Re: Holiday Game

<NathanCBaker@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:694c1760-337d-418c-b0f3-a36df110c357@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
If the issue could have been solved by simply "looking at the aligned
columns" as you suggest, then the grand minds of CompSci wouldn't have
had as much motivation to invent the superior languages that make use
of distinctive end tokens.

The same goes for using fingers as you did... Did they forget how to count?

Did they have an expectation that fingers or calculators were insufficient
to determine the nesting? Did they expect blocks so large that the are
virtually indeterminable? If so, wouldn't you want "for" and "endfor" to
have numbers appended so they explicitly match? Or, do the "GM of CS"
overreachingly attempt to explicitly solve problems that are quite rare and
relatively simple to solve? (You claimed you used fingers...) OR... Do
those undeserving of the reverence: "grand minds of CompSci," embrace a
hidden agenda to push heavily typed (not to be confused with strongly typed)
and ineffective languages like COBOL onto unsuspectingly naive CS students
primed and ready to unquestioningly embrace their CS masters' "brilliance"
without realizing that embracing their liberal and flawed ideology was a
total waste of their life until many decades later?

One cannot determine these answers by simply looking at C code
either.

Uh, what C haven't you been programming in? These are all answerable in C,
at least prior to C99 which may have obfuscated "true" and "false" when they
added booleans. For pre-C99 C, "true" and "false" would be a #define VALUE
in the code somewhere.

Are you saying that C is a poorly designed language simply
because one must read a manual in order to understand it?

I only use one book today as a guide to various peculularities. So, I must
ask, "What must you read to understand C?". I can think of a few things you
may need to read up on semi-regularly if you're not especially detail
oriented, like types of certain parameters, side effects of low use
functions, type conversions, etc.

I've been programming C so long, I honestly don't recall most of what I had
to learn to get here. I remember the basics of 6502: quite important, i.e.,
integers, addresses, assembly instructions, addressing modes. I remember
the basics of logic gates: quite important, e.g., and, or, nor, one and
two's complement. I remember some Pascal, but I had already learned
structured programming on my own and did so in BASIC regularly. I remember
realizing that the C operators either matched algebra or were symbolic for
FORTRAN's operators. So, it's a bit like asking an English teacher how many
English writing guides or how much Shakespeare they've read. Or, why,
despite the fact they are supposed to teach both, they only embrace Greek
tragedies as an acceptable form for papers and totally reject Greek
comedy... The sicker it is the higher grade, until it's so horrific they
become convinced you might (very likely) "go postal." I've read many books
on C, a few on C++, a medium number on FORTH, a couple on FORTRAN, etc. for
many other languages.

Besides, I don't program in
HLA... So, RTFM isn't an acceptable answer. While there are reasons for
me
to ask the questions, there aren't any reasons for me to RTFM. But,
those
who did RTFM, like you, and he who wrote TFM should know the answers.


I cannot believe that any of those answers are un-known.

Oh, I'm sure they are known - just not by me - which was why I asked.
Hopefully, they are known by you since you wrote the program. But, you are
avoiding answering these basic questions. They should definately be known
by Randall.

Surely, if a
manual page has been inadvertently deleted, or if Randy has forgotten
to document some obscure point, then it is obvious that disassembly
should provide some enlightenment.

That requires one who doesn't use HLA to do even more with HLA, i.e.,
download it, compile with it, disassemble it (probably using another package
like NASM), when the package likely comes with the manual that I'm not
interested in reading.


Rod Pemberton



.

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