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2014-12-11 -Lurid Crime Tales-

Police: Ramle Woman Slain Because She Wanted To Learn

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Posted by trailing wife 2014-12-11 00:00|| || Front Page|| [2 views ] Top

#1 Perhaps even BASIC Moslem Values.

They are still at BASIC. Even C has been too hard a language for them to learn.

Posted by JFM 2014-12-11 07:01|| 2014-12-11 07:01|| Front Page Top

#2 That's bad JFM.

Basic especially when you get to Basic + or +2 were powerful enough for most all needs and was syntactically complete. Even if the compiler wasn't as efficient as it might be for certain operations.

Posted by AlanC 2014-12-11 07:52|| 2014-12-11 07:52|| Front Page Top

#3 Meanwhile the Social Justice Warriors are enwrapped with their Salem Part XXII in America to notice real oppression on the world stage. Me, me, me!

Posted by Procopius2k 2014-12-11 07:52|| 2014-12-11 07:52|| Front Page Top

#4 AlanC

I think the sucess of C, a language created for programming a video game on a machine that by 1970 standards!!!!, was slow and with little memory, has been one of biggest blunders in the history of computing. 90% of Internet's security holes come from C's (and its offspring) design defects. But it is a small language as easy to learn tan Basic and as easy for writing bugs with it.

Posted by JFM 2014-12-11 09:26|| 2014-12-11 09:26|| Front Page Top

#5 For instance in C why do you have a separate precompilation stage that doesn't understand C (precompiler is just a SED on steroids) and can do weird things with your program before the real compiler even sees it? Because a compiler handling inclusions by itself (and checking them) wouldn't have fit in Thomson and Ritchie's old and small computer. (It was a piece of junk who had been lying in ATT's computer graveyard)

And why indexes ever begin at zero? Not because of code efficiency because any half smart compiler can "cheat" to make code as efficoient for arbitrary indexes tan for zero-based ones. Reason because Ritchie neede to make his compiler as small as possible and had to do away with arbirary indexes. Too bad for the thousands of bugs and the zillions of working hours lost trying to map real world problems on arrays with zero-based indexes.

Posted by JFM 2014-12-11 11:53|| 2014-12-11 11:53|| Front Page Top

#6 C sparked a contest as to who could write the most unintelligible, syntactically correct, complete statement.

The contest included people from many schools including MIT and WPI. The winning statement was such that NO one, including several professors of CompSci got the answer correct though the guy from WPI came closest.

Learned C as one of the many languages I used but never found it useful for "real" industrial strength business code due to its security issues and poor documentation. Had to audit some of it at one client and they couldn't even explain what it was supposed to do till the guy that wrote it came in.

Fun was had by all.

Posted by AlanC 2014-12-11 13:01|| 2014-12-11 13:01|| Front Page Top

#7 AlanC, whenever I teach programming, I mention that contest. I tell my students it is probably won by bored grad students with too much time on their hands, and that it is my sincere hope that when they get a real programming job that someone smacks them up along side of the had and tells them not to do that.

Posted by Rambler in Virginia 2014-12-11 13:43|| 2014-12-11 13:43|| Front Page Top

#8 LOL RiV!!

Thankfully I've never had to pretend to know it really well and NEVER teach it (various flavors of DEC Basic, COBOL and ABAP with some SQL & HTML mostly) over the course of my 30+ year career.

As I recall, and this is long ago, the contest statement was a "simple" data definition that involved multiple casting of arrays or elements (this was 25 years ago now).

Posted by AlanC 2014-12-11 15:07|| 2014-12-11 15:07|| Front Page Top

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