> pages.
As they say on "Dragon's Den": I'm out.
Bye.
--
Ben.
Ben Bacarisse
Malcolm McLean
> Richard Heathfield wrote:
>>
>> spinoza1111 said:
>
>> > C Unleashed, to promote his sales
>
> Isn't that book out of print?
>
Not really. You can still get copies.
--
Free games and programming goodies.
http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~bgy1mm
Chris McDonald
>...... like a rat, you refer to
>offline documents that none of us have time to verify.
Speaking of verification, I would like to verify your recent claim that
you personally speak for Brian Kernighan, and that he does not read this
newsgroup for the fallacious reasons you have cited.
Could you please provide proof of your statements, or were you lying?
Thank you,
--
Chris.
CBFalconer
> "pete" <pfi...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>>> spinoza1111 said:
>>
>>>> C Unleashed, to promote his sales
>>
>> Isn't that book out of print?
>
> Not really. You can still get copies.
Just like Gutenberg bibles.
spinoza1111
> spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@yahoo.com> writes:
> >...... like a rat, you refer to
> >offline documents that none of us have time to verify.
>
> Speaking of verification, I would like to verify your recent claim that
> you personally speak for Brian Kernighan, and that he does not read this
> newsgroup for the fallacious reasons you have cited.
It is well known that most prestigious people ignore usenet, whether
for posting or even reading, so I inferred the obvious: that Kernighan
does NOT waste his time with people who cannot write and who use this
newsgroup to trash personalities for commercial gain.
spinoza1111
> spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@yahoo.com> writes:
> > Randy Howard, Richard Heathfield, and Willem, either emulate him or
> > leave.
>
> If you had misrepresented and abused me in the way you have done to
> Richard Heathfield, I doubt I would be able to keep my head as he has
> done.
You need to do your homework. People conclude from the manly vigor of
my replies that I am making a mountain out of a molehill. You need to
have been here since 1998 to see Heathfield's modus operandi.
What you narcissitically refer to unclarity is probably a different
language. There's of course a bug in the above, as I've admitted.
However, your knee-jerk reaction showed you hate your job and, sadly,
like the other posters, you prefer psychological transference of this
hatred to content. I'd expected more, but instead I have to deal, it
seems, with the usual shit, in which programmers who don't code log on
here to hound and to scapegoat people for making interesting mistakes,
which, in a decent community, would produce collective knowledge.
It's obvious, as it should have been to me, that regexIndex can't
index when the last character of the regex is an asterisk. This wasn't
tested, but it was caught by the runtime, as it would not have been in
C. I'd say that all you need is a simple test, which is not needed in
C because of Nuls.
However, the bug illustrates not only my stupidity, but also the fact
that Kernighan is trying to "do" computer science with an inadequate
notation that imprisons the student within the "twittering world" of
C.
I realized when I so quickly posted the code that I was violating the
method I used in "Build Your Own .Net Language and Compiler". I didn't
make the C Sharp version object-oriented, I didn't use Hungarian (a
good way to avoid bugs), and I did not build-in testing with the
creation of procedures to generate random regexes, which is what I am
doing in the long-range solution.
I shall revisit the original Pike code this evening, as I've said, and
use not Visual C++ Express but a free C compiler. I shall review the C
sharp code for further bugs. Probably, this will not change the
metrics I obtained last week, which show that C Sharp is only a bit
slower, meaning that the Beauty of using value parameters as trash
work areas and counting on Nul is an illusion.
I will also continue my own OO version which will avoid blunders such
as the above with the level of testing I used on the compiler in my
book.
>
> > Pike's code is bug-free, it appears (although I have no proof of this,
> > and haven't seen it run bug-free according to its own charter).
>
> Of course you have no proof, and neither do I, but the code has the
> merit of being short, clear, and concise *and *of having had many eyes
> on it for many years. Unless you can show a bug, saying that you
> "have not seen it run big-free" just sounds petty and somewhat snide.
It would have been petty and snide only if I happened to be share the
lower middle class anxiety about criticism. The wildgeworden
Kleinburger cannot abide criticism because it pushes him into the
proletariat nor can he give it, even in technical areas where
criticism is important for safety and progress, therefore, to the
wildegeworden Kleinburger, the mere sound of criticism, apart from
high level criticism directed at underlings, or that from the bully
who clearly speaks for the high level in the manner of the Sergeant
Major, is harsh and grating to the ear.
I set the tone of the criticism by titling the thread that was
vandalized "Brian Kernighan, maybe I'm not worthy...". But this is
something that the wildgeworden Kleinburger is physicially incapable
of doing. It's too much of a risk.
>
> > It is bad teaching practice to teach, as good computer science, in a
> > notation that requires the student to know and remember (1) value
> > parameters can be written safely in C and
>
> Eh? If you dislike it from a style point of view, so be it (I don't
> like style arguments) but very few languages prevent it as a matter of
> course. What language do you suggest from this point of view?
Pascal, I believe, wouldn't let you assign a value parameter. Correct
me if I'm wrong.
>
> Interesting, both C and C++, *can* enforce this discipline,
> but you did not use that assistance (declaring the parameter const).
> This seems so odd that I think I have missed your point. If I have,
> what is problem of these safely writable parameters? A code snippet
> will be need to know what you are talking about.
Yes, I should have used const. But more generally, the original
designers of the language should have bit the bullet and forbid the
modification of val parameters as a confusion.
The problem is that these humanistic gestures were perceived by the
language designers as having a cost, and if the compiler had forbid
the modification of val parameters, then many programs would have
added one more value to the stack at run time, representing the work
area.
Now, I've been present at meetings where these sorts of decisions were
taken, usually in the understandable engineering direction of not
"wasting" time or here, storage. While I went along with many of them,
it seemed to me then and even more now that I was wasting my spirit in
an expense of shame amongst people who basically cared more about a
technical apparatus that was evenescent even on its own terms. Moore's
law was forgotten, and the designers, who seemed to me mostly people
who preferred machinery, even its smallest and most evenescent
manifestations, to the needs of humanity.
Whoa. Who farted?
I did. Basically, what I see in this ng is a self-hatred and post-
human decadence based squarely on an American approach to technology
that put software after hardware in refusing to make sensible
distinctions.
Niklaus Wirth had the courage to question this direction in 1974, and
I saw him isolated and disrespected at ASPLOS 1987 for insisting that
safe computing, which I'd call the only human computing, is just as
important as the high speed race to doom of the sort that 14 year old
boys dig.
In other words, Kernighan to me is a big fat disappointment, because
in The Elements of Programming Style he told us programmers that we do
make mistakes, we can use good style to prevent them, and that people
are more important than things. But, Kernighan was also part of the
power structure; not once, for example, did he speak out against the
mistreatment of engineers when Bell Labs was destroyed, to my
knowledge.
But the problem was that as a result, C has always served two
masters...as a language for presenting abstract algorithms to peope
and for cranking code for mere machines. With the result that it
causes smart people, like me, to make mistakes.
Boo fucking hoo, right?
[That is: I just don't give a fuck anymore. I see people here
screaming about "errors" without once questioning the way in which
high-level institutional structures generate far more errors in a
single release than I could make in a lifetime, enforcing *omerta* and
silence on those errors by using cheap bullies as technical managers
and newsgroup gurus.]
>
> > (2) no sweat if you're off by one, Nul saves you.
>
> > In particular, the latter "feature" creates a coding bum who simply
> > doesn't worry about such errors.
>
> Are you saying that is why you made the indexing error above? Has C
No. I made it because I was in a hurry, and the thread was being
vandalized, and I needed to get the results out.
> turned you into a "coding bum" (whatever that is)? My experience
I'm no longer a coder, or a coding bum. I left the field because I
don't like working for thugs who commencing in the 1980s in my
experience at Bell-Northern, used macho bullying to enforce IPO-driven
greed. But I still code. Deal with it.
My personal experience, as I have said, that with respect to any one
language, especially languages designed poorly to poorly serve both
human knowledge and the needs of things, you become after a few weeks
an idiot savant who doesn't make stupid mistakes...but unconsciously,
as did Rob, violates communicative reason by not saying "yo, check out
my use of the value parm", or "yo, there will be a Nul here", or even
"everybody be cool, this is an intellectual stickup".
> (limited, I agree) is that C tends to make for very careful and
> precise coders. I find it hard to believe that C has damaged your
> coding to such an extent. If I am right about that, the error is a
> simple slip-up caused by not thinking though what needs to happen at
> this stage in the algorithm -- i.e. a plain old bug·
...which C programmers don't have to worry abaying "out insofar as
they can be sure that char * arguments point to things that end in
Nul. Which of course they did in 1971 when computers were more
frequently being powered up and powered down, and which had a volatile
RAM, filled by default with good old Nul characters which became a
crash barrier.
In my experience, most C hotshots are neither careful nor precise.
They don't format their code, they can't be worried about Hungarian,
and absurd picoefficiency becomes ersatz for making solutions to real
problems. They whine when passed bad data and when their unchecked
requests aren't honored. They blame the victims of their errors,
especially when those victims are subalterned females who won't sleep
with them.
>
> <snip>
>
> > Which means that in the Princeton CS program, the students have had to
> > acquire as a condition for success a set of tics that they will, as
> > undergraduates and beyond, confuse with knowledge, making them less
> > than they could be.
>
> > They will believe false propositions such as "runtime bounds checks
> > are unmanly and inefficient, for sissies and script kiddies and
> > girls", "don't worry about off by one", and "all my callers will send
> > me strings using English-language characters properly bound by Nul",
> > and "if they don't, call Homeland Security".
>
> Has anyone bere, especially the author you originally criticised, ever
> stated any of these silly points of view?
My analysis is Freudian-political, so no, they don't state them
literally.
The language I synthesise is backstairs all the way down. It emerges
under pressure if at all. But it does emerge.
Kernighan's silence in Beautiful Code spoke volumes to me. He doesn't
mention the use of a value parameter as a work area, he doesn't
mention internationalization.
>
> In all these long related threads, only two examples have appeared
> that suggest a casual attitude to off-by-one errors: your C# code and
> the Shildt function posted by RH. I say "suggest" because I am sure
> you do care, but you can't have missed the irony.
The casual attitude was Pike's, because with Kernighan's connivance,
he presented AS A REUSABLE ALGORITHM, as an algorithm meant as a
teaching tool, a piece of code that requires the non-C coder (or in my
case a C coder who abandoned C after realizing how bad it was, and who
returns to it to repeat at first some blunders) to hold in mind that
(1) value parameters can be or should be work areas and (2) we'll
always have Nul, like Bogey would always have Paris.
Indeed, part of the disciplinary role of technology is to make smart
people look stupid, and to give wildgeworden kleinburger the false
illusion of their intellectual superiority.
>
> <snip polemic>
>
> >> I don't think is was C++. I don't know the details but it looked like
> >> something else -- I suggested C++/CLI elsethread -- but you probably
> >> know and could tell us.
>
> > Visual C++ Express to generate a command line executable.
>
> I meant what language was it. I does not go though a plain C++
> compiler.
Whoa. Just because the box says Microsoft it's an Evil C++ Compiler,
not a Plain Honest C++ Compiler? Son, you need to get out more.
>
> > Yes, it appears I buttfucked
>
> Let's not go there.
OK
>
> > the typing-in of the Pike code
>
> <snip>
>
> > Thanks for your contribution. I'll discount your smart remarks.
>
> You are welcome. As you can see, I have discounted your polemical
> remarks. I can't help being a smart Alec and I don't think you can
> help being polemical. Let's continue to ignore the bits we don't like.
>
Fair enough.
> > At this time, I stand by my original claim: a factor of five doesn't
> > justify presenting code that doesn't work for real, international
> > strings,
>
> I am happy to make a simple type change and pay no penalty.
Not so fast, cowboy. Each and every ++ and add one would have to be
changed to sizeof or two to work if you change the type to wide
character, would they not or am I wrong? Let's see, if the Pike
arguments were arrays of wide characters, maybe you'd get away with
it, maybe not. But they are ADDRESSES, not so?
What will happen when Pike is off by one, as he is? Will some sort of
16 bit Nul be there in the new type?
Do all available conformant and nonconformant compilers support the
change?
Including Microslop? Boo hoo with cheese: if you say it's real C, then
you need to at least be aware that there are evil C compilers, and
people are slaving away using these evil C compilers, and they need
even more help than rich kids at Princeton with the latest and
greatest. In fact, I fixed Nash's problem when I realized that the old
Microsoft C compiler was not calculating a constant value correctly,
and switched him to Borland: but now, Yuppie glamsters have highjacked
Borland after reading Lou Gerstner's lies about how he saved IBM...by
getting rid of the smart people, or bullying them for making mistakes.
See, that's the problem. The fact that a smart person like me has to
ask these stupid questions is the problem, and it's C's problem, not
mine.
Even if Heathfield favors us with his favorite simple answer du jour,
the very fact that we have to worry about such things MEANS that we're
not in a clean world of applied mathematics, but a world in which we
have to ask questions of the form "can a submarine swim?".
Indeed, and not to put too fine a point on it, there's something very
wrong in a world in which a character like Heathfield has any
authority.
Whoa.
Yup, that's the problem. Ugly presuppositions such as "we'll always
have Nul" and "value parameters are changeable" create low minds,
capable, being swept of Higher Things, of remembering details that
Beautiful Souls shrink from.
That is to be somewhat florid. But, I am serious. In the real Spinoza,
the truly superior mind simply isn't content, not with complexity (for
Spinoza, in the triumphant last words of The Ethics,says clearly
enough that the excellent is rare, and hard) but with the ugly and
nasty details that appeal to the wildgeworden.
Therefore I don't like a language which makes a character like
Heathfield an authority. If my reasoning is circular, it is benign and
self-reinforcing.
C is an expense of spirit in a waste of shame and a vandalized Algol:
for after American computer "scientists" had betrayed the European
Algol effort to show who was NATO's senior partner, and foisted
Fortran upon the folk, they turned back to the writings of the
prophets, and, after destroying them (as Trostky was destroyed, for
imagining what Gorbachev put into action), stole their cerements and
their grave honors, and pranced about like apes.
This was done by a collective, not by individuals. Brian K is a good
person and a great scientist. But the institutional mechanism has
produced a vast amount of wastage of time, has transformed
mathematicians into clerks, and clerks into Shakespeare's "great image
of authority", where the dog is obeyed in office.
>
> > and calling a grepper a regular expression processor. The
> > "inefficiency" of Java and .Net is an Urban Legend.
>
> --
> Ben.- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -
spinoza1111
Ben, with all due respect, it is certainly Heathfield's style to say
things that upon investigation have safety valves in the form of
logical contradictions, as your statement does.
How on EARTH could the code by VALID if it DOES NOT WORK for certain
encodings?
I'll ignore the *tu quoque*, because it shows that you don't know what
OO encapsulation means. It means that by design, Java and C Sharp
Strings allow the programmer to forget about "encodings" and do
humanity a service by destroying the authority of bullies and geeks
who run around making claims, not about reality, but about artifacts
(as in the famous put down that emerges whenever anyone dares to call
an 8 bit code ASCII).
The code is NOT VALID and DOES NOT WORK for other than 8 bit
characters on any machine where the address points not to a longer
word but to a byte.
The code has to be jiggered, ootzed, and hacked to work for anything
but bytes.
Richard Heathfield
Ben Bacarisse said:
> spinoza1111 <spino...@yahoo.com> writes:
>
<snip>
>> The problem here is that the publication date of the book Beautiful
>> Code was 2007. It is intellectually dishonest to maintain that
>> something as pragmatic, as applied, as code can be beautiful, at least
>> without an explicit statement from Kernighan that "I ignore
>> international characters", a statement he did not make.
>
> The error of this logic has been pointed out already (I think by
> Richard Heathfield, in fact). The code is valid for any character set
> at all.
I do not recall saying so, actually, but you're certainly right that the
logic is erroneous.
As for the code being valid for any character set at all, I must take your
word for it, since I can't find any article, in any of these longwinded
threads, in which the original Kernighan source is quoted. (It is possible
that someone did quote it and I missed it.)
But I think you need a rider on your claim. I'm sure you meant that the
code is valid for any character set that is legal in C (which is a very
unrestrictive language, but which does impose /some/ restrictions on
character sets - specifically, that the values of characters in the
required source character set (other than null) must be positive, that
null must be 0, and that '0' to '9' are contiguous).
Chris McDonald
Then you were either wrong or knowingly lying when you claimed that
you *knew* your fallacious statements to be facts.
How can anyone here now place any credence in your statements?
Be shamed, and please leave our newsgroup so the rest of us can again
focus on discussing programming and not your character assassinations,
lies, and trolling.
--
Chris.
spinoza1111
> [Posted and mailed]
>
> Ben Bacarisse said:
>
>
> <snip>
>
> >> The problem here is that the publication date of the book Beautiful
> >> Code was 2007. It is intellectually dishonest to maintain that
> >> something as pragmatic, as applied, as code can be beautiful, at least
> >> without an explicit statement from Kernighan that "I ignore
> >> international characters", a statement he did not make.
>
> > The error of this logic has been pointed out already (I think by
> > Richard Heathfield, in fact). The code is valid for any character set
> > at all.
>
> I do not recall saying so, actually, but you're certainly right that the
> logic is erroneous.
>
> As for the code being valid for any character set at all, I must take your
> word for it, since I can't find any article, in any of these longwinded
> threads, in which the original Kernighan source is quoted. (It is possible
> that someone did quote it and I missed it.)
>
> But I think you need a rider on your claim. I'm sure you meant that the
> code is valid for any character set that is legal in C (which is a very
> unrestrictive language, but which does impose /some/ restrictions on
> character sets - specifically, that the values of characters in the
> required source character set (other than null) must be positive, that
> null must be 0, and that '0' to '9' are contiguous).
Looks like fine print on a mortgage to me: oh, and by the way, your
payment will balloon to twice your year income after six months.
Non restricted ASCII characters beyond 127 aren't positive if bytes
are signed.
You forgot to add that Nul (not "null", please, that names something
different) must occur somewhere oh what the hey after the character
set or some stupid thing will happen. This isn't a library dependency.
It's implicit in Rob's processing of a final asterisk!
An address points OUTSIDE the region it is meant to point at. This
would be a crime in responsible assembly language! It's an assertion
that "I may assume, because I'm such a helluva guy, that all addresses
passed to me from cloud cuckoo land will be responsibly terminated by
a zero length string, which is represented as a byte containing Nul".
[And woe to the innocent programmer who needs to process strings
containing Nuls using anything resembling Pike's code, although it
would be terribly useful to apply regular expressions to strings
containing Nuls. This victim has been bundled out back of the hall by
Richard's thugs and the beatings will continue until morale improves.]
[Oh yeah, my code, despite its bug which was caught as soon as it
occured by runtime, handles strings containing Nuls when debugged for
free, as will my complete solution. PIKE'S CODE WILL NEVER HANDLE TEST
STRINGS WITH NULS.]
[Not in a million years, without serious and itself bug-prone
overhaul. Notice the effect of C as thought control, as nerve gas,
when even a smart person like myself forgot to put this world-
historical boner on Pike's rap sheet.]
The "freedom" of C, its "lack of restriction" is a technical isomorph
of capitalist "freedom", a lack of restriction which allows the
programmer to shoot himself in the foot and have to listen to people
like you, Mister Richard and-or-or-whatthehell Heathfield. It is the
illusionary freedom of the wildgeworden cuntburgers (suck on that
Willem, meine Freunde, meine Lieber Kamerade, Gnadige Herr).
It is a creative mortgage and a no down payment auto loan. It is a
Tonkin Gulf incident and an invasion of Iraq. It is a Great American
Disaster.
In the Pike code he is not in any responsible sense processing strings
at all! He is only barely processing characters! What you don't get is
that the Idea of the string simply cannot, for the sake of sanity, for
the sake of humanity, contain the rubbish and the leftover snacks of
workmen!
The Pike code processes two things: von Neumann addresses, and memory
cells which better be eight bytes in the event some clown gets it into
his fat head to use bit twiddling in some later version of this crap.
We deserve better.
Death to C!
Richard Heathfield
snipped after only the briefest scanning to identify its nature, without
actually reading it; this reply focuses purely on the technical part of
Nilges's reply, which is of course broken and needs addressing. CAVEAT: I
have not bothered to indicate where polemic, rhetoric, abuse and other
such idiocies have been snipped. Refer to the parent article if you care
enough.]
spinoza1111 said:
> On Jan 12, 2:50 pm, Richard Heathfield <r...@see.sig.invalid> wrote:
>> But I think you [i.e. Ben Bacarisse] need a rider on your claim. I'm
>> sure you meant that the
>> code is valid for any character set that is legal in C (which is a very
>> unrestrictive language, but which does impose /some/ restrictions on
>> character sets - specifically, that the values of characters in the
>> required source character set (other than null) must be positive, that
>> null must be 0, and that '0' to '9' are contiguous).
>
> Non restricted ASCII characters beyond 127 aren't positive if bytes
> are signed.
There aren't any ASCII characters beyond 127. It's a 7 bit code. We covered
that, remember? But to answer your substantive point, yes, if bytes are
signed AND are only eight bits wide, then this does mean that all the
required source character set characters must have values in the range
0-127 (with the 0 obviously being assigned to the null character).
> You forgot to add that Nul (not "null", please, that names something
> different)
In C, the Standard defines the null character as the character with value
0. More formally: "A byte with all bits set to 0, called the null
character, shall exist in the basic execution character set" - C89: 2.2.1
Since the context is C, I am using C terminology. If you wish to use the
word "null" for something else instead, that's up to you, but I have made
my usage precisely clear by citing the source of my definition. I have no
qualms about using the appropriate term ("the null character", sometimes
abbreviating it to "null" just as we abbreviate "the space character" to
"space", etc), whether you like it or not.
> must occur somewhere oh what the hey after the character
> set or some stupid thing will happen.
No, it must have the value 0, and must be a part of the character set.
Because some code point values must follow it (i.e. have positive values),
it cannot be at the end, so in no sense does it come "after the character
set".
> This isn't a library dependency.
> It's implicit in Rob's processing of a final asterisk!
Not so. The asterisk character is one of the required source character set
characters, and must therefore have a positive value. It must therefore
succeed the null character (not necessarily directly - i.e. other
characters may and generally do come between them); the null character
cannot have a higher code point than the asterisk character. This is one
of the restrictions of which I spoke earlier on character sets usable with
conforming C implementations.
> An address points OUTSIDE the region it is meant to point at.
You lost me. Could you please explain what this has to do with character
sets?
moi
> spinoza1111 wrote:
> ) I am familiar with the nasty habit of German speaking people to treat
> ) their language or rural dialect or argot as Holy Writ (heiliger )
> schrift, hein?) and to attack people for its "misuse", usually from )
> behind safe cover, in the same spirit as Germans liked circa 1938 to )
> beat up Jews.
>
> Are you calling me a Nazi ?
>
>
> SaSW, Willem
Willem, vertel nog eens wat leuke oorlogsverhalen.
Van toen je nog bij de NSB zat enzo.
:-)
AvK
spinoza1111
> [In deference to Phlip, all Nilges's polemic, rhetoric, abuse, etc has been
> snipped after only the briefest scanning to identify its nature, without
> actually reading it; this reply focuses purely on the technical part of
> Nilges's reply, which is of course broken and needs addressing. CAVEAT: I
> have not bothered to indicate where polemic, rhetoric, abuse and other
> such idiocies have been snipped. Refer to the parent article if you care
> enough.]
If you don't read the posts, you have no right to reply.
>
> spinoza1111 said:
>
> > On Jan 12, 2:50 pm, Richard Heathfield <r...@see.sig.invalid> wrote:
> >> But I think you [i.e. Ben Bacarisse] need a rider on your claim. I'm
> >> sure you meant that the
> >> code is valid for any character set that is legal in C (which is a very
> >> unrestrictive language, but which does impose /some/ restrictions on
> >> character sets - specifically, that the values of characters in the
> >> required source character set (other than null) must be positive, that
> >> null must be 0, and that '0' to '9' are contiguous).
>
> > Non restricted ASCII characters beyond 127 aren't positive if bytes
> > are signed.
>
> There aren't any ASCII characters beyond 127. It's a 7 bit code. We covered
> that, remember? But to answer your substantive point, yes, if bytes are
> signed AND are only eight bits wide, then this does mean that all the
> required source character set characters must have values in the range
> 0-127 (with the 0 obviously being assigned to the null character).
This not only is a fucking slap in the face to international users,
it's a fucking slap in the face to American users and an arrogant
piece of shit. It would NOT be if you would only DESIST from claiming
that C handles strings.
IT DOES NOT.
>
> > You forgot to add that Nul (not "null", please, that names something
> > different)
>
> In C, the Standard defines the null character as the character with value
> 0. More formally: "A byte with all bits set to 0, called the null
> character, shall exist in the basic execution character set" - C89: 2.2.1
The C standard is poorly worded. No wonder you like it.
>
> Since the context is C, I am using C terminology. If you wish to use the
> word "null" for something else instead, that's up to you, but I have made
> my usage precisely clear by citing the source of my definition. I have no
> qualms about using the appropriate term ("the null character", sometimes
> abbreviating it to "null" just as we abbreviate "the space character" to
> "space", etc), whether you like it or not.
In usable standards, it is Nul to disambiguate it from a null integer
returned to indicate failure, which may or may not be zero. You need
to get out more.
>
> > must occur somewhere oh what the hey after the character
> > set or some stupid thing will happen.
>
> No, it must have the value 0, and must be a part of the character set.
> Because some code point values must follow it (i.e. have positive values),
> it cannot be at the end, so in no sense does it come "after the character
> set".
Your failure of comprehension caused you to miss the typo. Substitute
string for set and stop wasting my time.
>
> > This isn't a library dependency.
> > It's implicit in Rob's processing of a final asterisk!
>
> Not so. The asterisk character is one of the required source character set
> characters, and must therefore have a positive value. It must therefore
> succeed the null character (not necessarily directly - i.e. other
> characters may and generally do come between them); the null character
> cannot have a higher code point than the asterisk character. This is one
> of the restrictions of which I spoke earlier on character sets usable with
> conforming C implementations.
>
Your failure of comprehension or of a proofreader's charity continues.
It's of course rather late in the game to speak of charity. You have
never shown any such thing, nor are you going to get it here until the
bitter end.
You failed to see what was obvious: I wasn't talking about sets, I was
talking about strings. A reasonable person would have caught that.
> > An address points OUTSIDE the region it is meant to point at.
>
> You lost me. Could you please explain what this has to do with character
> sets?
I lost you a long time ago because you are willfully ignorant and
simply not qualified as an authority. It is unprofessional to just
assume that the character string will be terminated by a Nul.
You skipped most of the post, and you are such a poor reader that you
did not mentally correct me when I, under pressure from your thread
vandalism and personal attacks, typed set when I meant string.
How DARE you even reply?
spinoza1111
> spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@yahoo.com> writes:
> >On Jan 12, 5:01=A0am, Chris McDonald <ch...@csse.uwa.edu.au> wrote:
> >> spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@yahoo.com> writes:
> >> >...... like a rat, you refer to
> >> >offline documents that none of us have time to verify.
>
> >> Speaking of verification, I would like to verify your recent claim that
> >> you personally speak for Brian Kernighan, and that he does not read this
> >> newsgroup for the fallacious reasons you have cited.
> >It is well known that most prestigious people ignore usenet, whether
> >for posting or even reading, so I inferred the obvious: that Kernighan
> >does NOT waste his time with people who cannot write and who use this
> >newsgroup to trash personalities for commercial gain.
>
> Then you were either wrong or knowingly lying when you claimed that
> you *knew* your fallacious statements to be facts.
>
> How can anyone here now place any credence in your statements?
Dullards need not even try. It is a well known sociological fact that
dullards infest the Internet with their stupidity and low, vicious
campaigns.
>
> Be shamed, and please leave our newsgroup so the rest of us can again
> focus on discussing programming and not your character assassinations,
> lies, and trolling.
Laying waste to reputations is NOT discussing programming. Vandalizing
threads created by people who have refused to kow-tow to authors of
bogus and fraudulent, almost out of print, and deservedly so, books is
NOT discussing programming.
Capering like apes when somebody else with a shred of decency finds an
error, if only in the lowest code-ape way, by merely running a
program, without being able to even explain the error, despite his
implicit claims of competence, is NOT discussing programming.
Since 1998, Richard Heathfield has trashed this commons. He has used
this newsgroup to establish an authority which he cannot establish by
actual competence, and the evidence of that is a campaign, of which he
is either the instigator or a leading member, to destroy Herbert
Schildt.
You can leave. You can get the fuck out of here. People are speaking
up against the Fascist dictatorship this newsgroup has become, and
Richard's reign is coming to an end.
>
> --
> Chris.
spinoza1111
> Randy Howard wrote:
> > spinoza1111 wrote
>
> ... snip ...
>
> >> Stop vandalizing a discussion between Bacarisse and myself about
> >> whether there are flaws in either program. It's people like you
> >> who are responsible for silencing discussions about such flaws
> >> and in effect, the flaws.
>
> > It's my fault your version(s) of the code, both the C++/whatever
> > that you /claimed/ was C, and the .NET whatever both do not work
> > properly?
>
> You might consider pointing out that "a discussion between
> Bacarisse and myself" (where myself refers to Spinoza1111) has no
> business on a public Usenet newsgroup, but belongs in email.
> Putting it here is pure thuggery and vandalization.
Bullshit. BULLSHIT. Bacarisse made useful observations about code that
I'd posted for public use, and I alerted the public to flaws in my own
work.
While being accused by crummy little programmers, who on the job, I am
somehow certain, continually cover up malpractice, of hiding my
errors!
You're not MAN enough to admit your own errors, which is why you
vandalize threads.
You have no business making such a crazy statement about what I should
or should not do, and your post indicates the malignity and bad faith
of the forces I find marshaled against me here.
Richard Heathfield
> On Jan 12, 3:48 pm, Richard Heathfield <r...@see.sig.invalid> wrote:
>> [In deference to Phlip, all Nilges's polemic, rhetoric, abuse, etc has
>> [been
>> snipped after only the briefest scanning to identify its nature, without
>> actually reading it; this reply focuses purely on the technical part of
>> Nilges's reply, which is of course broken and needs addressing. CAVEAT:
>> I have not bothered to indicate where polemic, rhetoric, abuse and other
>> such idiocies have been snipped. Refer to the parent article if you care
>> enough.]
>
> If you don't read the posts, you have no right to reply.
I have only replied to the parts of the post that I read. I didn't bother
to reply to the parts of the post that I have not read. If you had
bothered to read what I had written (above), you would have realised this.
Since you did not realise it, either you had not read what I had written
(in which case, by your own argument, you had no right to reply to it), or
you did not understand it, in which case the proper course was to ask for
an explanation of the part you did not understand.
In the rest of this reply, I focus purely on the technical aspects, as
before. All your polemic, rhetoric, abuse, and other such idiocies have
been snipped, unmarked. If you want to read them again, by all means refer
to the parent article to this reply.
>> spinoza1111 said:
>>
>> > On Jan 12, 2:50 pm, Richard Heathfield <r...@see.sig.invalid> wrote:
>> >> But I think you [i.e. Ben Bacarisse] need a rider on your claim. I'm
>> >> sure you meant that the
>> >> code is valid for any character set that is legal in C (which is a
>> >> very unrestrictive language, but which does impose /some/
>> >> restrictions on character sets - specifically, that the values of
>> >> characters in the required source character set (other than null)
>> >> must be positive, that null must be 0, and that '0' to '9' are
>> >> contiguous).
>>
>> > Non restricted ASCII characters beyond 127 aren't positive if bytes
>> > are signed.
>>
>> There aren't any ASCII characters beyond 127. It's a 7 bit code. We
>> covered that, remember? But to answer your substantive point, yes, if
>> bytes are signed AND are only eight bits wide, then this does mean that
>> all the required source character set characters must have values in the
>> range 0-127 (with the 0 obviously being assigned to the null character).
>
> This not only is a [...] slap in the face to international users,
> it's a [...] slap in the face to American users and an arrogant
> piece of [...].
(Expletives deleted.) C does not require that implementations use ASCII. It
allows them to use ASCII. If an implementor wants to use some other
character set (EBCDIC, Unicode, some other standardised set, or even a
custom character set), the C Standard endorses that decision subject only
to the very minor restrictions that: (a) the null character is the
character whose bits are all set to 0; (b) the required character set
characters must have positive values; (c) the digit characters '0' to '9'
have values that are contiguous and which ascend in the obvious way, with
'0' first and '9' last within the digit group. This is not a slap in
anyone's face, but a broad and liberal approach to character sets.
> It would NOT be if you would only DESIST from claiming
> that C handles strings.
>
> IT DOES NOT.
C handles strings according to its own definition thereof. If you choose to
use another definition of the word "string", that's entirely your choice,
but C's definition of "string" is the definition I use when discussing
strings in a C context. If you want to discuss your belief that C fails to
allow programmers to handle some other data format, I suggest that you
define the data format in question in a way that makes it clear what you
are talking about.
>> > You forgot to add that Nul (not "null", please, that names something
>> > different)
>>
>> In C, the Standard defines the null character as the character with
>> value 0. More formally: "A byte with all bits set to 0, called the null
>> character, shall exist in the basic execution character set" - C89:
>> 2.2.1
>
> The C standard is poorly worded. No wonder you like it.
The ISO C Committee does not claim to be perfect, and so there is a process
for raising faults. You are free to raise a fault (a "Defect Report", or
DR) if you wish. If the Committee considers that your report has merit,
they may well decide to change the wording, and no doubt they will take
into consideration any proposed wording change that you might care to
suggest.
>> Since the context is C, I am using C terminology. If you wish to use the
>> word "null" for something else instead, that's up to you, but I have
>> made my usage precisely clear by citing the source of my definition. I
>> have no qualms about using the appropriate term ("the null character",
>> sometimes abbreviating it to "null" just as we abbreviate "the space
>> character" to "space", etc), whether you like it or not.
>
> In usable standards, it is Nul to disambiguate it from a null integer
> returned to indicate failure, which may or may not be zero.
The C89 Standard is considered usable by a great many implementors (since
they *have* used it to produce conforming implementations) and a great
many programmers (because they *have* used it to produce very portable
programs). That you do not consider it usable is perhaps relevant to you,
but your opinion regarding its usability is not the only one.
In C, an integer return value of 0 typically indicates success. For
example, if we check the <stdio.h> header, we find that the following
functions use 0 to indicate success: remove, rename, fclose, fflush,
setvbuf, fgetpos, fseek, fsetpos. Functions that do not return 0 for
success are either void functions, or functions that return a count of
some kind (e.g. the number of characters printed by printf), or functions
that return a character value (e.g. putc, getc, ungetc), or functions that
return a pointer value. (I think that list is exhaustive, but I won't
swear to it.)
>> > must occur somewhere oh what the hey after the character
>> > set or some stupid thing will happen.
>>
>> No, it must have the value 0, and must be a part of the character set.
>> Because some code point values must follow it (i.e. have positive
>> values), it cannot be at the end, so in no sense does it come "after the
>> character set".
>
> Your failure of comprehension caused you to miss the typo. Substitute
> string for set and stop wasting my time.
Character sets were the subject of discussion. If you randomly introduce a
discussion of character strings into a discussion about character sets and
then describe the character strings as character sets, it is you who waste
my time, rather than vice versa.
> It is unprofessional to just
> assume that the character string will be terminated by a Nul.
In C, if a sequence of characters is not terminated by a null character, it
is not a string.
> You skipped most of the post,
That's because most of the post was rhetoric, polemic, abuse, or other such
idiocy. I made it clear at the outset that I would not address such things
in my reply.
> and you are such a poor reader that you
> did not mentally correct me when I [...] typed set when I meant string.
So when you make mistakes, it's suddenly my fault? I don't think so.
> How DARE you even reply?
We all have the right of reply. Your pathetic threat of physical violence
has failed to intimidate me. I dare to continue to correct your errors
because you dare to continue to make errors. If you don't want me to post
corrections to your articles, don't post errors in those articles.
CBFalconer
> Ben Bacarisse said:
>
... snip Nilgewater ...
>
>> The error of this logic has been pointed out already (I think by
>> Richard Heathfield, in fact). The code is valid for any character
>> set at all.
>
>
> But I think you need a rider on your claim. I'm sure you meant
> that the code is valid for any character set that is legal in C
> (which is a very unrestrictive language, but which does impose
> /some/ restrictions on character sets - specifically, that the
> values of characters in the required source character set (other
> than null) must be positive, that null must be 0, and that '0'
> to '9' are contiguous).
You omitted a critical portion. '0' < '1' < '2' < .... < '9' is
also a requirement. I.E. the coding for numeric digits must be
ordered in the natural way. This ordered and contiguous valued
characteristic does not apply to alpha characters.
--
[mail]: Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net)
[page]: <http://cbfalconer.home.att.net>
Richard Heathfield
> Richard Heathfield wrote:
>> [...] I'm sure [Ben] meant
>> that the code is valid for any character set that is legal in C
>> (which is a very unrestrictive language, but which does impose
>> /some/ restrictions on character sets - specifically, that the
>> values of characters in the required source character set (other
>> than null) must be positive, that null must be 0, and that '0'
>> to '9' are contiguous).
>
> You omitted a critical portion. '0' < '1' < '2' < .... < '9' is
> also a requirement. I.E. the coding for numeric digits must be
> ordered in the natural way.
Yes, I did, didn't I? I think I spelled this out in a later article, but
you are right that I didn't make it explicit here.
> This ordered and contiguous valued
> characteristic does not apply to alpha characters.
Right. Otherwise, EBCDIC wouldn't qualify.
Malcolm McLean
"Richard Heathfield" <r...@see.sig.invalid> wrote in message
> (Expletives deleted.) C does not require that implementations use ASCII.
> It
> allows them to use ASCII. If an implementor wants to use some other
> character set (EBCDIC, Unicode, some other standardised set, or even a
> custom character set), the C Standard endorses that decision subject only
> to the very minor restrictions that: (a) the null character is the
> character whose bits are all set to 0; (b) the required character set
> characters must have positive values; (c) the digit characters '0' to '9'
> have values that are contiguous and which ascend in the obvious way, with
> '0' first and '9' last within the digit group. This is not a slap in
> anyone's face, but a broad and liberal approach to character sets.
>
Which means that in practise you must use ASCII or face endless hassles.
Also there is the issue of embedded strings. Ity is extremely convenient to
be able to embed strings literal in sourcecode, although of course it
effectively ties you to English.
Using the MS string registry I could internationalise BASICdraw, for
instance, but the problem is that French is the only other major language I
could translate to myself. So internationalsation entails calling in
experts, and recalling them everytime a change is made to the messages
displayed by the user. Were I a mega corp it would eb worth it, but for one
chap tapping away in his bedroom, it's just unrealistic.
CBFalconer
> spinoza1111 said:
>
>
>> If you don't read the posts, you have no right to reply.
>
> I have only replied to the parts of the post that I read. I didn't
> bother to reply to the parts of the post that I have not read. If
> you had bothered to read what I had written (above), you would
> have realised this. Since you did not realise it, either you had
> not read what I had written (in which case, by your own argument,
> you had no right to reply to it), or you did not understand it,
> in which case the proper course was to ask for an explanation of
> the part you did not understand.
>
> In the rest of this reply, I focus purely on the technical
> aspects, as before. All your polemic, rhetoric, abuse, and other
> such idiocies have been snipped, unmarked. If you want to read
> them again, by all means refer to the parent article to this
> reply.
I think you are both missing the elementary fact that Usenet is for
communication between individuals and the general public, NOT
between individual and individual. Email is available for that.
Note that this characteristic is completely isolated from the value
of the information exchanged.
Richard Heathfield
>
> "Richard Heathfield" <r...@see.sig.invalid> wrote in message
>> (Expletives deleted.) C does not require that implementations use ASCII.
>> It
>> allows them to use ASCII. If an implementor wants to use some other
>> character set (EBCDIC, Unicode, some other standardised set, or even a
>> custom character set), the C Standard endorses that decision subject
>> only to the very minor restrictions that: (a) the null character is the
>> character whose bits are all set to 0; (b) the required character set
>> characters must have positive values; (c) the digit characters '0' to
>> '9' have values that are contiguous and which ascend in the obvious way,
>> with '0' first and '9' last within the digit group. This is not a slap
>> in anyone's face, but a broad and liberal approach to character sets.
>>
> And sizeof(char) must equal one.
Is 1, by definition. But this doesn't mean that character set sizes are
restricted.
> Which means that in practise you must use ASCII or face endless hassles.
No, it doesn't. For one thing, EBCDIC is just as easy to use as ASCII
(indeed, one might say it's easier in some respects). For another, C does
not require that implementors limit themselves to eight-bit bytes. It
requires that bytes must be *at least* eight bits wide, but they can
certainly be wider. If implementors wish to set CHAR_BIT to 9 or 13 or 16
or 17 or 31 or 32 or 57 or 119 or whatever (for values of "whatever" that
exceed 7), well, that's entirely up to them.
> Also there is the issue of embedded strings. Ity is extremely convenient
> to be able to embed strings literal in sourcecode, although of course it
> effectively ties you to English.
Presumably you mean the fact that the Standard allows implementations
considerable latitude when faced with source code containing characters
that are not in the required basic character set. I assure you that this
doesn't tie programmers to English. On Y2K I had to deal with a
considerable body of source code with comments (and identifiers!) written
in Italian.
Nevertheless I do see your point - and the way to deal with this is to keep
the prompts in a file that is made available at runtime, rather than in
the source. Yes, it's less convenient, but it's not /that/ big a deal. Not
a hassle you'd want to go through for Janet&John programs, though,
obviously.
Richard Heathfield
<snip>
> I think you are both missing the elementary fact that Usenet is for
> communication between individuals and the general public, NOT
> between individual and individual.
The observations I am making in this discussion are technical, and have
widespread applicability.
Rui Maciel
> Be shamed, and please leave our newsgroup so the rest of us can again
> focus on discussing programming and not your character assassinations,
> lies, and trolling.
Trolls like this spinoza character will leave once everyone stops paying any
attention and therefore provide any incentive for the sad person behind
that act to post more drivel. So please don't feed the troll and eventually
this pathetic act will die off.
Rui Maciel
moi
[snip]
> hopeless and self-hating *wildgeword kleinburger*, just money, and not
> much of that either.
Did you mean *wildgewordener Kleinburger* ?
[snip]
AvK
spinoza1111
> spinoza1111 said:
>
> > On Jan 12, 3:48 pm, Richard Heathfield <r...@see.sig.invalid> wrote:
> >> [In deference to Phlip, all Nilges's polemic, rhetoric, abuse, etc has
> >> [been
> >> snipped after only the briefest scanning to identify its nature, without
> >> actually reading it; this reply focuses purely on the technical part of
> >> Nilges's reply, which is of course broken and needs addressing. CAVEAT:
> >> I have not bothered to indicate where polemic, rhetoric, abuse and other
> >> such idiocies have been snipped. Refer to the parent article if you care
> >> enough.]
>
> > If you don't read the posts, you have no right to reply.
>
> I have only replied to the parts of the post that I read. I didn't bother
> to reply to the parts of the post that I have not read. If you had
> bothered to read what I had written (above), you would have realised this.
> Since you did not realise it, either you had not read what I had written
> (in which case, by your own argument, you had no right to reply to it), or
> you did not understand it, in which case the proper course was to ask for
> an explanation of the part you did not understand.
If you don't read all the posts, you have no right of reply.
This is nonsense. C can pretend to be laissez-faire about new code,
although anyone who starts a real project in C is an incompetent.
But a "standard" "permits" alternative encodings NOT when it is
laissez-faire and says that new code can do all sorts of shit.
A standard permits alternative encodings when an existing program,
written in the standardized language following the standard, has a
snowball's chance in hell of working for a new encoding with a minimum
of fuss approaching zero!
You don't understand encapsulation in the slightest.
A String, in C Sharp or Java, can be redefined. Existing standard-
conformant code will work after due diligence. Period.
By due diligence, I DON'T mean calling some Fat Bastard in as an
overpriced consultant.
I mean that a regex written for grown-up Strings in C Sharp will
increment an index by ONE and index to specific chars which can also
be redefined with a minimal amount of due diligence, and no visits by
Fat Bastards, pompous garden gnomes, half-crazed monks with silly
beards and irritating baritones, or other "C consultants".
>
> > It would NOT be if you would only DESIST from claiming
> > that C handles strings.
>
> > IT DOES NOT.
>
> C handles strings according to its own definition thereof. If you choose to
> use another definition of the word "string", that's entirely your choice,
> but C's definition of "string" is the definition I use when discussing
> strings in a C context. If you want to discuss your belief that C fails to
> allow programmers to handle some other data format, I suggest that you
> define the data format in question in a way that makes it clear what you
> are talking about.
You have no conception of what a string is, because in 1971, nobody
knew what a string was. IBM thought it was an 8, later 16 bit length
followed by a string which could include Nul (not "null"). Probably
just to pimp IBM's, and perhaps Multic's, ass, Kernighan and his merry
men decided to go for "unlimited length strings" while making an
exactly equivalent mistake from the standpoint of usability: the fact
that you can't process real strings on behalf of humanity that
contain...Nul.
Strangely this problem had been solved, and the solution, and the
people who developed it, thrown away. The IBM 1401 business midrange
computer, announced in 1959, simply added an extra bit to each (6-bit)
byte, creating a 7 bit addressable word such that a "word mark"
indicated string end. I floored my math professor by using this simple
feature in 1973 to compute, possibly for the first time in the history
of the human race, probably for the first time in Chicago-land, the
exact value of 100 factorial.
[Nominations for my Nobel may now be submitted har har.]
But, for the thoughtcrime of insisting that this was kewl and should
be built upon and not scrapped, John Haanstra was subject to IBM Gulag
for many years, and IBM's first PL/I compiler required strings to be
limited to 255 bytes.
What is a string? It is a sequence of characters or ideograms for
serving human needs.
>
> >> > You forgot to add that Nul (not "null", please, that names something
> >> > different)
>
> >> In C, the Standard defines the null character as the character with
> >> value 0. More formally: "A byte with all bits set to 0, called the null
> >> character, shall exist in the basic execution character set" - C89:
> >> 2.2.1
>
> > The C standard is poorly worded. No wonder you like it.
>
> The ISO C Committee does not claim to be perfect, and so there is a process
> for raising faults. You are free to raise a fault (a "Defect Report", or
> DR) if you wish. If the Committee considers that your report has merit,
> they may well decide to change the wording, and no doubt they will take
> into consideration any proposed wording change that you might care to
> suggest.
>
Thank you for a courteous tone here, but I think I'll take a pass on
that. I don't think C should be standardized, I think it should be
shit canned, and you don't want to be responsible for unleashing me on
the committee.
I have hopes this evening based only on your not vandalizing my latest
thread on the project status that you have decided to behave yourself
in future, as well as, just possibly, Randy Howard. I will not mention
you in new threads or posts to encourage this healthy development.
> >> Since the context is C, I am using C terminology. If you wish to use the
> >> word "null" for something else instead, that's up to you, but I have
> >> made my usage precisely clear by citing the source of my definition. I
> >> have no qualms about using the appropriate term ("the null character",
> >> sometimes abbreviating it to "null" just as we abbreviate "the space
> >> character" to "space", etc), whether you like it or not.
>
> > In usable standards, it is Nul to disambiguate it from a null integer
> > returned to indicate failure, which may or may not be zero.
>
> The C89 Standard is considered usable by a great many implementors (since
> they *have* used it to produce conforming implementations) and a great
> many programmers (because they *have* used it to produce very portable
> programs). That you do not consider it usable is perhaps relevant to you,
> but your opinion regarding its usability is not the only one.
C isn't portable. It wasn't designed to be portable. It was designed
by people who didn't grasp the higher power of mathematics to address
time and space efficiency to get around this failure by exploiting
specific details of machine architecture.
Specific C programs can be very portable. Linux is one example. They
use highly specific techniques including a virtual or shadow form of
object-orientation enforced at the level of file structure, coupled
with primitive curses in Finno-Ugric on people who do stupid and
nonportable things for no reason, and macros, to get to this
portability.
Demotic C code, on the other hand, has at a minimum to be audited by a
Fat Bastard of a C consultant line by line in a way C Sharp does not.
This is why I think you promote C, although you may or may not be a
Fat Bastard, or dead sexy for that matter.
>
> In C, an integer return value of 0 typically indicates success. For
Yes. I know. This was Yet Another world-historical brain fart from the
C team.
> example, if we check the <stdio.h> header, we find that the following
> functions use 0 to indicate success: remove, rename, fclose, fflush,
> setvbuf, fgetpos, fseek, fsetpos. Functions that do not return 0 for
> success are either void functions, or functions that return a count of
> some kind (e.g. the number of characters printed by printf), or functions
> that return a character value (e.g. putc, getc, ungetc), or functions that
> return a pointer value. (I think that list is exhaustive, but I won't
> swear to it.)
This is barbarism. The only value that should be returned for success
is bool true. Period. The only value that should be returned for
failure is bool false. Full stop.
>
> >> > must occur somewhere oh what the hey after the character
> >> > set or some stupid thing will happen.
>
> >> No, it must have the value 0, and must be a part of the character set.
> >> Because some code point values must follow it (i.e. have positive
> >> values), it cannot be at the end, so in no sense does it come "after the
> >> character set".
>
> > Your failure of comprehension caused you to miss the typo. Substitute
> > string for set and stop wasting my time.
>
> Character sets were the subject of discussion. If you randomly introduce a
> discussion of character strings into a discussion about character sets and
> then describe the character strings as character sets, it is you who waste
> my time, rather than vice versa.
I've already said I was talking about strings but under the stress
created by your thread vandalism, which I hope has ceased, I typed
set. The confusion results from the fact that I disambiguate sets and
strings in an object oriented fashion in my new code, and type the two
words frequently.
The problem is that real STRINGS cannot contain NUL. I am well aware
that the C character SET contains NUL.
I really hope you know the difference between a character set and a
character string. Using the standards of uncharity in force in this
community, I would have gotten mediaeval on your ass for what appears
to be a simple mistake in globally grasping my meaning and being able
to spot my typo.
D'oh (Homer's null utterance).
>
> > It is unprofessional to just
> > assume that the character string will be terminated by a Nul.
>
> In C, if a sequence of characters is not terminated by a null character, it
> is not a string.
This is absurd! Hamlet is terminated by "Let the soldiers shoot",
followed by a period. My book is terminated by "The rest is
television", followed by a period. War and Peace is terminated by "In
the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an
unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel;
in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom
that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of
which we are not conscious.".
C does not define reality and is completely inadequate for new
development!
Death to C!
>
> > You skipped most of the post,
>
> That's because most of the post was rhetoric, polemic, abuse, or other such
> idiocy. I made it clear at the outset that I would not address such things
> in my reply.
This makes you ne kulturney. Where do you get off? It was precisely my
fear as an adolescent, and what prompted me to take my first computer
science class, that tech thugs would impose their thug vision on
humanity. C brought this to pass.
>
> > and you are such a poor reader that you
> > did not mentally correct me when I [...] typed set when I meant string.
>
> So when you make mistakes, it's suddenly my fault? I don't think so.
Here, it was. You created data smog. When you desist, productive
discussion will move forward.
>
> > How DARE you even reply?
>
> We all have the right of reply. Your pathetic threat of physical violence
You're lying. No such threat was made. I suggested a dialog in a pub.
If you like to come to blows, that's your problem. Try me.
> has failed to intimidate me. I dare to continue to correct your errors
> because you dare to continue to make errors. If you don't want me to post
> corrections to your articles, don't post errors in those articles.
I'd suggest instead that you stay out of any threads in which I am a
participant. That would allow you to continue your use of usenet for
commercial gain.
You need only not mention me, and I, you.
I've already resorted to referring to you and Randy as the Beastie
Boys. Would you prefer Fat Bastards? I look forward to posting here
without even that need.
Seriously: don't talk about me and don't talk to me. Don't hire me and
I won't hire you.
Or, continue the overall tone of this post in which you make, for the
most part, and given your limitations, a genuine effort to explain
your world-view.
Sure, I use profanity and hyperbole. You don't. And, you do a
reasonably good job in explaining modern C.
But, you don't understand its context. It's a flawed programming
language that never (in the manner of many of its Baby Boom programmer
generation) grew up.
The Algol team realized through actual experience in a Europe still
recovering from WWII that computing was going to be hard. The United
States, and IBM, didn't want to hear this because it was entering a
silly season in which we, the boomer generation, would be able to grow
stupid beards and not wear socks to work, and stay close to machines,
which were easier to deal with than the men of my father's generation,
damaged goods as they were by the experience of the war.
I'm serious. "Staying close to the machine" and being able to twiddle
bits was and is a Peter Pan gesture, and a way to not grow up.
The Algol team, grown-ups like Dijsktra, realized that if they were
not given enough time by uncaring American corporations, which at the
time had the European economy by the balls, society would eventually
collapse under the weight of unmastered data systems, which it is
doing post-September 11 (where the FBI team investigating al-Quaeda
wasn't given a query engine capable of Boolean logic) and in the
current subprime mortgage crisis (where it appears to me that
programmers could not be bothered to, or were scared to, search chains
of virtual or real derivatives for credit or reinsurance spirals).
The PROBLEM is that today, if you talk like a 19th century adult male,
you DO sound like a raving maniac, because it's accepted as a social
axiom that society is beyond our control. This is a legacy of the
collapse of Marxism.
>
> --
> Richard Heathfield <http://www.cpax.org.uk>
> Email: -http://www. +rjh@
> Google users: <http://www.cpax.org.uk/prg/writings/googly.php>
> "Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999- Hide quoted text -
Randy Howard
(in article <4788aa71$0$5090$a729...@news.telepac.pt>):
I'm inclined to agree. It is somewhat difficult to allow him to post
article after article in which you are named an attacked personally.
However, I think that whatever point or set of points he had hoped to
make in this drive by have fallen flat. Nobody with even the slightest
knowledge of programming in C, C++, or C# (or any other language I
suspect) has been fooled by the latest incarnation.
If he wishes to continue to make a mockery of whatever reputation he
has left here, I won't try and correct his mistakes. Note that if he
posts something making claims about me in the future, the fact that I
do not respond does not mean that I agree with him, only that I'm not
playing the game anymore.
--
Randy Howard (2reply remove FOOBAR)
"The power of accurate observation is called cynicism by those
who have not got it." - George Bernard Shaw
Richard Heathfield
<snip>
> If you don't read all the posts, you have no right of reply.
That is an interesting opinion, but I do not share it. I see no reason why
I should not ignore all your drivel and focus on what little technical
content remains.
In the rest of this reply, I focus purely on the technical aspects, as
before. All your polemic, rhetoric, abuse, and other such idiocies have
been snipped, unmarked. (Consequently, this reply is less than half the
length of the parent article, despite containing the text of my reply.) If
you want to read them again, by all means refer to the parent article to
this reply.
>> C handles strings according to its own definition thereof. If you choose
>> to use another definition of the word "string", that's entirely your
>> choice, but C's definition of "string" is the definition I use when
>> discussing strings in a C context. If you want to discuss your belief
>> that C fails to allow programmers to handle some other data format, I
>> suggest that you define the data format in question in a way that makes
>> it clear what you are talking about.
>
> You have no conception of what a string is,
Within the context of the C programming language, I know exactly what a
string is. I have already cited the definition for you. I trust I need not
do so again.
> What is a string? It is a sequence of characters or ideograms for
> serving human needs.
Well, we can call it that, provided that we recognise that we are putting
aside the C definition for the purposes of this discussion.
The problem with your definition is that it gives no indication about how
to determine where a string *stops*. Somehow, we must carry that
information around, or at least define a mechanism for determining it. One
way to do this is to pass a separate length parameter to functions that
have to deal with strings. Another is to encapsulate the character
information and the length information within a
structure/record/class/whatever.
The C language supports the former mechanism for dealing with arbitrary
sequences of characters - strings, by your definition - with its mem*
functions. It doesn't offer direct support for the latter, but it is
pretty trivial to write one's own support routines for it, and many
programmers have done this.
I suspect that the reason ISO didn't codify such support in the standard
library was either that they couldn't, or didn't care to try to, get
agreement on the best way to do it - "one size doesn't quite fit anybody".
>> > In usable standards, it is Nul to disambiguate it from a null integer
>> > returned to indicate failure, which may or may not be zero.
>>
>> The C89 Standard is considered usable by a great many implementors
>> (since they *have* used it to produce conforming implementations) and a
>> great many programmers (because they *have* used it to produce very
>> portable programs). That you do not consider it usable is perhaps
>> relevant to you, but your opinion regarding its usability is not the
>> only one.
>
> C isn't portable.
Perhaps there is a case for claiming that, but I think it's true to say
that it is currently less non-portable than any other programming
language.
> It wasn't designed to be portable.
Then its high degree of portability is a triumph of good software
engineering.
>> In C, an integer return value of 0 typically indicates success. For
>> example, if we check the <stdio.h> header, we find that the following
>> functions use 0 to indicate success: remove, rename, fclose, fflush,
>> setvbuf, fgetpos, fseek, fsetpos. Functions that do not return 0 for
>> success are either void functions, or functions that return a count of
>> some kind (e.g. the number of characters printed by printf), or
>> functions that return a character value (e.g. putc, getc, ungetc), or
>> functions that return a pointer value. (I think that list is exhaustive,
>> but I won't swear to it.)
>
> This is barbarism. The only value that should be returned for success
> is bool true. Period. The only value that should be returned for
> failure is bool false. Full stop.
It has been said that all happy people are happy in much the same way,
whereas miserable people each dwell in their own particular misery.
Success is - well - success, but failures can happen for a multitude of
reasons. To have many error codes available is useful. Sometimes an error
is non-critical, so one useful convention is to reserve 0 for an optimal
result, negative values for sub-optimal but acceptable results, and
positive values for actual errors (or, of course, vice versa). One might
not like this convention, but then one is not forced to use it. If one
doesn't like the convention used by C, well, wrappers are trivial to
write.
> The problem is that real STRINGS cannot contain NUL. I am well aware
> that the C character SET contains NUL.
The only mention of NUL in the C Standard is in a non-normative footnote
referring to a specific character set, which is certainly not "the" C
character set.
> I really hope you know the difference between a character set and a
> character string.
You will be glad to hear that I do know the difference. It is not evident
from your earlier replies that /you/ do.
>> > It is unprofessional to just
>> > assume that the character string will be terminated by a Nul.
>>
>> In C, if a sequence of characters is not terminated by a null character,
>> it is not a string.
>
> This is absurd!
You might consider it so, but that is how the C language defines strings.
If you don't like the definition, feel free to try to persuade ISO to
change it.
> C does not define reality
It doesn't claim to. Nevertheless, the ISO C Standard defines the C
programming language. If you don't like the definition, you have some
choices, some of which are: (a) lobby ISO to get it changed; (b) put up
with it; (c) ignore the problem and use some other language instead. It
seems that you have chosen option (c), which is fine, but when discussing
the C language, it makes no sense to ignore the formal definition of that
language.
>> > How DARE you even reply?
>>
>> We all have the right of reply. Your pathetic threat of physical
>> violence
>
> You're lying. No such threat was made.
In the message with Message-ID
<e654dafc-9e3a-4120...@l6g2000prm.googlegroups.com>
you wrote "I'd make mincemeat of you person to person. Care to arrange a
meeting?"
Let others decide for themselves whether I am lying in claiming that this
was a threat of physical violence.
CBFalconer
> spinoza1111 said:
>
> <snip>
>
>> If you don't read all the posts, you have no right of reply.
>
> That is an interesting opinion, but I do not share it. I see no
> reason why I should not ignore all your drivel and focus on what
> little technical content remains.
It is time to inform spinoza_the_nth that Usenet does not have any
delivery guarantees. There is no reason to assume that anyone has
received, or ever will receive, all messages in any particular
thread. This is why sane users snip their quotations to material
significant to their replies, bottom (or intermediate) post, and
limit the size of their posts.
In addition, it is usually hard to read posts from a poster who has
been PLONKED for misuse of the Usenet facility.
spinoza1111
wrote:
> On Sat, 12 Jan 2008 05:54:32 -0600, Rui Maciel wrote
>
> > Chris McDonald wrote:
>
> >> Be shamed, and please leave our newsgroup so the rest of us can again
> >> focus on discussing programming and not your character assassinations,
> >> lies, and trolling.
>
> > Trolls like this spinoza character will leave once everyone stops paying any
> > attention and therefore provide any incentive for the sad person behind
> > that act to post more drivel. So please don't feed the troll and eventually
> > this pathetic act will die off.
>
> I'm inclined to agree. It is somewhat difficult to allow him to post
> article after article in which you are named an attacked personally.
Excuse me, asshole. You jumped me as soon as I started the thread
"Brian Kernighan, maybe I'm not worthy, maybe I'm scum". You're the
aggressor and you made a fool of yourself. You got your butt kicked.
>
> However, I think that whatever point or set of points he had hoped to
> make in this drive by have fallen flat. Nobody with even the slightest
> knowledge of programming in C, C++, or C# (or any other language I
> suspect) has been fooled by the latest incarnation.
Excuse me, asshole. Productive discussion is ongoing in a thread I
don't want you to join. I made a serious error in mindlessly
transcribing the Pike code. Ben Bacarisse, not you, found this bug.
You wasted several days raving at me when you could have, had you the
competence you claim, found the obvious flaw. You could then have
capered and gibbered in your ape-like way about being such an hot
shot.
But you didn't, asshole, for the same reason you scored rather low on
a simple C++ test. Ben beat you in finding the bug, but not by
examining the code. He found the error. I not only promptly admitted
it and took responsibility, I immediately saw that it resulted from
the fact that C, with respect to strings that are correctly formatted,
can be off by one and this bizarre feature, unique to C, is used by
hot shots with pride. I explained this in one syllable words even you
could parse.
You haven't found any mistakes I've made. You've watched glowering
from the side-lines as better men than you TOOK THE RISK of pointing
out a flaw, and being found perhaps wrong in turn, leaping in like an
ape whenever you saw a chance to make a cheap shot.
>
> If he wishes to continue to make a mockery of whatever reputation he
My reputation among thugs and coding bums is not my concern here.
> has left here, I won't try and correct his mistakes. Note that if he
You have never once done any such thing, asshole. You have parroted
and plagiarized the work of somewhat more competent code monkeys,
venting your anger repeatedly and obsessively. Heathfield has had the
decency to at least try to explain why C is to him the greatest thing
since Jesus. Your posts have been strictly bile.
> posts something making claims about me in the future, the fact that I
> do not respond does not mean that I agree with him, only that I'm not
> playing the game anymore.
You've said this before, but in 2004 it was my maturity and my self-
restraint that maintained a truce between us requested by third
parties at the time, a truce which you violated several times, most
recently when I posted the original Kernighan thread.
You didn't have the decency at the time to post an agreement to join
the truce. Instead, asshole, you treated it as one of your ape
victories. You'd silenced the girlieman...who you fear you are
yourself. Had I at anytime replied to you, you would have been
delighted to continue your sick campaign of vilification.
You are in the main ignorant of your job and as a result you use a
primitive categorization which sorts the world in sleepwalking fashion
between studly Dudlies, of which you consider yourself the studliest,
and "script kiddies" like me, meaning anyone with any sort of
girlieman interest, not in never posting any code that could not be
challenged in a CIVIL tone as I challenged Robs, but in starting a
human dialogue about the unwarranted predominance of C mind control,
and finding a way to create end to end solutions that work.
You loaded the code in my book and you couldn't get it to work. Others
could. You didn't have the humility at any time to air your concerns
in eMail, about this or anything else that is bothering you.
You did manage to impress a couple of Sad Sacks of the sort who read
one or two posts in a flamey thread to find out who's being ganged up
on, and then run to join the fun, and they emulated you.
You're right about one perception you do seem to have, asshole. My
concerns as a quondam programmer, a quondam title I'm ashamed to bear
since it puts me in the same class as clowns like you, have indeed
been orthogonal to those of apes who have wanted to see the pretty
lights flash faster and faster, and who as a result have been so
corrupted that they don't give a good goddamn about the truth, or
other people who they don't like.
Richard Heathfield
In the rest of this reply, I focus purely on the technical aspects, as
before. All your polemic, rhetoric, abuse, and other such idiocies have
been snipped, unmarked. If you want to read them again, by all means refer
to the parent article to this reply.
So... what's left?
Oh.