sequence points in subexpressions

[spinoza1111]

(Some schmuck wrote)

You certainly got that right.  Given that the whole game in CLC (and,
unfortunately, in Usenet as a whole, but nowhere else [IME] as severe
and unforgiving as in CLC) is to stare at something, that someone else
wrote, until you can come up with an absurd interpretation.  Then you
post a reply that assumes that that interpretation is the only possible
one.

And like Heathfield's fantasy land stories about how he reformatted a
hard drive because of UB back in 89, most stories are conjured up to
provide a reason for their anal retentiveness and lack of real life
awareness. But this years prize for most exagerrated tall tales that
refer to dinosaur machines must go to Flash Gordon. It seems he never
programmed a machine what was not missing a bit, alternate endian or had
no stack.

My current favorite is Heathfield's claim that his teacher said that
for loop exit is tested before each statement in the for loop. It is
not impossible, depending on what low level technical Borstals he may
have been sent to as a ward of the state (that's irony not a claim)
but it's likelier that he deliberately misinterpreted her when she
said (correctly), "children, the statement after the for loop is
executed while the for loop condition is true". She was correct
because that is the syntax of the for loop:

forLoop := "for" "(" [ initialization ] ";" condition
";" [ modification ] ")"
statement

since "statement" can be a simple or compound "statement".

Richard may have misheard her and jumped all over the poor lady.

 

[Argonaut]

We can change this, Kenny. The new game starts now. And the rules are
found in The Psychology of Computer Programming: no personal attacks,
just problem solving, active tolerance of alternate points of view,
and the absolute right of personal verbal self-defense.

Great! The all-new, touchy, feely, sensitive Spinoza!

Which lasted 6 minutes, till you attacked Heathfield:

My current favorite is Heathfield's claim that his teacher said that
for loop exit is tested before each statement in the for loop. It is
not impossible, depending on what low level technical Borstals he may
have been sent to as a ward of the state (that's irony not a claim)
but it's likelier that he deliberately misinterpreted her when she

Where you presume you know facts of his childhood better than he does.
In which case you're a seriously obsessed stalker, or psychic.


Meanwhile,

Therefore, to save SEEBACH work, and to avoid further
confusion as a result of a flame war I will not post anything further
at this thread.

-- followed up in that thread by at least four of your trademark
apoplectic tirades.

And on that topic, I note that while you over and over accuse Seebach
of leading some kind of vendetta against Schildt, searching the
newsgroup that he set up and controls, as moderator,
(comp.lang.c.moderated, where you recently shat in your own pants)
shows that until you turned up , Schildt had not been mentioned once
in the last seven years. Now that's a real sneaky way to run a
vendetta. What an evil mastermind.

 

[Seebs]

And on that topic, I note that while you over and over accuse Seebach
of leading some kind of vendetta against Schildt, searching the
newsgroup that he set up and controls, as moderator,
(comp.lang.c.moderated, where you recently shat in your own pants)
shows that until you turned up , Schildt had not been mentioned once
in the last seven years. Now that's a real sneaky way to run a
vendetta. What an evil mastermind.

The secret to my vendetta is delegation. Having no interest in actually
pursuing the vendetta (indeed, having been totally unaware of it), I
apparently subcontracted it to a Usenet kook who would go around preaching
to everyone and anyone that would listen that Schildt's work was, according
to me, garbage, and according to the kook, the ideal salvation of the human
race. This has, I suspect, done more to undermine Schildt's reputation
than my web page ever did.

-s

 

[Eric Sosman]

We can change this, Kenny. The new game starts now. And the rules are
found in The Psychology of Computer Programming: no personal attacks,
just problem solving, active tolerance of alternate points of view,
and the absolute right of personal verbal self-defense.

Great! The all-new, touchy, feely, sensitive Spinoza!
[...]

Just two requests: First, please stop feeding the troll.
Second, if you cannot resist the urge to feed him, please
refer to him as "Nilges" and not by the revered names like
Spinoza and Orwell that he has misappropriated for his own
scummy purposes.

 

[Seebs]

Just two requests: First, please stop feeding the troll.
Second, if you cannot resist the urge to feed him, please
refer to him as "Nilges" and not by the revered names like
Spinoza and Orwell that he has misappropriated for his own
scummy purposes.

I like "Spinny". Spinoza, he ain't. A sort of cheap knock-off of Spinoza,
I could buy.

Also, he gets really offended when you besmirch his family name, as a result
of which, I feel that associating it with his behavior is probably pretty
offensive to him.

-s

 

[spinoza1111]

If you were expecting rationality and consistency from him, I suggest
a reappraisal.



For the record, I was 26 years old at the time. There was no
misinterpretation, deliberate or otherwise. I asked her to clarify
what she meant, and wrote some code that would give different results
depending on whether the loop condition was, or was not, tested after
every statement, leaving us both in no doubt about what she meant.
And what she meant was wrong. I demonstrated this to her, and she at
least had the good grace to recognise that she was wrong, and to make
her mistake clear to the class at the next opportunity.

Even if this is true, it means that you took classes in programming
from laughably unqualified people. That alone could be remediated but
we also have your poor performance on the Sparknotes test to show that
you are not an "expert" on the topics you profess.

However, I believe you deliberately disrupted the class as you disrupt
conversations here by deliberately taking one mis-statement by a
female teacher. I believe your fear of women played a role. I believe
she humored you as I humored "Otto" in my classes.

She probably meant that the loop condition is true during the
execution of each statement in the block in the loop scope and that
you COULD repeat the test before each statement since each statement
lies before the modification, UNLESS a statement in the block changed
the loop condition. She may have been making a subtle point that
escaped you: that it's poor practice to allow the condition to become
false in the loop body. She may have been talking about program
verification and it was over your head, therefore you jumped on her as
you jump on people here.

The code you wrote was probably pathological whereas she wanted you to
code loops that did not modify the loop condition.

 

[spinoza1111]

I like "Spinny".  Spinoza, he ain't.  A sort of cheap knock-off of Spinoza,
I could buy.

Also, he gets really offended when you besmirch his family name, as a result
of which, I feel that associating it with his behavior is probably pretty
offensive to him.

Decent people usually get offended when you besmirch their family
name. You might not care about bringing shame on your father or
Schildt's family, but I think it is wrong.

I've used spinoza1111 since 1996 because Baruch Spinoza was "flamed"
by the Amsterdam Jewish community for his views.

The issue is not my behavior, it is yours. Since you're an Apress
author, I advise you as an older one to withdraw the Schildt canard
since it brings disrepute on Apress as a whole and indirectly may harm
my sales.

 

[spinoza1111]

Great! The all-new, touchy, feely, sensitive Spinoza!

Reread the part about self-defense. Heathfield disrupts conversations
and enables campaigns of personal destruction. We have the right of
collective and individual self-defense against his attacks. But we do
NOT initiate them by deliberately misinterpreting what people say into
charges of incompetence.

The "soft male" is raised by women to not defend himself but
compensates by bullying safe targets.

 

[stan]

Reread the part about self-defense. Heathfield disrupts conversations
and enables campaigns of personal destruction. We have the right of
collective and individual self-defense against his attacks. But we do
NOT initiate them by deliberately misinterpreting what people say into
charges of incompetence.

"We" - the plot thickens!

 

[Seebs]

"We" - the plot thickens!

Don't read too much into it, I think he just can't count.

-s

 

[spinoza1111]

Don't read too much into it, I think he just can't count.

In a bullying situation, it is important to re-present the victim as
isolated and friendless, which is actually the secret contour of the
bully's weakness. The fact is that your treatment of Schildt has been
criticized by others, and Schildt thanked me for my change to the
wikipedia article last year. In addition, the spamming of Amazon by
people whose sole source is your essay has been criticized by third
parties at Amazon.

Instead of fairly and humanely discussing programming issues (with its
attendant risks in this first-draft and unedited environment of making
errors), people prefer

(1) Negative, smirking claims ("undefined") which in their generality
are safer because more likely to be true, but which don't educate: we
need to know what compilers evaluate undefined C expressions in which
way in maintaining pathological software but no information is
provided

(2) Focusing on personalities instead of ideas. It's safer to trash
personalities since discussing ideas may anger employers

 

[Argonaut]

Reread the part about self-defense. Heathfield disrupts conversations
and enables campaigns of personal destruction. We have the right of
collective and individual self-defense against his attacks. But we do
NOT initiate them by deliberately misinterpreting what people say into
charges of incompetence.

"SELF" defense does not give you the license to call Heathfield a Nazi
youth in response to an anecdote he told about his teacher, which had
nothing at all to do with you, and of which you have no knowledge at
all to base your accusations.

Of course, you've added some weasel words extending "self defense" to
"collective" which you imagine gives you the right to act on anyone
else's behalf. So you've appointed yourself a free-agent vigilante.

Actually, it seems very likely that the origin of your Quixotic
"Defend Schildt" campaign was some remark your nemesis Heathfield made
about him, and you appointed yourself Schildt's defender simply to
give yourself a stick to beat him with, while claiming you were acting
to defend Schildt's (and even his family's) reputation.

And do you have a macro to type "campaigns of personal destruction"?
It would save you a lot of time.

 

[spinoza1111]

"SELF" defense does not give you the license to call Heathfield a Nazi
youth in response to an anecdote he told about his teacher, which had
nothing at all to do with you, and of which you have no knowledge at
all to base your accusations.

Nothing has anything to do with anything if an addictive system has no
memory. However, Heathfield's conduct does resemble, as far as I can
tell from (1) my experience here, (2) my experience in SDS in the
1960s, and (3) my reading that of radical left students in the 1960s
and that of Nazi youth in the 1930s.

Of course, you've added some weasel words  extending "self defense" to
"collective" which you imagine gives you the right to act on anyone
else's behalf. So you've appointed yourself a free-agent vigilante.

Nope, I just decided to investigate the matter of Schildt, because
when I submitted intelligent and well received comments on programming
professionalism to comp.programming in 2000, about the time I was
invited by Princeton University Press to an online panel on Internet
issues alongside Mike Godwin, I found myself targeted by Richard
Heathfield in a Topic Vendetta in which he said "comp.programming is
not about programmers".

I also noted that Heathfield, the unsuccessful editor of a poorly-
received computer book, had a hair up his ass about the much more
successful Herb Schildt, whose "Born to Code" book I'd read and liked
in 1989, and I decided to investigate the matter. I reasoned that one
way to stop what seemed to be bullying was not only self-defense,
because that would be interpreted as bias. I also had seen bullying
teachers in my high school in the 1960s confronted by my fellow
students, who defended my right to wear black armbands to protest
Vietnam even though many of them hated my guts. I'd seen that
solidarity overcomes bullying, because bullying is how illegitimate
power legitimises itself.

I wasn't particularly impressed by Schildt's work after Born to Code
based on my own experience in assisting Nash, and I did feel he needed
to use a wider range of compilers and platforms. However, I also
realized that by 2000, C had become a mess and that to be truly
encyclopedic about C was nearly impossible. It's not a well-definable
programming language as shown by "sequence points" which are an ugly
hack not found in discussions of better languages.

Actually, it seems very likely that the origin of your Quixotic
"Defend Schildt" campaign was some remark your nemesis Heathfield made
about him, and you appointed yourself Schildt's defender simply to
give yourself a stick to beat him with, while claiming you were acting
to defend Schildt's (and even his family's) reputation.

Overall, that is correct. Yes, Heathfield pisses me off. But this is
because he's disruptive and a trouble maker who consistently
interrupts technical discussions by labeling, or enabling the
labeling, of one of the discussants as incompetent. He's one of those
programmers who's justly terrified that his own inadequacy will be
exposed and seeks to label others for this reason. If I only defended
myself, then I'd be biased. But on investigation I discovered that
Heathfield was also attacking a well-received (in the sense of sales)
computer book, and as a published author, I knew that a language
standard is a different *genre* from a computer book, since the
mission of the latter is to teach. To teach means to use examples that
the student must use as a basis for generalization, as in the case of
the high school geometry teacher who uses one triangle to show
something true for all triangles.

And do you have a macro to type "campaigns of personal destruction"?
It would save you a lot of time.

I prefer to think about what I write. If I have to repeat myself, so
be it. I am saying that this newsgroup could be useful if people came
here less ready to INITIATE such campaigns, and more ready to DEFEND
themselves like men.

 

[Ike Naar]

She probably meant that the loop condition is true during the
execution of each statement in the block in the loop scope and that
you COULD repeat the test before each statement since each statement
lies before the modification, UNLESS a statement in the block changed
the loop condition. She may have been making a subtle point that
escaped you: that it's poor practice to allow the condition to become
false in the loop body. She may have been talking about program
verification and it was over your head, therefore you jumped on her as
you jump on people here.

Are you confusing "loop condition" with "loop invariant"?
It is good practice to maintain the truth of the loop invariant,
but the loop condition *must* be falsified at some point, otherwise
the loop does not terminate.

You design a loop in such a way that the desired result (the condition
that you want to be true after the loop finishes) follows from
the conjunction of the loop invariant and the negation of the loop
condition.

So, your loop goes like:

establish loop_invariant;
while (loop_condition)
{
work toward falsification of loop_condition, preserving loop_invariant;
}
"loop_invariant and not loop_condition" holds;

For the sake of efficiency, you want loop_condition to become false
as soon as possible.

 

[spinoza1111]

Are you confusing "loop condition" with "loop invariant"?
No.

It is good practice to maintain the truth of the loop invariant,
but the loop condition *must* be falsified at some point, otherwise
the loop does not terminate.

Yes. But to verify the program's correction you need both.

You design a loop in such a way that the desired result (the condition
that you want to be true after the loop finishes) follows from
the conjunction of the loop invariant and the negation of the loop
condition.
Correctomundo.


So, your loop goes like:

    establish loop_invariant;
    while (loop_condition)
    {
      work toward falsification of loop_condition, preserving loop_invariant;
    }
    "loop_invariant and not loop_condition" holds;

For the sake of efficiency, you want loop_condition to become false
as soon as possible.

Right, but you don't, as Heathfield's probably mythical She Devil C
Teacher From Hell claimed in his probably fabricated, bother in most
imaginable cases to test the condition after each statement. In a zero
trip loop you test it at the start, in a one tripper at the end, and
in a "breaking" loop somewhere in the middle.

[Hey Richard! Was she hot?]

I suppose that in some deep optimization, where ANY of the conditions
may falsify the loop condition, you might test the loop condition
after each statement if it's easy to do so.

Richard's up to his usual shit: making false claims and spreading
confusion as opposed to Sweetness and Light.

 

[Argonaut]

Nothing has anything to do with anything if an addictive system has no
memory. However, Heathfield's conduct does resemble, as far as I can
tell from (1) my experience here, (2) my experience in SDS in the
1960s, and (3) my reading that of radical left students in the 1960s
and that of Nazi youth in the 1930s.

Okay, glad you cleared that up.

So, we forget about "the new game" and revert to the "old game", where
you just call anyone you disagree with a bully, nazi, ******, etc,
etc, whenever you deem appropriate.

I prefer to think about what I write. If I have to repeat myself, so
be it. I am saying that this newsgroup could be useful if people came
here less ready to INITIATE such campaigns, and more ready to DEFEND
themselves like men.

This is a Usenet forum. People sit and type on a keyboard and hit
"send". Testosterone is not required for this. If you are attempting
to prove your masculinity, you are really not in the right place.

 

[Keith Thompson]

On Wed, 23 Dec 2009 23:31:06 -0800 (PST), spinoza1111
Okay, glad you cleared that up.

So, we forget about "the new game" and revert to the "old game", where
you just call anyone you disagree with a bully, nazi, ******, etc,
etc, whenever you deem appropriate.

[...]

You're wasting your time (and ours). "spinoza1111" isn't going to
become consistent or reasonable just because you remind him that
he's being inconsistent and unreasonable.

The "game" hasn't changed, and it isn't likely to do so. The only
winning move is not to play.

 

[Seebs]

This is a Usenet forum. People sit and type on a keyboard and hit
"send". Testosterone is not required for this. If you are attempting
to prove your masculinity, you are really not in the right place.

I am so far as I can tell essentially free of gender identity, meaning that
I have no particular interest in doing anything "like men" or "like women".
The concept seems ridiculous to me. How about later I make a point of
looking around the room like someone with blue eyes? That'll show them!

-s

 

[spinoza1111]

Okay, glad you cleared that up.

So, we forget about "the new game" and revert to the "old game", where
you just call anyone you disagree with a bully, nazi, ******, etc,
etc, whenever you deem appropriate.

The problem is that you're pretending that a discussion circle in
which people start campaigns to ruin others is still subject to rules
of civility after the campaigns begin. Richard Heathfield lies with
malicious intent, without using words like "nazi" or "******": to
detect his lie, you need to do more than scan for keywords. The intent
of his lies is to destroy reputations and employability.

If people use words like "Nazi" in the conclusion, this is merely a
memorable and effective way of drawing intention to the seriousness of
the issue to people who are here to frivolously waste time, many of
them on the job, wasting their employers' resources acting like
fourteen year olds.

This is a Usenet forum. People sit and type  on a keyboard and hit
"send".  Testosterone is not required for this.  If you are attempting
to prove your masculinity, you are really not in the right place.

This is an old illusion with which I am familiar. Since groups were
first set up, their original creators, who were mollycoddled, fat and
bearded members of the military-industrial complex, thought of
themselves as somehow privileged and as living in a fantasy world
where the ordinary rules of decency did not apply. Indeed, I was hired
at Princeton in 1987 in hopes that I would help put a stop to this
type of behavior as more and more ordinary people logged on not
realizing that wastrels would **** with them. In that position, I
participated in setting network standards and I realized that "free
speech" doesn't mean the right (for example) to say "Nilges claims to
have posted to comp.risks, but I searched for him in comp.risks and
didn't find him".

Part of the problem is that the wastrels who started the Internet
think everything except technical rules to be meaningless. Cf. Zizek:
their superego is the corporation.

 

[spinoza1111]

On Wed, 23 Dec 2009 23:31:06 -0800 (PST),spinoza1111
Okay, glad you cleared that up.

So, we forget about "the new game" and revert to the "old game", where
you just call anyone you disagree with a bully, nazi, ******, etc,
etc, whenever you deem appropriate.

[...]

You're wasting your time (and ours).  "spinoza1111" isn't going to
become consistent or reasonable just because you remind him that
he's being inconsistent and unreasonable.

The "game" hasn't changed, and it isn't likely to do so.  The only
winning move is not to play.

Yet you keep playing. The Troglodyte keeps dragging himself to the
firelit circle of other Troglodytes to see who they are stoning to
death.