twitter: comp.lang.c - 25 new messages in 9 topics

comp.lang.c
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c?hl=en

comp.lang.c@googlegroups.com

Today's topics:

==============================================================================
TOPIC: Implementing strstr
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/t/a3fe05ab352d5774?hl=en
==============================================================================

== 1 of 10 ==
Date: Tues, Mar 30 2010 8:40 am
From: cri@tiac.net (Richard Harter)

On 30 Mar 2010 11:21:37 GMT, blmblm@myrealbox.com
<blmblm@myrealbox.com> wrote:

>In article <81830c3d-0569-4c24-82f3-a3ed628a633d@g1g2000pre.googlegroups.com>,
>spinoza1111 <spinoza1111@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> On Mar 30, 1:45 am, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
>> > On 2010-03-29, Ben Bacarisse <ben.use...@bsb.me.uk> wrote:
>> >
>> > > What is (at first glance) a little odd is that two explicit cases have
>> > > been added to a default cause. One has to ask if the added
>> > > documentary value in making these explicit is worthwhile. I'd say
>> > > that it is -- particularly if all switch statements that switch on the
>> > > message type explicitly include these four cases.
>> >
>> > Most of the time (but not always), I test for every defined value
>> > (usually excluding things like FOO_NONE or FOO_MAX) explicitly, and "default"
>> > is there to handle the possibility that a value not in the defined range
>> > at all will occur.
>>
>> Which is fine. But in the case of ack and nak in queue.c, you
>> fallthrough over code which at the time you wrote it contains no valid
>> case handling, but could easily be changed by someone who doesn't
>> realize that ack and nak are invalid for the client, as you say you
>> state in the documentation. The implicit rule is that the maintainer
>> may NOT put actually valid cases under ack and nak!
>>
>> The reason why we avoid unstructured code (which is what a fallthrough
>> switch() is, being irreducible to the Bohm Jacopini primitives unlike
>> other switch() statements
>
>I must be misunderstanding something, because I thought the point of
>those primitives was that any program could be expressed using them.
>If that's the case, surely any program, even an ill-structured one [*],
>can be so expressed? What does "irreducible" mean in context?

Perhaps Nilges has some private meaning in mind. That said,
translating C switch statements into Bohm Jacopini primitives is
quite straightforward.

>
>[*] Not that I necessarily think the code in question is ill-structured.

"Structure" in programming is a many splendored thing. The term,
structured code, is usually taken to mean code that has nested
flow control. In that sense the code in question is structured;
however the construct in which it is embedded is unstructured.

Richard Harter, cri@tiac.net
http://home.tiac.net/~cri, http://www.varinoma.com
It's not much to ask of the universe that it be fair;
it's not much to ask but it just doesn't happen.

== 2 of 10 ==
Date: Tues, Mar 30 2010 8:41 am
From: Seebs

On 2010-03-30, blmblm myrealbox.com <blmblm@myrealbox.com> wrote:
> In article <af2a01d7-cde1-4baa-9e1f-8dd3ab47e207@k24g2000pro.googlegroups.com>,
> spinoza1111 <spinoza1111@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> On Mar 30, 6:44 pm, blm...@myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
>> > Did it actually fail, in the context in which it was intended to be
>> > used?

>> Search me.

> Didn't you say above that it did?

He did. And it didn't.

>> In the context such a tool is intended to be used, you
>> don't use C. Instead, you use a scripting language with builtin string

Actually, no. In the context that tool was intended to be used, it would
be called hundreds of thousands of times in a time-critical hunk of stuff,
such that the cost of starting up a script interpreter would be prohibitive.

>> But...he would merit my silent pity, and I would make no comment, save
>> for the Schildt canard, and his treatment, last January, of my
>> collegial request for an exchange of email about Schildt.

> Quoted on the off chance that Seebs feels inclined to remind(?) us *why*
> this e-mail was deleted unread.

Because Nilges is a kook. He's unreliable in comprehending simple English,
he writes long and unrelated rants, he frequently refuses to answer simple,
direct, and topical questions, and his obsession with the issue has nothing
to do with me, so far as I can tell.

When he first posted about this in clcm, I responded and asked a number of
relevant, technical, questions. They went largely ignored because he has no
answers to them. He's not worth arguing with, except in that he sometimes
says something technically wrong in a way that newbies could learn from seeing
a correction to.

>> [Peter claims to have fixed the %s/%t confusion but his fix did not
>> address the ontological heart of the matter: that %s and %t are
>> strings, and IF you include string.h, THEN you need to use strstr.]

This, too, is untrue, but it's also worth pointing out that the '%s' thing
(there was no "%t", ever) was, in fact, "fixed" by switching to strtstr.

> We all get 168 hours per week, but we make different choices
> about what to do with them.

Yup.

Speaking of which, I'm going to go use my advanced education and theoretical
background to go help a friend unload shingles from a truck.

-s
--
Copyright 2010, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / usenet-nospam@seebs.net
http://www.seebs.net/log/ <-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictures
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology) <-- get educated!

== 3 of 10 ==
Date: Tues, Mar 30 2010 10:12 am
From: Seebs

On 2010-03-30, blmblm myrealbox.com <blmblm@myrealbox.com> wrote:
> In article <49925268-88c2-4fb8-b0d2-e4062ef95213@a16g2000pre.googlegroups.com>,
> spinoza1111 <spinoza1111@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> > fprintf(stderr, "test_strstr: needle too long (limit %d)\n",
>> > MAX_LEN);

>> Unconscionably bad. strstr simply should not depend on having a string
>> length < N, any N. If N is too small, this strstr will fail, and
>> that's simply not acceptable behavior in a utility. If N is too large,
>> it will occupy a wasteful amount of space in 99% of cases.

> Um, not to spoil your fun, but as best I can tell the limitation applies
> only to the test harness, not to the actual my_strstr function.

And indeed, the comments address this specifically.

>> You've failed Computer Science 101 Using C, and I suggest you change
>> your major.

(I have no idea what he thinks this means.)

> Since the above code is part of the *test harness*, how does it affect
> the performance of my_strstr?

The "waste" is there because I like to use that for string test harnesses;
it gives me pointers that I can compare to each other, and allows me to
stash magic values to check for overruns.

And yes, as you note -- none of this is in the my_strstr implementation.
The test harness is indeed inefficient and specialized; it's there just
to let me check my work.

== 4 of 10 ==
Date: Tues, Mar 30 2010 10:13 am
From: Seebs

On 2010-03-30, blmblm myrealbox.com <blmblm@myrealbox.com> wrote:
> In article <bd581988-d552-402b-8af9-b5b7c5a9492e@c2g2000pre.googlegroups.com>,
> spinoza1111 <spinoza1111@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> 2. In only thirty minutes, you decided on the wrong approach, which
>> was to make the workability of your solution dependent on have five
>> times the longest possible string's length of memory available.

> You do know that the only part of the solution that has this
> dependency is the test harness, right?

Obviously, he doesn't.

== 5 of 10 ==
Date: Tues, Mar 30 2010 10:32 am
From: spinoza1111

On Mar 30, 11:37 pm, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
> On 2010-03-30, blmblm myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
>
> > In article <4ccf239a-0e2b-4fca-a0c1-0f276f40e...@u5g2000prd.googlegroups.com>,
> >spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >> This is a junior programmer script kiddie newbie error! You define
> >> MAX_LEN above as 128 because da big boys do so, ignorantly copying,
> >> aping their style.
>
> Uh, no. I define it because I understand symbolic constants. :)

Using the rule you uncharitably use on others, including Schildt and
myself, we CAN infer from any one of your mistakes that you don't
understand the facility. I'm not sure I can make this inference in
this case, you may have SOME sort of superficial "knowledge" from
reading books and your foolish friends. But you have proved, each and
every time you posted code, that you don't know how to apply this
knowledge, and your self-hatred, on which you based your attacks on
Schildt and myself, is evident in your lack of enough self-esteem not
to make a fool of yourself.

Your mistake in using and then not using a symbolic constant is
consistent, and a professional programmer would not make it even in a
first draft. And you took TWO MONTHS to come up with that crap.
>
> > Now this, I think, is a fair cop. Seebs, is this another case of
> > not getting the easy stuff right? though really, it's kind of hard
> > for me to imagine ....
>
> Ayup.
>
> Keep in mind, I once had a firecracker go off in my hand because I
> *forgot I was holding it*.

I would suggest you address that problem, especially before you barge
in here calling people "insane" or "morons" or "kooks", because you're
asking for a charity you do not extend to others.
>
> This is the kind of thing I catch if I make a pass through the code after
> writing it. (Ben actually caught a more substantial bug, which I've also

I suggest in future you make several passes before you waste our time.
If you were a real programmer, you'd take some pride in your work
instead of attacking real programmers like Schildt or telling people
who've TAUGHT computer science that problems are beneath you as "first
year CS"...when you haven't taken first or any year CS.

> fixed.) I also tend to do things like waffling between two plausible names
> for a variable, but at least compilers catch that.
>
> Note that the only bug Nilges found was in the hastily-cobbled-together

...after about ten minutes of reading code I found horrid and
disgusting. I then had to go to work. You know about work, don't you.
It's not where you talk some company into letting you work when you
want 'cause you is white and middle class, and come here to get your
"homework" fixed.

> test harness, it didn't actually change the behavior of anything, he
> misunderstood why I was using defined-length buffers, and that the actual

No, I stopped there, and said, this guy is doing TOO MUCH unnecessary
copying. Like I said, I'm having fun and will find at this rate many
more problems, some of which have already been found by Ben.

If you think you've invented a clever new algorithm for strstr...well,
aux d'autres, ma vielle. While I'm not through with your crap code,
and expect to find many new gems of idiocy, you don't copy bytes to do
a strstr.

> algorithm appears to have had only one bug (that we've found so far,
> anyway) which could be fixed in under 5 minutes. I maintain that trivial
> errors that can be corrected immediately are a lot less of a problem than
> the sorts of epically-unmaintainable garbage he produces.

Long ago, I realized that English and computer science skills were in
fact so low in Corporate Amerikkka that good code could be
"unmaintainable", and I went on record as saying so at a talk at the
Data Processing Management Association in Peoria. The code is not
designed to be maintained by the likes of you, since I now realize
you're not competent.

>
> > Did it actually fail, in the context in which it was intended to be
> > used?
>
> No. Since I controlled the inputs, it worked exactly as expected; the
> use of '%s' was purely documentary for the user.

So you're the slob who wrote the horrible compiler at Motorola who
said that he didn't need to insert any error checks since the team
could be "disciplined" to submit "good" code?

Apply to Devry
I say with a sigh
Learn your trade
Lay off the Kool Ade

>
> >> * switch() statements which use an unstructured and needlessly
> >> misleading style
>
> This one's just a plain error.

...on your part. Bohm and Jacopini PROVED that any program can be
written using only three control structures, process, if..then..else,
and do while, and the most important fact about the Bohm-Jacopini
structures is that they each have one entry and one exit. This means
that they can be plugged together in a comprehensible fashion and
gives a solid, mathematical basis to an intuitive notion of
"readability"...which happens to be completely at variance from your
childish and narcissistic notion of readability-as-something-Petey-can-
fucking-read.

Dijkstra observed that the best programmers in his experience followed
the Bohm-Jacopini model even before it was formally proven. I read FT
Baker's article on Dijkstra/Bohm/Jacopini in 1972 in the IBM Systems
Journal along with Dijkstra's letter as an assembler and Fortran
programmer, and immediately realized that in assembler and Fortran-II,
despite their absence of modern control structures at the level of
syntax, what really counted was a style that showed the isomorphism of
the code with a structured flowchart of the code, back in an era when
flowcharting was still in vogue.

I applied this to find that my productivity increased to the point
that I was able to write a complete grading solution for the Registrar
who labeled me upon completion a bloody genius, and several other
modules, all written in assembler but more testable and less prone to
failure than my pre-1972 code.

In 1976, I published my first computer article, on "Virtually
Structured Programming", in Computerworld.

Now, a "fallthrough switch()" block consists of one or more cases
which have more than one, precisely TWO entries: one when the switch
goes to the case (ack or nak in your odious code), and another where
control arrives from the case above. It is NOT a structured
programming constant.

However, many thoughtful programmers would object that I have to apply
a transformation from code like this pseudo-assembler, which is
isomorphic to a structured flowchart, to code in "true" structured
style:

if (c) goto L1
a; b; c;
L1:
L2:
if (c2) goto L3
d; e;
goto L2
L3:

Isn't the fact that Petey's miserable botched code easily enough
translated into a structured switch() (which is further transformable
to a series of nested ifs which is less readable in practice than a
switch that does not fallthrough) show that he too is structured?

No, because in the above at runtime, it is always known what small and
immediately comprehensible single entry/exit "block" you're in and
this simply makes reading and debugging by way of the same heuristic
great programmers used before Bohm and Jacopini proved their result.

Another test might possibly be failed, although at this point I've
proven that Peter doesn't know what he's doing if he dares claim his
switch() blocks are structured, since the test is more conservative.
It's the Dijkstra test:

"If 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty,
you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say
to yourself: 'Dijkstra would not have liked this', well that would be
enough immortality for me."

I don't think Dijkstra would have approved of staying as I stayed out
of economic necessity with non-structured languages like Fortran-II,
Cobol and assembler in the conservative Chicago computing culture of
the Seventies. However, a fortiori, Dijkstra would throw up if he saw
Petey's code.

>
> >> * Logic leaks in which you leave significant variables completely
> >> uninitialized
>
> Also untrue, so far as I know -- assuming he's talking about the db_header
> thing.

Simply saying I'm a fucking liar without at least recapitulating any
proof you have shows you're:

* A bad writer who struggles (unlike me) to express himself
* Without a solid and elegant proof
* A liar yourself

No, you didn't even bother to initialize in the definition-declaration
which means that the code could "work" given random storage contents,
this being the worst type of bug: the unknown bug.

"Don't compete with me: firstly, I have more experience, and secondly,
I have chosen the weapons."

- Dijkstra
>
> -s
> --
> Copyright 2010, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / usenet-nos...@seebs.nethttp://www.seebs.net/log/<-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictureshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology) <-- get educated!

== 6 of 10 ==
Date: Tues, Mar 30 2010 10:46 am
From: spinoza1111

On Mar 30, 11:40 pm, c...@tiac.net (Richard Harter) wrote:
> On 30 Mar 2010 11:21:37 GMT, blm...@myrealbox.com
>
>
>
>
>
> <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
> >In article <81830c3d-0569-4c24-82f3-a3ed628a6...@g1g2000pre.googlegroups.com>,
> >spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >> On Mar 30, 1:45 am, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
> >> > On 2010-03-29, Ben Bacarisse <ben.use...@bsb.me.uk> wrote:
>
> >> > > What is (at first glance) a little odd is that two explicit cases have
> >> > > been added to a default cause. One has to ask if the added
> >> > > documentary value in making these explicit is worthwhile. I'd say
> >> > > that it is -- particularly if all switch statements that switch on the
> >> > > message type explicitly include these four cases.
>
> >> > Most of the time (but not always), I test for every defined value
> >> > (usually excluding things like FOO_NONE or FOO_MAX) explicitly, and "default"
> >> > is there to handle the possibility that a value not in the defined range
> >> > at all will occur.
>
> >> Which is fine. But in the case of ack and nak in queue.c, you
> >> fallthrough over code which at the time you wrote it contains no valid
> >> case handling, but could easily be changed by someone who doesn't
> >> realize that ack and nak are invalid for the client, as you say you
> >> state in the documentation. The implicit rule is that the maintainer
> >> may NOT put actually valid cases under ack and nak!
>
> >> The reason why we avoid unstructured code (which is what a fallthrough
> >> switch() is, being irreducible to the Bohm Jacopini primitives unlike
> >> other switch() statements
>
> >I must be misunderstanding something, because I thought the point of
> >those primitives was that any program could be expressed using them.
> >If that's the case, surely any program, even an ill-structured one [*],
> >can be so expressed? What does "irreducible" mean in context?
>
> Perhaps Nilges has some private meaning in mind. That said,
> translating C switch statements into Bohm Jacopini primitives is
> quite straightforward.

Only in the sense that Bohm and Jacopini PROVED that "for every
algorithm that uses more than the favored three control structures,
there exists an equivalent algorithm that does not". There are, in
fact, automated ways to translate nonstructured Coding Horrors into
structured code.

However, it was quickly discovered that the output of such tools was
if anything less readable than the original mess, the output being
littered with "Boolean flags". Dijkstra's heuristic observation was
not really about "code" as it was of the type of personality who
simply would not want to code a fallthrough case unless he were
writing very tight, very low level OS code...of the sort that the
Walter Mittys of this newsgroup, flies who dream they are men who cry
on awakening to dream again, fantasize they are doing when they
buttfuck C code.

This sort of personality, which I saw become extinct in programming
(who was often a female of Hippie tendencies) has been pushed out by
creeps like Dweebach, who in my experience at Bell Northern Research:

* Themselves write unmaintainable and unreadable code not only bug
ridden but systematically using, out of a unique combination of
stupidity and vanity, the wrong approach (such as using strchr to find
%s)

* Steal the intellectual production of their colleagues as Peter is
attempting to do here

* Backstab and lie consistently

>
>
>
> >[*] Not that I necessarily think the code in question is ill-structured.
>
> "Structure" in programming is a many splendored thing. The term,
> structured code, is usually taken to mean code that has nested
> flow control. In that sense the code in question is structured;
> however the construct in which it is embedded is unstructured.

I suggest you don't know what you are talking about. I saw the rapid
evolution of "structured programming", which meant something precise
to the successful Chief Programmer of a New York Times information
bank which I use today every time I search the Times site on the Web,
a Mr. FT Baker, to a slop meaning, a thug meaning: "it's structured if
it don't make me think".

In 1972 it meant "uses the Bohm Jacopini control primitives as
itemized in their paper, perhaps enhanced with one trip do until and a
case statement WITHOUT ANY FALLTHROUGH, and with subroutining".
Fallthrough was excluded because it is not needed when you have
functions, preprocessor macros, or inline functions, and it makes
explaining your switch statement impossible in practice. Furthermore,
it was required that the switch statement be translatable to a nested
If, and this is not possible with fallthrough.

But, of course you see that "the construct in which it is embedded is
unstructured", and Peter is writing toy software, not a demanding OS.
Therefore, he is incompetent because all competent programmers after
Bohm-Jacopini (and, according to Dijkstra, before) restricted
themselves in most situations to completely, not partially, structured
code.

>
> Richard Harter, c...@tiac.nethttp://home.tiac.net/~cri,http://www.varinoma.com
> It's not much to ask of the universe that it be fair;
> it's not much to ask but it just doesn't happen.

== 7 of 10 ==
Date: Tues, Mar 30 2010 11:05 am
From: spinoza1111

On Mar 30, 11:41 pm, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
> On 2010-03-30, blmblm myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
>
> > In article <af2a01d7-cde1-4baa-9e1f-8dd3ab47e...@k24g2000pro.googlegroups.com>,
> >spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >> On Mar 30, 6:44 pm, blm...@myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
> >> > Did it actually fail, in the context in which it was intended to be
> >> > used?
> >> Search me.
> > Didn't you say above that it did?
>
> He did. And it didn't.

Worst kind of bug: a bug that doesn't cause your code to fail. But
hey, what the fuck does a clown like you care?
>
> >> In the context such a tool is intended to be used, you
> >> don't use C. Instead, you use a scripting language with builtin string
>
> Actually, no. In the context that tool was intended to be used, it would
> be called hundreds of thousands of times in a time-critical hunk of stuff,
> such that the cost of starting up a script interpreter would be prohibitive.

A new excuse for poor workmanship!

I'm not up to speed on Linux: but for some time on .Net we've known
all about just in time compilation.

Most "script interpreters" have APIs to circumvent the "loading" time.

Furthermore, I'd have to ask why you are replacing a pattern in a
directory "hundreds of thousands of times". You see, in any reasonable
scenario, that pattern is a device for the user to abstract the name.
I think this is therefore an instance of incredibly poor workmanship,
in which you are REPEATEDLY changing %s (and any other %c pattern, at
least in the first version) in the same places and in the same string
because all other evidence (off by one strlen, reversal of conditions,
and your queue.c horror) shows you don't know your job.

But even granting this point, there's still the basic design error,
and that was to

1. Include string.h
2. Not use strstr for %s, which is a string

>
> >> But...he would merit my silent pity, and I would make no comment, save
> >> for the Schildt canard, and his treatment, last January, of my
> >> collegial request for an exchange of email about Schildt.
> > Quoted on the off chance that Seebs feels inclined to remind(?) us *why*
> > this e-mail was deleted unread.
>
> Because Nilges is a kook. He's unreliable in comprehending simple English,

You don't write "simple English", and "comprehending me" for an
autistic cunt is "agreeing with me or I have a tantrum".

> he writes long and unrelated rants, he frequently refuses to answer simple,
> direct, and topical questions, and his obsession with the issue has nothing

Hey, motherfucker. You have any simple, direct and topical questions,
make sure I see them by sending them by email. You do not speak to me
directly because you're a sissy and a coward. Saying that I refuse to
answer questions when you don't ask them of me is insane.

> to do with me, so far as I can tell.
>
> When he first posted about this in clcm, I responded and asked a number of

You introduced yourself. But during that "question time", it was I who
had the questions and comments on the overall approach. You never
answered those questions. Instead, almost immediately, you launched
into a global assault on my credibility, enabled by Richard
Heathfield, a destructive prick who thinks he runs this newsgroup and
clcm.

I then sent you email and you deleted the first email unread, although
it was a good faith effort, to which I referred in the public space,
to see if we couldn't tone down the "moron" and "kook" accusations on
your side, and my critique of you as a technician and a person, based
on my gradually dawning realization that you, sir, are a fraud
unfortunately backed by some sort of corporation...that is using you
to steal intellectual production.

> relevant, technical, questions. They went largely ignored because he has no
> answers to them. He's not worth arguing with, except in that he sometimes
> says something technically wrong in a way that newbies could learn from seeing
> a correction to.

News flash: you need to return to school and thereby disambiguate "my
pet coding shibboleths learned from other wet behind the ear geeks
scarcely older than I" and technology.
>
> >> [Peter claims to have fixed the %s/%t confusion but his fix did not
> >> address the ontological heart of the matter: that %s and %t are
> >> strings, and IF you include string.h, THEN you need to use strstr.]
>
> This, too, is untrue, but it's also worth pointing out that the '%s' thing
> (there was no "%t", ever) was, in fact, "fixed" by switching to strtstr.

(Sigh). As I recommended. And you failed to give credit. You are a
fraud and a thief, Dweebach, and this issue is not going away.
>
> > We all get 168 hours per week, but we make different choices
> > about what to do with them.
>
> Yup.
>
> Speaking of which, I'm going to go use my advanced education and theoretical
> background to go help a friend unload shingles from a truck.

You do that. But it doesn't prove that you're Authentic. My guess is
you'll unload a few and then supervise.
>
> -s
> --
> Copyright 2010, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / usenet-nos...@seebs.nethttp://www.seebs.net/log/<-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictureshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology) <-- get educated!

== 8 of 10 ==
Date: Tues, Mar 30 2010 11:26 am
From: spinoza1111

On Mar 30, 7:40 pm, blm...@myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
> In article <af2a01d7-cde1-4baa-9e1f-8dd3ab47e...@k24g2000pro.googlegroups.com>,
>
> spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > On Mar 30, 6:44 pm, blm...@myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
> > > In article <4ccf239a-0e2b-4fca-a0c1-0f276f40e...@u5g2000prd.googlegroups.com>,
>
> > >spinoza1111<spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > > > On Mar 30, 3:53 am, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
>
> [ snip ]
>
> > > > How dare you, how dare you attack Schildt! Every fucking scrap of code
> > > > you've submitted to this newsgroup contains, not just bugs, but
> > > > completely wrong code which demonstrates that you come here to steal
> > > > intellectual product in the form of fixes to code that a professional
> > > > programmer would be ashamed of.
>
> > > > * A %s search which failed because you used strchr and not string.h's
> > > > strstr
>
> > > Did it actually fail, in the context in which it was intended to be
> > > used?
>
> > Search me.
>
> Didn't you say above that it did?
>
>
>
>
>
> > In the context such a tool is intended to be used, you
> > don't use C. Instead, you use a scripting language with builtin string
> > handling such as Rexx for the IBM mainframe, Visual Basic .Net or
> > Visual Basic for Applications on Microsoft platforms, or awk or its
> > descendants on Linux and unix. The code was completely useless to
> > anyone here as opposed to the instructional utility of demonstrating
> > how to learn string handling from people like Willem and Ben (and me)
> > by discarding string.h. It was a vanity effort which I think Peter
> > meant to show that he was qualified to code C. As such, he
> > demonstrated to me that he's far less qualified than he thinks he is,
> > and far less qualified than Heathfield, who has a good grasp of the
> > trees but sometimes gets lost in the forest. This has been confirmed
> > in recent weeks by each code snippet and program he has posted.
>
> > But...he would merit my silent pity, and I would make no comment, save
> > for the Schildt canard, and his treatment, last January, of my
> > collegial request for an exchange of email about Schildt. As you will
> > recall, he discarded my email unread and proceeded to repeatedly call
> > me (a fellow Apress author) "insane", a "moron", and a "kook". I am
> > none of these things.
>
> Quoted on the off chance that Seebs feels inclined to remind(?) us *why*
> this e-mail was deleted unread.
>
>
>
>
>
> > The worst type of bug is one that doesn't "actually fail", most of the
> > time, or even never, when, years later, a maintenance programmer makes
> > a small change (such as adding %t as a different type of pattern, and
> > not expecting it to be changed), only to have the new code fail.
> > Professional programmers produce, as I produce, tokens of a type or
> > set of alternative texts which meet a range of neighboring
> > possibilities in such a way that it's easy to change from one token to
> > the next.
>
> > [Peter claims to have fixed the %s/%t confusion but his fix did not
> > address the ontological heart of the matter: that %s and %t are
> > strings, and IF you include string.h, THEN you need to use strstr.]
>
> > This sounds like the ravings of a "crazy man" who caught schizophrenia
> > >from Nash only to uneducated paraprogrammers, whether the truly
> > unwashed, or people who "washed" out of other fields and came, filled
> > with self-hatred, shame and anger, to programming. But the fact is
> > that like a number of older programmers (such as Richard Stallman), I
> > spent a number of summers yearning for a CPU and drycoding programs,
> > along with learning mathematics, logic and the foundations of
> > mathematics. I also studied theater and literature in that time so
> > that by the time I was a graduate student in CS, I'd learned that
> > people and ideas matter far more than machines and software.
>
> > I'm afraid that Peter never had this chance, nor the chance to solve
> > difficult problems on his own, but not on his own terms. He was
> > sitting in a university, presumably with Mommy and Daddy paying his
> > tuition, unlike my middle class black and female students at DeVry,
> > who staggered in exhausted from working two jobs to pay their
> > tuition.
>
> > If he was interested in computers, it seems reasonable that he would
> > have taken a class; I jumped at the chance, in 1970, to take the first
> > class in computer science at Roosevelt University in Chicago.
>
> We all get 168 hours per week, but we make different choices
> about what to do with them. Didn't you say that at some point
> stop taking classes because you had other obligations? What is
> that but a choice .... <shrug>

Again, you're a corporate commodity fetishist, Ms M, who actually
thinks arguments can be resolved by selecting some suitable abstract
and "fuzzy" concept, expressed in "simple" but on investigation
completely meaningless language, which covers up an actual difference
and actual victimization.

Which is a fancy way of saying, Ms M, that you're making the tu quoque
logical fallacy.

You see, Peter, probably out of fear that his "learning disorder" (of
a sort that was not recognized when Larry Ellison, or I, were in
school) would disadvantage him, refused to even start on any sort of
acceptable journey.

Whereas when I was an undergraduate, there were no computer science
classes at my nontech uni. When they were announced four years after I
got my BA, I signed up because I had tuition support and ONE child.
But after I'd completed the heavy class work required (computer
architecture, compiler development, theory of computation, data base
theory, microcomputer architecture, etc.) with an A+ average, we had
our second child and the price of gas shot up after Iran took the US
embassy.

I was by then working for a Chicago firm that required a 45 hour plus
week. I was getting involved in some very interesting projects
including developing tools in which software for the very first
cellphone released for sale, and figuring that I'd learned enough, I
decided, with some reluctance, not to finalize the MSCS. This freed me
up to move to Silicon Valley and get a pay increase to cover the late
Carter inflation.

Now, there is simply no comparision between this and Peter sitting in
his bedroom with his head up his ass, fantasizing that he knew how to
program. And when I was forty, as Peter now appears to be, I was
delivering a paper on a parser generator I'd written in Rexx to
generate a parser for Rexx, as a result of my studies.

However, even in the 1980s, I noticed that programmers were rapidly
"learning" to disrespect universities and to take pride in a complete
disconnect between their work and what they'd learned in school. It
was increasingly claimed by them that they were working at a "cutting
edge" that academicians didn't dare enter even when, and usually when,
you investigated their work to find out that they were screwing the
pooch out of ignorance. They were using fallthrough case unnecessarily
and repeatedly making the same string transformation, using the wrong
approach, without bothering to create an index of the places where to
insert the string. They were constructing "linked lists" in which each
node had megabytes of data, unnecessarily.

They were repeating the same mistake mainframe programmers had made in
the 1960, which was to think that intellectually manageable programs
could be written without a stack mechanism, but on a far grander
scale. And if you asked the hard questions (such as why the fuck would
I want a strstr that constrains me to limit the string length to an
too-small value, OR occupy a huge address space), these questions were
dismissed as "academic".
>
> > I can
> > only conclude that he's developed a passive-aggressive style which is
> > better treated by traditional psychiatry and outdoor service work than
> > medication...but would caution you, saying that that diagnosis is
> > probably irresponsible, possibly as irresponsible as people who
> > diagnose me as schizo because they can't read worth dick.
>
> [ snip ]
>
> --
> B. L. Massingill
> ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.

== 9 of 10 ==
Date: Tues, Mar 30 2010 11:36 am
From: spinoza1111

On Mar 30, 7:21 pm, blm...@myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
> In article <81830c3d-0569-4c24-82f3-a3ed628a6...@g1g2000pre.googlegroups.com>,
>
>
>
>
>
> spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > On Mar 30, 1:45 am, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
> > > On 2010-03-29, Ben Bacarisse <ben.use...@bsb.me.uk> wrote:
>
> > > > What is (at first glance) a little odd is that two explicit cases have
> > > > been added to a default cause. One has to ask if the added
> > > > documentary value in making these explicit is worthwhile. I'd say
> > > > that it is -- particularly if all switch statements that switch on the
> > > > message type explicitly include these four cases.
>
> > > Most of the time (but not always), I test for every defined value
> > > (usually excluding things like FOO_NONE or FOO_MAX) explicitly, and "default"
> > > is there to handle the possibility that a value not in the defined range
> > > at all will occur.
>
> > Which is fine. But in the case of ack and nak in queue.c, you
> > fallthrough over code which at the time you wrote it contains no valid
> > case handling, but could easily be changed by someone who doesn't
> > realize that ack and nak are invalid for the client, as you say you
> > state in the documentation. The implicit rule is that the maintainer
> > may NOT put actually valid cases under ack and nak!
>
> > The reason why we avoid unstructured code (which is what a fallthrough
> > switch() is, being irreducible to the Bohm Jacopini primitives unlike
> > other switch() statements
>
> I must be misunderstanding something, because I thought the point of
> those primitives was that any program could be expressed using them.
> If that's the case, surely any program, even an ill-structured one [*],
> can be so expressed? What does "irreducible" mean in context?

You are misunderstanding something. Sure, nothing's "irreducible"
since any unstructured program can be automatically structured (that
results from Turing equivalence). But as I indicate elsethread,
Dijkstra, like Confucius, was looking for the type of person who would
prefer not to be unstructured even as Confucius looked for the
gentleman, and would grow out of wanting to fall through, as I did in
1972 at the ripe age of 22.

His "elegance" was a moral category which recognized that the ultimate
source of value is the Other Person, Levinas, "the other whose face is
the face of God removed from the world", the other who people so
readily call a "troll" (where becoming familiar with the particular
other's personality and actual skills and lack of decency towards
others, and calling him a fraudulent motherfucker, is quite
different).

Because for Dijkstra people and their human culture is infinitely more
important that machines or software, programming is the moral act of
documenting precisely your intentions as to use a computer to an
Other.

Anyone who would prefer to be cute and write a fallthrough case
because he think's its cute and shows that he should be writing OS
code and not scripts is a cad on this account, and because, as TW
Adorno showed, "intelligence is a moral category", a stupid cad.
>
> [*] Not that I necessarily think the code in question is ill-structured.

Oh we must be "objective". I'm afraid that Adorno showed that being
"objective" for low level people in an administered world, which is
what we are, which is what you are, is to be blinded as were Odysseus'
men to most of reality. The code is ill-structured, dear heart.
>
>
>
>
>
> > but unnecessary for a Turing complete
> > language) is precisely to avoid these gotchas. Many programmers do not
> > read the documentation, not so much out of sloth, instead because the
> > documentation is so often out of date or wrong.
>
> > You've never learned to write for true readability, which is something
> > you have to learn by taking computer science classes for the most
> > part. This is because in a class, you have to hand in your work to an
> > instructor or graduate assistant who must grade it. Whereas many
> > corporate groups in my experience are designed by their own members
> > with the silent complicity of top management to avoid quality control
> > so as to meet deadlines, with code reading given at best lip service.
>
> > This means that I think you are lying when you claim that queue.c is a
> > group effort where you reviewed the code. I think that you're a script
> > kiddie who's not allowed to write code like a man because, as you
> > yourself concede, you get simple things wrong in a field where (news
> > flash) we build complex systems out of simple things, what Dijkstra
> > called a cloud of mosquitos humming in harmony. I don't think a
> > competent coworker would have stood for a Duff's device, or
> > fallthrough case, because they are legacy and idiomatic styles, and
> > unacceptable today.
>
> [ snip ]
>
> --
> B. L. Massingill
> ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.

== 10 of 10 ==
Date: Tues, Mar 30 2010 12:26 pm
From: Squeamizh

On Mar 30, 4:40 am, blm...@myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
> In article <af2a01d7-cde1-4baa-9e1f-8dd3ab47e...@k24g2000pro.googlegroups.com>,
> > recall, he discarded my email unread and proceeded to repeatedly call
> > me (a fellow Apress author) "insane", a "moron", and a "kook". I am
> > none of these things.
>
> Quoted on the off chance that Seebs feels inclined to remind(?) us *why*
> this e-mail was deleted unread.

Hey, B. L. Barneby, why don't you get a clue? What exactly are you
trying to extract from spinoza? By republishing his nonsense, you
just lure weak-willed saps to respond indirectly, and further pollute
this newsgroup. If you somehow get something out of reading his
tripe, then I suggest you check the archives; you'll find enough to
keep you pacified for a year or two. If you simply can't resist
taking your little shots at spinoza, then I suggest sticking to email
(CC Seebs if you like).

==============================================================================
TOPIC: Need a hand~
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/t/6a46761ca90b3910?hl=en
==============================================================================

== 1 of 4 ==
Date: Tues, Mar 30 2010 9:23 am
From: Dorje

Hi, all,
I can not freely access the website of google group, so I want to know
how
to public a topic and reply a specific topic by using gmail or any
other email， many
thanks~

== 2 of 4 ==
Date: Tues, Mar 30 2010 9:50 am
From: Andrew Poelstra

On 2010-03-30, Dorje <dingjiu.eecs@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, all,
> I can not freely access the website of google group, so I want to know
> how
> to public a topic and reply a specific topic by using gmail or any
> other email， many
> thanks~

This is Usenet, which is a different protocal (NNTP) than email
(SMTP). Your ISP probably has a newsserver you can use to post
messages, plus there are a number of free ones on the Internet.

It is pretty hard to find a worse interface than Google's. At
the very least, others will not pretend that they "own" Usenet
and brand it using their own "Groups" service.

--
Andrew Poelstra
http://www.wpsoftware.net/andrew

== 3 of 4 ==
Date: Tues, Mar 30 2010 10:41 am
From: Dorje

On Mar 31, 12:50 am, Andrew Poelstra <apoels...@localhost.localdomain>
wrote:
> On 2010-03-30, Dorje <dingjiu.e...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hi, all,
> > I can not freely access the website of google group, so I want to know
> > how
> > to public a topic and reply a specific topic by using gmail or any
> > other email， many
> > thanks~
>
> This is Usenet, which is a different protocal (NNTP) than email
> (SMTP). Your ISP probably has a newsserver you can use to post
> messages, plus there are a number of free ones on the Internet.
>
> It is pretty hard to find a worse interface than Google's. At
> the very least, others will not pretend that they "own" Usenet
> and brand it using their own "Groups" service.
>
> --
> Andrew Poelstrahttp://www.wpsoftware.net/andrew

Thank you for your help~

== 4 of 4 ==
Date: Tues, Mar 30 2010 11:48 am
From: "dingjiu"

I have fixed this problem~
"Dorje" <dingjiu.eecs@gmail.com> Ð´ÈëÏûÏ¢ÐÂÎÅ:59532037-c3ef-44aa-b583-d9af65f9eefd@l25g2000yqd.googlegroups.com...
On Mar 31, 12:50 am, Andrew Poelstra <apoels...@localhost.localdomain>
wrote:
> On 2010-03-30, Dorje <dingjiu.e...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hi, all,
> > I can not freely access the website of google group, so I want to know
> > how
> > to public a topic and reply a specific topic by using gmail or any
> > other email£¬ many
> > thanks~
>
> This is Usenet, which is a different protocal (NNTP) than email
> (SMTP). Your ISP probably has a newsserver you can use to post
> messages, plus there are a number of free ones on the Internet.
>
> It is pretty hard to find a worse interface than Google's. At
> the very least, others will not pretend that they "own" Usenet
> and brand it using their own "Groups" service.
>
> --
> Andrew Poelstrahttp://www.wpsoftware.net/andrew

Thank you for your help~

==============================================================================
TOPIC: Edward Nilges' lie
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/t/14c6f4a4afe68f60?hl=en
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Tues, Mar 30 2010 9:43 am
From: BruceS

On Mar 30, 4:44 am, blm...@myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
> In article <b98dd10e-8f4d-48d2-b232-0ac27a8fa...@k5g2000pra.googlegroups.com>,
>
>
>
> spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > On Mar 28, 1:50 am, blm...@myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
<snip>
> > > Perhaps the problem is not that we're not willing to defend our fellow
> > > human beings but that we don't feel that this is a case in which such
> > > defense is appropriate. (I can't speak for either of the other two, but
> > > that's the case for me.)
>
> > Yes, we must be "appropriate". What puzzles me, however, is how people
> > in corporations and here can appeal to a norm which is based not only
> > on shared values but of knowledge, almost invisible here and
> > deliberately hidden in most corporations, about other people's
> > motivations and real feelings.
>
> > Basically, your notion of appropriateness is fucked up. This is
> > because as in the corporation it allows minatory language as long as
> > the language uses the right shibboleths and appeals to clerical
> > conventions easily understood, but bans self-defense.
>
> You know, I knew when I wrote the post to which you're replying
> that "appropriate" was not exactly the right word to express
> my intended meaning [*], but I couldn't think of a better one,
> and I still can't.

Perhaps you meant to say "justified". Are you trying to say that
defense of spinoza1111 in this is not justified, or that any
involvement in the conflict is {uninteresting|pointless|
counterproductive}, or something else entirely?
HTH

==============================================================================
TOPIC: #if 0?0?0:0:0
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/t/b75e40e1094105ba?hl=en
==============================================================================

== 1 of 3 ==
Date: Tues, Mar 30 2010 9:47 am
From: Francois Grieu

The following 4-lines source fragment test.c (fourth line empty)
#if 0?0?0:0:0

twitter

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

comp.lang.c - 25 new messages in 9 topics - digest

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

About Me

Previous Posts