comp.lang.c - 9 new messages in 3 topics - digest

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

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Today's topics:

* Letter sent to Apress with concerns about Peter Seebach's online behavior -
5 messages, 3 authors
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/t/482b38643777da3c?hl=en
* Has thought been given given to a cleaned up C? Possibly called C+. - 1
messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/t/5954dc70a43f9f8e?hl=en
* Idiotic programming style edicts - 3 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/t/99bc3aa427fc7518?hl=en

==============================================================================
TOPIC: Letter sent to Apress with concerns about Peter Seebach's online
behavior
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/t/482b38643777da3c?hl=en
==============================================================================

== 1 of 5 ==
Date: Wed, Mar 17 2010 7:55 pm
From: spinoza1111

On Mar 18, 11:40 am, Walter Banks <wal...@bytecraft.com> wrote:
> spinoza1111wrote:
> > But what's most troubling is your apparent record of educational
> > failure.
>
> Didn't you say that you too dropped out of University.

I completed a BA and most of the work towards MSCS, but left the
latter program after completing most of the work with an A average. I
had family responsibilities.

I have said:

* It was not only possible, in the early days, to not take computer
science, it was necessary. There was no CS. I took the first ever CS
class offered at my undergrad university

* There have been many programmers with partial or no prep in
academic cs. But those programmers have produced interesting and
important code, and generally would be loth to attack someone with
Schildt's academic qualifications from a basic sense of standing and
decency.

The question is Seebach's strange attitude towards education. The
minorities I taught at DeVry had a respect for educations they
couldn't afford whereas Seebach seems, despite the fact that his
father seems to be a professor, to have a Fascistic anti-
intellectualism.

A Humble Programmer doesn't believe that academic preparation is
useless or pernicious, but there is an urban legend to this effect
which has destroyed good people, and far less important, projects.

Had Seebach been completely autodidact, this would have been OK. But
in his case, his lack of academic preparation is accompanied by a deep
level of ignorance and a George Bush-reminiscent level of incuriosity,
whence his claim that Herb couldn't speak of stacks and that the heap
is a DOS term.
>
> --- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: n...@netfront.net ---

== 2 of 5 ==
Date: Wed, Mar 17 2010 8:03 pm
From: spinoza1111

On Mar 18, 10:41 am, ImpalerCore <jadil...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mar 17, 6:34 pm, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
>
> > On 2010-03-17, Chad <cdal...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > Yeah. There is a former FreeBSD Engineer, who is know a Senior
> > > Executive at Apple, who never actually graduated High School.
>
> > It's surprisingly common.  I usually save the Big Reveal that I never
> > finished high school (or got a GED, or anything comparable) until I have
> > someone like Nilges to play with, but given how much mileage he got
> > out of merely knowing I hadn't taken CS courses, I was sorta worried that
> > it would cause him to explode in outrage.
>
> While you may not have finished high school or college, I'm sure you
> put at least as much effort into learning programming as people who
> did go to college, probably more.  Some people work best when they are
> self-directed because their interest drives a good work ethic.  Then
> there are those that won't do anything unless someone tells them they
> need to do it.  College is usually good for those kinds of people, but
> it's certainly not a requirement to follow a career in programming.
> Then there are those who won't do anything no matter who tells them to
> do it.
>
> Were you pretty much self-taught, or did you have a mentor of some
> kind?  As a college guy myself, I'm curious about people who found
> their way as a programmer through paths less traveled.

Give me a break. This suspension of educational requirements is a
white male privilege in companies in which jobs are designed around
white males identified as future managers (mostly because of evidence
that they are willing to destroy others), where, for example, the
white male only has to find bugs and report them, whereas the
difficult jobs are farmed out to consultants in Asia.

It is in fact welfare for white males.

By law, people should today be required to have a BS in computer
science or pass an examination before being permitted to call
themselves programmers, on the internet or anywhere else. This is not
the case simply because corporations want to define reality.

We were largely self-taught in 1973, but I returned to graduate school
in 1976 out of intellectual curiosity. I did not get the degree
because I had a family, but I have a respect for people who either
finish the degree, or learn as I did without the piece of paper.

I then returned to school (Princeton in an unusual program) ten years
later but at this point I was more curious about philosophy.

Whereas Peter seems to believe that he's learning when he attacks
others and plays computer games.
>
>
>
> > -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!

== 3 of 5 ==
Date: Wed, Mar 17 2010 9:17 pm
From: Walter Banks

spinoza1111 wrote:

> On Mar 18, 11:40 am, Walter Banks <wal...@bytecraft.com> wrote:
> > spinoza1111wrote:
> > > But what's most troubling is your apparent record of educational
> > > failure.
> >
> > Didn't you say that you too dropped out of University.
>
> I completed a BA and most of the work towards MSCS, but left the
> latter program after completing most of the work with an A average. I
> had family responsibilities.

Dropout

--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: news@netfront.net ---

== 4 of 5 ==
Date: Wed, Mar 17 2010 8:55 pm
From: Seebs

On 2010-03-18, ImpalerCore <jadill33@gmail.com> wrote:
> While you may not have finished high school or college,

Oh, I finished college. I have a degree in psychology. :)

> Were you pretty much self-taught, or did you have a mentor of some
> kind? As a college guy myself, I'm curious about people who found
> their way as a programmer through paths less traveled.

I never studied CS in college, but I had the good fortune to run into
a fairly good programmer sort (one of the authors of GNU grep, as
it happens, more recently a CPU designer), who decided that it would be
interesting to try to teach me how to think about computers. It appears
to have taken.

I don't know why I never took CS courses; I think it simply hadn't
occurred to me, and anyway it was mostly obvious.

-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!

== 5 of 5 ==
Date: Wed, Mar 17 2010 8:57 pm
From: Seebs

On 2010-03-18, Walter Banks <walter@bytecraft.com> wrote:
> spinoza1111 wrote:
>> But what's most troubling is your apparent record of educational
>> failure.

> Didn't you say that you too dropped out of University.

What's interesting to me is that he assumes that there was educational
"failure" involved. I think I failed two classes ever -- trigonometry
(couldn't memorize things; I could never do trig until I learned enough
calculus to derive it) and a chemistry class that was scheduled at 7:45
AM, which I think I attended a good three or four times.

It says a lot more about Nilges than about me that he'd assume that there
was any kind of failure involved. I didn't say I flunked out of high
school, only that I didn't continue taking high school classes. Similarly,
I never said I failed college, only that I didn't do CS... Because I
was busy doing math, philosophy, and psychology. ;)

-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!

==============================================================================
TOPIC: Has thought been given given to a cleaned up C? Possibly called C+.
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/t/5954dc70a43f9f8e?hl=en
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Wed, Mar 17 2010 8:54 pm
From: Ian Collins

On 03/18/10 12:16 PM, Richard Delorme wrote:
> Le 17/03/2010 23:09, Ian Collins a écrit :
>> On 03/18/10 11:01 AM, Richard Delorme wrote:
>>> Le 17/03/2010 18:44, Keith Thompson a écrit :
>>>> Richard Delorme<abulmo@nospam.fr> writes:
>>>
>>>> All this to avoid having to write a function declaration? I thought
>>>> you were trying to simplify things.
>>>
>>> From the programmer point of view this is a simplification. What I
>>> would appreciate, is to transfer some complexity from the programmer to
>>> the compiler.
>>
>> By adding a set of unnecessarily complex set of lookup rules?
>
> The programmer won't care much of this set of lookup rules.

He/she would if they enforce code layout rules, imaging several source
files this the same named function in them, or a library without source.

>>> This is exactly the opposite of what restrict is doing in
>>> current implementations.
>>
>> How so? There's no way for a compiler to know what is going to be passed
>> to a function.
>
> Yes there is, using alias analysis.

So the writer/compiler of memcpy() knows all possible uses of the
function? Interesting, psychic compilers!

--
Ian Collins
--
comp.lang.c.moderated - moderation address: clcm@plethora.net -- you must
have an appropriate newsgroups line in your header for your mail to be seen,
or the newsgroup name in square brackets in the subject line. Sorry.

==============================================================================
TOPIC: Idiotic programming style edicts
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/t/99bc3aa427fc7518?hl=en
==============================================================================

== 1 of 3 ==
Date: Wed, Mar 17 2010 11:48 pm
From: Jonathan de Boyne Pollard

>
>>>>
>>>> Such edicts make one want to write code in the form
>>>> x /* The variable x */
>>>> = /* is assigned */
>>>> x /* its value * /
>>>> + /* plus * /
>>>> 2 /* one */
>>>> ; /* . */
>>>>
>>> It also shows that maintaining these kinds of comment are more
>>> trouble than the comment is worth. The maintenance of these
>>> comments is way higher than the information they give, i.e. Who
>>> forgot to change the '/* one */' to '/* two */'?
>>>
>> x /* The pointer */
>> -> /* equals */
>> x /* itself */
>> = /* minus */
>> 2 /* five */
>> ; /* :( */
>>
> Then you start questioning which is right, the comment or the code,
> which can end up leading to a lot more work to figure it out.
>
As has been finally spotted, there was a subtler point in there, too.

== 2 of 3 ==
Date: Wed, Mar 17 2010 11:48 pm
From: Jonathan de Boyne Pollard

>
>>
>> Such edicts make one want to write code in the form
>>
> x /* The variable x */
> = /* is assigned */
> x /* its value * /
> + /* plus * /
> 2 /* two */
> ; /* . */
>
> Correction applied. HTH.
>
As you now know, you got the correction wrong. This was a deliberately
subtle point. The discrepancy in the mandatory comment prose caused you
to overlook another error. I deliberately made it a well-known and
fairly basic C programming error that most of the people participating
in this thread from comp.lang.c should all be familiar with, and
regularly leap upon in posted code, moreover.

== 3 of 3 ==
Date: Wed, Mar 17 2010 11:46 pm
From: Jonathan de Boyne Pollard

>
>
> Agreed. But note that the "its value" and "plus" comments aren't
> properly terminated, so the "/*" on the "its value" line introduces a
> comment that isn't terminated until the "*/" on the "one" line. The
> net result is "x = x;"
>
Hooray! At last! Well spotted. I've been waiting to see how long it
took and how many would do so.

So not only does the mandatory comment on every line not match the
apparent code, but the apparent code isn't the actual code, as a direct
consequence of the mandatory comments.

I'm assuming that M. Shanahan either spotted this too, or would have
done so.

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