Re: A note on computing thugs and coding bums

On Jan 12, 6:12 pm, Richard Heathfield <r...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
spinoza1111 said:

On Jan 12, 3:48 pm, Richard Heathfield <r...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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.

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...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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.

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 ***.

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 *** 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
*** 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 *** 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 ***, 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 -

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