Re: A note on computing thugs and coding bums

On Jan 12, 2:50 pm, Richard Heathfield <r...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[Posted and mailed]

Ben Bacarisse said:

spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@xxxxxxxxx> 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).

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 ***.]

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 <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

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