why cant functions return arrays

[Keith Thompson]

Richard Harter said:

It's also a lie. I don't do sockpuppetry.


The problem faced by Richard Riley and his fellow trolls is that a
lot of articles posted in this newsgroup express opinions similar to
mine. There are only two ways to explain this - either I'm using a
great number of sock puppets, or there are a lot of people in this
newsgroup who very often agree with what I write. It seems that the
trolls cannot bring themselves to believe the latter, so they are
forced to assume the former, in defiance of the facts. Their
problem, not mine.

If person X accuses person Y out of the blue of committing some bad
act, with no pretense of any evidence to back up the accusation, it's
worth considering the possibility that it's something that person X is
himself guilty of.

This is purely speculation on my part, but it just might explain why
the trolls are so pathetically hung up on the idea of sockpuppetry.

To the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever presented the slightest
shred of real evidence that Richard Heathfield has ever used a sock
puppet. I, for one, do not believe for a moment that he's ever done
so. I doubt that the trolls really believe it either.

 

[Chris Torek]

I get sizeof(tab) =4 [which shows that a parameter

that was ostensibly an array has been converted, as
the language requires, to a pointer, discarding the
size the programmer wrote].

Indeed, and this is entirely correct. The explicit bounds in
the formal parameter are, and *must be*, discarded, at least
in this case. It is not an error to write, for instance:

void silly(char s[1]) {
s[42] = 0;
}

int main(void) {
char buf[100];
silly(buf);
return 0;
}

This makes checking array bounds impossible in C.

It makes bounds-checking *difficult*. Bounds-checking is not, in
fact, "impossible", and there are a few (rare) compilers that do
it. To do it, compiler-writers generally have to implement what
are usually called "fat pointers", and do a lot of fancy
behind-the-scenes work in the malloc() family of functions (so that
malloc()ed areas can also be bounds-checked).

Implementations that provide fat pointers generally run compiled
programs more slowly than those that do not. Since, as we know,
it is important to get the wrong answer as fast as possible ,
there are few implementations that provide fat pointers.

(Note that a new C99 feature allows compilers to use the size
of formal parameters in one way. If you write:

void foo(SOME_TYPE buf[static 10]) {
/* code */
}

the compiler is allowed to assume that the size of the array "buf"
is *at least* 10 elements. It may be larger, and "sizeof buf" must
still be the size of a pointer to SOME_TYPE, rather than 10 times
the size of a SOME_TYPE object. This does not give any assistance
to bounds-checkers. Those who would like to check all bounds at
compile time based solely on types are out of luck in C. If you
want to do bounds-checking, you must be more creative. For instance,
instead of paying the full "fat pointer" price, you can compile up
a hybrid system, in which the compiler tracks types as far as
compile-time static checking can possibly go[%], and then resorts
to fat pointers *only* for those things that require them.)

[% This is surprisingly far, once you do "link-time compilation".
That is, running "cc -c", or equivalent, simply does parsing and
semantic analysis, not actual code generation, leaving behind a
highly decorated AST or similar. "cc foo.o bar.o ... -o prog",
optionally with "-profile previous_run_profile.out", then uses the
tree, and the optional runtime profile, to figure out where and
when to put in what kinds of bounds checking. Huge swaths of slow
"fat pointer"y code can be lifted out through call sites or hoisted
above loops, so that inner loops never need do anything beyond what
the fast simple machine instructions already do.]

 

[Bartc]

No. Read the following links, especially the first and third.

Some useful references about C:

I followed these links (mainly the first and third!) interestingly to see
what they had to say about C and function array passing.

But they seem to be topicality articles about c.l.c. :-(

So I think CBF is saying that Soscpd is off-topic. Despite there already
being some 50 posts in this thread.

My reply to Sospcd is: The standard is very unlikely to change. But the
discussion is fairly interesting and sometimes you can learn a few new
things along the way.

 

[Default User]

Keith Thompson wrote:

To the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever presented the slightest
shred of real evidence that Richard Heathfield has ever used a sock
puppet. I, for one, do not believe for a moment that he's ever done
so.

When would he have the time? His posting schedule is pretty full as is.

I doubt that the trolls really believe it either.

Exactly. One more way to cause trouble. One more reason they should be
plonked or ignored when they pull these shenanigans. Trolls want
response.



Brian

 

[Richard]

Richard <[email protected]> is a known troll, and should always be
ignored. PLONKING is fairly effective.

I am afraid that asking for a little bit of openness is not
trolling. Neither is pointing out your continual mistakes and open
hypocrisy with regard to your posting standards. You and your ilk are a
blight on this group - fortunately many of the other c.l.c regulars have
seen through your little charade and have killfiled you. People do not
need your advice on who to killfile - I can assure you of that.

 

[Richard]

Keith Thompson wrote:



When would he have the time? His posting schedule is pretty full as is.


Exactly. One more way to cause trouble. One more reason they should be
plonked or ignored when they pull these shenanigans. Trolls want
response.



Brian

I believe it was Heathfield who pointed out that the great majority of
your posts are off topic and seemingly only concerned with petty
vendettas and kill filing. He was right.

 

[soscpd]

Hello List, Hello Bart, Hello Falconer

Thanks for make that clear Bart. Think now I get the spirit of the
list. I am very sorry to hear that about the standards. Really think
that it doesn't need to be that restrictive. Looks like they aren't
commited with keep the language as much usefull and updated as
possible, but to keep that compatible with old versions and compilers.
I will take a look in the standards and in the problem itself and see
if I can get a real help here instead of claim around.

Thanks to Falconer too. The links aren't very usefull for me now, but
knowledge is the only power, isn't it?

Regards
Rafael

 

[Keith Thompson]

Hello List, Hello Bart, Hello Falconer

Thanks for make that clear Bart. Think now I get the spirit of the
list. I am very sorry to hear that about the standards. Really think
that it doesn't need to be that restrictive. Looks like they aren't
commited with keep the language as much usefull and updated as
possible, but to keep that compatible with old versions and compilers.
I will take a look in the standards and in the problem itself and see
if I can get a real help here instead of claim around.

Thanks to Falconer too. The links aren't very usefull for me now, but
knowledge is the only power, isn't it?

The real problem with the idea of changing C to allow arrays to be
treated as first-class objects is that there's no good way to do so
without breaking uncounted millions of lines of existing code.

The C language is already quite useful, and newer is not necessarily
better.

The decision to implement most array operations via pointers was made
very early in the development of the C language -- in fact, I believe
it goes back to the ancestral B and BCPL languages from which C was
developed. This approach has turned out to be extremely flexible;
there's really nothing you and do in a language with first-class
arrays that you can't do with C's pointer-and-offset techniques. The
drawback is that it requires the use of relatively primitive low-level
constructs to perform manipulations that might be done in more
sophisticated and less error-prone ways in other languages.

The fact is, arrays are hard. C's ways of dealing with them are at
one end of the spectrum: leave almost everything to the programmer,
with only a dash of syntactic sugar to help out (or, in some cases, to
sow confusion, as in a parameter declaration that looks like an array
but is really a pointer). Some higher-level languages treat arrays as
first-class objects (more or less), but at the expense of hiding a
great deal of computational complexity behind simple-looking language
constructs.

What could be done, I suppose, is to add an entirely new array-like
construct to C, one that doesn't depend on pointer semantics for its
fundamental operations or decay to a pointer in most contexts. Let's
call it a "vector". Then you might have:

int arr[20]; /* old-style C array */
vector int vec[20]; /* new-style C vector */

afunc(arr); /* arr decays to a pointer */
vfunc(vec); /* no decay, passes a vector */
afunc(vec); /* illegal */
vfunc(arr); /* illegal */

arr[n]; /* equivalent to *(arr + n) */
vec[n]; /* not equivalent to *(vec + n) */

But even if these new "vector" types could be made to work better than
C's current array types, you'd still have to fully support both in the
language. All existing code uses old-style C arrays; interfacing this
code with new code that uses vectors would be difficult.

If I could go back in a time machine and offer Dennis Ritchie advice
on how to define this new C language of his, I just might suggest
different ways of handling arrays. But given the huge amount of
existing code, though there undoubtedly are a lot of ways C's array
handling could be improved, there are very few such ways that wouldn't
break existing code and/or make the language design as a whole less
clean. (I'd be delighted to be proven wrong.)

One of the best resources I know of for understanding arrays as they
currently work in C is section 6 of the comp.lang.c FAQ,
<http://www.c-faq.com/>.

 

[Nick Keighley]

Richard Harter said:


It's also a lie. I don't do sockpuppetry.


The problem faced by Richard Riley and his fellow trolls is that a lot of
articles posted in this newsgroup express opinions similar to mine. There
are only two ways to explain this - either I'm using a great number of
sock puppets, or there are a lot of people in this newsgroup who very
often agree with what I write. It seems that the trolls cannot bring
themselves to believe the latter, so they are forced to assume the former,
in defiance of the facts. Their problem, not mine.

I categorically deny that I am sockpuppet of Richard Heathfield

 

[jacob navia]

Keith Thompson wrote:
[snip]

What could be done, I suppose, is to add an entirely new array-like
construct to C, one that doesn't depend on pointer semantics for its
fundamental operations or decay to a pointer in most contexts. Let's
call it a "vector".

Correct. This is the way that lcc-win has choosen. Using
operator overloading of the '[' and ']' operators lcc-win
offers a true array type that doesn't "decay" to anything.

Then you might have:

int arr[20]; /* old-style C array */
vector int vec[20]; /* new-style C vector */

afunc(arr); /* arr decays to a pointer */
vfunc(vec); /* no decay, passes a vector */
afunc(vec); /* illegal */
vfunc(arr); /* illegal */

If you define an operator () (cast) that takes a vector
and returns a pointer to the data you can do
afunc(vec)

The conversion in the other direction is not possible since
it is not possible in general to determine the size of an
array in C.

arr[n]; /* equivalent to *(arr + n) */
vec[n]; /* not equivalent to *(vec + n) */

If you overload the operator '+' with vectors, you can
add a vector with an integer yielding a pointer to
an element of the vector.

But even if these new "vector" types could be made to work better than
C's current array types, you'd still have to fully support both in the
language.

No. Operator overloading provides a simple and elegant solution as
I have been claiming since several years now.

All existing code uses old-style C arrays; interfacing this
code with new code that uses vectors would be difficult.

Not at all.

 

[Ben Bacarisse]

Keith Thompson wrote:
[snip]

What could be done, I suppose, is to add an entirely new array-like
construct to C, one that doesn't depend on pointer semantics for its
fundamental operations or decay to a pointer in most contexts. Let's
call it a "vector".

Correct. This is the way that lcc-win has choosen. Using
operator overloading of the '[' and ']' operators lcc-win
offers a true array type that doesn't "decay" to anything.

Way off-topic now so I've set followup-to comp.compilers.lcc, but I
can't see how that can do anything. In this code:

int a[10];
f(a);

there are no [] operators, so how does the compiler know which sort of
array I want?

... Operator overloading provides a simple and elegant solution as
I have been claiming since several years now.

I think treating initialisation as assignment and, if I recall
correctly, *not* treating argument passing as assignment makes your
operator overloading much less useful than it might have been.

 

[jacob navia]

Keith Thompson wrote:
[snip]

What could be done, I suppose, is to add an entirely new array-like
construct to C, one that doesn't depend on pointer semantics for its
fundamental operations or decay to a pointer in most contexts. Let's
call it a "vector".

Correct. This is the way that lcc-win has choosen. Using
operator overloading of the '[' and ']' operators lcc-win
offers a true array type that doesn't "decay" to anything.

Way off-topic now so I've set followup-to comp.compilers.lcc, but I
can't see how that can do anything. In this code:

int a[10];
f(a);

there are no [] operators, so how does the compiler know which sort of
array I want?

Because you tell it to:

int a[10]; // Normal C array
Vector v = newVector(10,sizeof(int));

a[2] = 5;
v[2] = 5;

I think treating initialisation as assignment and, if I recall
correctly, *not* treating argument passing as assignment makes your
operator overloading much less useful than it might have been.

All argument passing are assignments in standard C.

But if you want C++, no, it is not C++.

 

[Ben Bacarisse]

Ben Bacarisse wrote:

Way off-topic now so I've set followup-to comp.compilers.lcc, but I
can't see how that can do anything. In this code:

int a[10];
f(a);

there are no [] operators, so how does the compiler know which sort of
array I want?

Because you tell it to:

int a[10]; // Normal C array
Vector v = newVector(10,sizeof(int));

I've replied, but only in comp.compilers.lcc since this is so
off-topic here.

 

[James Dow Allen]

(My whining diatribe complains about whining and
is thus oxymoronic, or in violation of the Barber's
Paradox. I've combined 2 or 3 whining diatribes
into a single message so that the few who've not yet
killfiled me will need but a single, if vicious, punch
on the 'n' key.)

...
This post has Heathfield sockpuppet written all over it.

Perhaps I can't fully rule out being controlled by an
alien intelligence, but I did double-check my birth
certificate and found that my name, as I have long
suspected, is indeed shown as James Dow Allen III.
(I dropped the pretentious-seeming "III" several
decades ago. I hope the medionym "Dow" doesn't seem
pretentious -- I started using it in the Google era,
since "James Allen" gets almost as many search-engine
hits as "Usenet trolling" or "George Bush idiot.")

And while I agree with *many* of Mr. Heathfield's
views, I don't think my alleged puppet master and
his sockpuppet will be sharing each other's code,
at least without a re-indent utility: I use wholesome
and generous 8-space tabs, while Mr. Heathfield
insists on the infuriating and anal-retentive 2-space
tabs which are probably responsible for my rare
ophthalmological disorders.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Excepting spam, posts in this ng can be divided roughly
into five categories: homework/work problems, technical
answers, boring or boorish gibberish, witticisms, and
whining. There are also posts on various meta-topics,
but these can be treated roughly as combinations of
boorishness, witticisms and whining.

There are a few posters whose contributions consist almost
entirely of correct and useful technical information.
Eric Sosman and Chris Torek are among the most obvious
examples of this category, though I don't intend to slight
several other excellent participants.

Of course the best posters are usually also witty people.
Mr. Sosman, for example, once accused me of making a
Pascal's wager. This was probably intended as a euphemism
for hypocrisy but I chose to take it as a flattering
comparison with the discoverer of the Mystic Hexagram!

Usenet would be a boring place without wit and whining,
but if we do want only homework problems and their answers,
a simple solution is possible: authorize only Mr. Sosman
and a few others to respond to queries and provide a bot
which responds after 36 hours to any unanswered query with:

Apparently your homework problem was too boring or insipid
for our experts. Please check the FAQ again, or ask
your Professor to recommend a remedial text.

Since most homework problems will have a single obvious
answer, it follows that most of the posts here will be
whining or witticisms. (I'll lump boring gibberish with
whining though usually the whining is more interesting.)

There are many examples of postings I find far more
annoying than even Dr. Nilges' whining. Many posters
don't even understand the concept of "fragment" where
a program excerpt is provided for brevity, even though
it's not a self-contained compilable unit. I don't
have any problem with an otherwise appropriate answer
that contains a line like

BTW, don't forget to #include stdio.h when calling
printf().

but lately I've seen several responses to homework which
consist *solely* of such trivia. In most of these cases
it would take any competent C programmer about 20 seconds
to identify and fix the student's actual bug, but the whiner
who trots out his pretentious stdio.h cliche -- though
wasting several *man-hours* of other people's time since
thousands of c.l.c. readers will need to hit their 'n'
key -- can't be bothered to spend 20 seconds answering
the homework question!

(Another annoyance is the Chuckie_BF bot which sends an
automated reply to every "top poster." We can be sure
*this* is a bot since any real human who uses the
Internet would be well aware that the annoyance of
improper quoted-material editing in e-mail and newsletters
dwarfs any minor transgressions in this newsgroup.)

Anyway, after ignoring spam, homework problems, and the
rarish useful responses, c.l.c is simply another forum
for wits and whiners. No need to complain about that --
the level of debate here is still better than, say, much
of Rupert Murdoch's media -- but of course we all prefer
to read posters with a high wit-to-whine ratio (WWR).

IMHO, Mr. Heathfield has a higher wit-to-whine ratio
than most of his detractors, though I'm afraid many
of his helpful but ironic responses are over-clever.

It will be difficult to get general agreement on any
particular poster's WWR score. Many witticisms will seem
like whining, especially to a thin-skinned OP. I'm sure
my WWR score will be judged as quite poor, but this is
partly due to my Scottish sense of irony and whimsy.
(Mr. Heathfield, do you also have Scottish ancestry?
Adding a winking smile ;-) is contrary to the whole tone
of Scottish irony, but perhaps I should change my ways:
I recall once making an absolutely hilarious reply,
advising an OP on pharmaceuticals for obsessive-compulsion
disorder and felt any emoticon would be redundant, but
OP shot back an enraged rejoinder about my own
pathologies and pharmaceutical needs!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Many many of the technical newsgroups seem dominated
by B-grade level sophomores showing off to C-grade
level freshmen, but I don't mean to impugn sophomores
or even B-grade students. (After all, the probable
next Pres. of the U.S. graduated near the bottom of
his class.) PhD's are no bargain either, as anyone
with real-world experience knows. Dr. Nilges' degrees
are probably authentic and he may well be capable of
adequate work when he takes his meds. Mr. navia seems
like a sophomore but he could have a degree for all
I know (though I doubt if he's ever written the world's
fastest image compressor, or coded an OS from scratch
in 9 weeks). Here, I've given him a chance to improve
his wit-to-whine ratio with something like:

You've made 11 syntax errors here in just 2 lines, Bozo.
Also, calling printf() with no arguments may cause
your hard disk to be trashed, and I hope that happens!

Well, I hope this diatribe amuses someone, and doesn't
detract too much from the on-going discussions about
the evils of a "void main()" declaration. I also hope
I've offended no Scotsmen with my comments on "Scottish
sense of humor" -- I now wonder if this concept was just
an invention of my mother who had to live with the
sarcasm of my father (whose name, coincidentally
enough, was James Dow Allen Jr.).

Sincerely,
James Dow Allen ... (I think!)

 

[jacob navia]

In the categories of posts here, you forgot a kind that appears
VERY often and it is one of the favorite sports around:

navia is unable to understand and appreciate C
navia doesn't know C
navia's daughter reads porn
navia is a shrewd businessman trying to sell his wares for free
navia's view of c lead to destruction
navia likes c++ and wants to destroy our beautiful language
navia is not standard
navia likes c99
navia is (... expletive deleted)
navia is a spammer
navia wrote a message where he doesn't mention lcc-win.

maybe you have noticed but i have reduced my postings here
most of the technical discussions that i started led to
a flame fest from heathfield and co.
fine. they win then.

 

[John Bode]

And a lot of people blatantly do not agree with Heathfield who is, to be
honest, so full of himself I am astonished his head can fit through the
door. It's funny how one is a troll when one says "Hey, there's no need
to be so rude and obnoxious". He appears to have made a career out of
it though from what I can gather in this group. A more thoroughly
unpleasant character would be hard to pinpoint in this or other
technical news groups.

I'm starting to miss S**** N****. He was free-range nuts, but at
least his bugaboos had to do with C and not other posters, at least as
individuals (we were *all* deficient in S****'s eyes). And he was a
damn sight more entertaining than the current crop of hecklers.

Maybe if Kenny started claiming that floor() and ceil() are
redundant...

 

[Antoninus Twink]

maybe you have noticed but i have reduced my postings here
most of the technical discussions that i started led to
a flame fest from heathfield and co.
fine. they win then.

If you reduce your postings, then yes, they win.

All they have on their side is hate and loudness.

I for one am looking forward to the next installment in your series on
debuggers and linkers.

 

[spinoza1111]

(My whining diatribe complains about whining and
is thus oxymoronic, or in violation of the Barber's
Paradox. I've combined 2 or 3 whining diatribes
into a single message so that the few who've not yet
killfiled me will need but a single, if vicious, punch
on the 'n' key.)



Perhaps I can't fully rule out being controlled by an
alien intelligence, but I did double-check my birth
certificate and found that my name, as I have long
suspected, is indeed shown as James Dow Allen III.
(I dropped the pretentious-seeming "III" several
decades ago. I hope the medionym "Dow" doesn't seem
pretentious -- I started using it in the Google era,
since "James Allen" gets almost as many search-engine
hits as "Usenet trolling" or "George Bush idiot.")

And while I agree with *many* of Mr. Heathfield's
views, I don't think my alleged puppet master and
his sockpuppet will be sharing each other's code,
at least without a re-indent utility: I use wholesome
and generous 8-space tabs, while Mr. Heathfield
insists on the infuriating and anal-retentive 2-space
tabs which are probably responsible for my rare
ophthalmological disorders.

   *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Excepting spam, posts in this ng can be divided roughly
into five categories: homework/work problems, technical
answers, boring or boorish gibberish, witticisms, and
whining. There are also posts on various meta-topics,
but these can be treated roughly as combinations of
boorishness, witticisms and whining.

There are a few posters whose contributions consist almost
entirely of correct and useful technical information.
Eric Sosman and Chris Torek are among the most obvious
examples of this category, though I don't intend to slight
several other excellent participants.

Of course the best posters are usually also witty people.
Mr. Sosman, for example, once accused me of making a
Pascal's wager. This was probably intended as a euphemism
for hypocrisy but I chose to take it as a flattering
comparison with the discoverer of the Mystic Hexagram!  

Usenet would be a boring place without wit and whining,
but if we do want only homework problems and their answers,
a simple solution is possible: authorize only Mr. Sosman
and a few others to respond to queries and provide a bot
which responds after 36 hours to any unanswered query with:


Since most homework problems will have a single obvious
answer, it follows that most of the posts here will be
whining or witticisms. (I'll lump boring gibberish with
whining though usually the whining is more interesting.)

There are many examples of postings I find far more
annoying than even Dr.Nilges' whining. Many posters

Sorry, I don't have an MD (that would be my Pop) or a PhD.

Edward G. Nilges, BA, Ltd (as in liability)

don't even understand the concept of "fragment" where
a program excerpt is provided for brevity, even though
it's not a self-contained compilable unit. I don't
have any problem with an otherwise appropriate answer
that contains a line like> BTW, don't forget to #include stdio.h when calling

D'oh! You're absolutely right.

but lately I've seen several responses to homework which
consist *solely* of such trivia. In most of these cases
it would take any competent C programmer about 20 seconds
to identify and fix the student's actual bug, but the whiner
who trots out his pretentious stdio.h cliche -- though
wasting several *man-hours* of other people's time since
thousands of c.l.c. readers will need to hit their 'n'
key -- can't be bothered to spend 20 seconds answering
the homework question!

(Another annoyance is the Chuckie_BF bot which sends an
automated reply to every "top poster." We can be sure
*this* is a bot since any real human who uses the
Internet would be well aware that the annoyance of
improper quoted-material editing in e-mail and newsletters
dwarfs any minor transgressions in this newsgroup.)

Anyway, after ignoring spam, homework problems, and the
rarish useful responses, c.l.c is simply another forum
for wits and whiners. No need to complain about that --
the level of debate here is still better than, say, much
of Rupert Murdoch's media -- but of course we all prefer
to read posters with a high wit-to-whine ratio (WWR).

IMHO, Mr. Heathfield has a higher wit-to-whine ratio
than most of his detractors, though I'm afraid many
of his helpful but ironic responses are over-clever.

It will be difficult to get general agreement on any
particular poster's WWR score. Many witticisms will seem
like whining, especially to a thin-skinned OP. I'm sure
my WWR score will be judged as quite poor, but this is
partly due to my Scottish sense of irony and whimsy.
(Mr. Heathfield, do you also have Scottish ancestry?  
Adding a winking smile ;-) is contrary to the whole tone
of Scottish irony, but perhaps I should change my ways:
I recall once making an absolutely hilarious reply,
advising an OP on pharmaceuticals for obsessive-compulsion
disorder and felt any emoticon would be redundant, but
OP shot back an enraged rejoinder about my own
pathologies and pharmaceutical needs!

   *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Many many of the technical newsgroups seem dominated
by B-grade level sophomores showing off to C-grade

This isn't the problem. The problem is the very real bullying and
authoritarianism.

level freshmen, but I don't mean to impugn sophomores
or even B-grade students. (After all, the probable
next Pres. of the U.S. graduated near the bottom of
his class.) PhD's are no bargain either, as anyone
with real-world experience knows. Dr.Nilges' degrees
are probably authentic and he may well be capable of

Yes, I received the Bachelor of Arts from Roosevelt University in
1973. Although I play a college professor in the movies (I was an
extra in Ang Lee's movie Lust, Caution: watch for me in one of the
scenes at Hong Kong University, talking with a lovely blonde), and
although I was asked to teach philosophy when I had only the BA, and
have taught at uni level, I simply haven't had the spare time and
money that upper class brats have...to get advanced degrees which they
then don't use because they can't teach.

Your reference to "meds" is rather offensive. This is because I
assisted John Nash at Princeton with C during a time when he was
steadily recovering precisely because he got off "meds", and into a
community, unlike this one, not consisting of normalized deviants.

adequate work when he takes his meds. Mr. navia seems
like a sophomore but he could have a degree for all

Navia? Didn't he write a C compiler? And am I perhaps not the only
person to accomplish a thing or two in the real world, only to
encounter a shit storm of abuse from people stealing time from their
employers working as incompetent programmers?

Interesting typeface here in c.l.c. I have committed not to post on
comp.programming until my compiler for the spinoza language is done.
As to why it's late, what part of "Asian six day week or you no eat
Gweilo running dog" don't you chumps understand?

Professor Doctor Extraordinarius-Superfluentiosus Edward G.
spinoza1111 Nilges, Knight-Commander of the Mystic Sea, Licensed
Nubility Tester, Notary Sojak, Certified Programmer (DPMA 1972, so th

 

[spinoza1111]

(My whining diatribe complains about whining and
is thus oxymoronic, or in violation of the Barber's
Paradox. I've combined 2 or 3 whining diatribes
into a single message so that the few who've not yet
killfiled me will need but a single, if vicious, punch
on the 'n' key.)



Perhaps I can't fully rule out being controlled by an
alien intelligence, but I did double-check my birth
certificate and found that my name, as I have long
suspected, is indeed shown as James Dow Allen III.
(I dropped the pretentious-seeming "III" several
decades ago. I hope the medionym "Dow" doesn't seem
pretentious -- I started using it in the Google era,
since "James Allen" gets almost as many search-engine
hits as "Usenet trolling" or "George Bush idiot.")

And while I agree with *many* of Mr. Heathfield's
views, I don't think my alleged puppet master and
his sockpuppet will be sharing each other's code,
at least without a re-indent utility: I use wholesome
and generous 8-space tabs, while Mr. Heathfield
insists on the infuriating and anal-retentive 2-space
tabs which are probably responsible for my rare
ophthalmological disorders.

   *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Excepting spam, posts in this ng can be divided roughly
into five categories: homework/work problems, technical
answers, boring or boorish gibberish, witticisms, and
whining. There are also posts on various meta-topics,
but these can be treated roughly as combinations of
boorishness, witticisms and whining.

There are a few posters whose contributions consist almost
entirely of correct and useful technical information.
Eric Sosman and Chris Torek are among the most obvious
examples of this category, though I don't intend to slight
several other excellent participants.

Of course the best posters are usually also witty people.
Mr. Sosman, for example, once accused me of making a
Pascal's wager. This was probably intended as a euphemism
for hypocrisy but I chose to take it as a flattering
comparison with the discoverer of the Mystic Hexagram!  

Usenet would be a boring place without wit and whining,
but if we do want only homework problems and their answers,
a simple solution is possible: authorize only Mr. Sosman
and a few others to respond to queries and provide a bot
which responds after 36 hours to any unanswered query with:


Since most homework problems will have a single obvious
answer, it follows that most of the posts here will be
whining or witticisms. (I'll lump boring gibberish with
whining though usually the whining is more interesting.)

There are many examples of postings I find far more
annoying than even Dr.Nilges' whining. Many posters

I don't have a PhD. My father has the MD: please don't call me "Dr.
Nilges": my retired father deserves his emeritus standing, in part
because he took issue like a man with the normalized deviants in his
own field and in medical ethics. I have a BA from Roosevelt University
('73). I was, however, asked to teach philosophy and computer science
after receiving the BA. I've played a professor at the movies and am
seen in Ang Lee's Lust Caution: the British prof who walks past the
principals in a scene at Hong Kong university, talking with a lovely
blonde, is me. An extra.

spinoza as a programming language is forthcoming, and I've committed
not to post more than the occasional status report on comp.programming
until it's ready. As to why it's late: what part of "six day Asia week
or you no get rice bowl, Gweilo dog" don't you understand?

I find your reference to "meds" wearisome & annoying. It is,
subconsciously, a reference to an absent Father. I assisted John Nash
at Princeton: he got better when he got off "meds" and into a
supportive community that didn't consist of deviants pretending to
represent a normalized POV.

But overall, interesting and well-written post.

- Professor Doctor Extraordinarius-Superfluentius Edward spinoza1111
Nilges, Knight Commander of the Mystic Sea

 

[spinoza1111]

(My whining diatribe complains about whining and
is thus oxymoronic, or in violation of the Barber's
Paradox. I've combined 2 or 3 whining diatribes
into a single message so that the few who've not yet
killfiled me will need but a single, if vicious, punch
on the 'n' key.)



Perhaps I can't fully rule out being controlled by an
alien intelligence, but I did double-check my birth
certificate and found that my name, as I have long
suspected, is indeed shown as James Dow Allen III.
(I dropped the pretentious-seeming "III" several
decades ago. I hope the medionym "Dow" doesn't seem
pretentious -- I started using it in the Google era,
since "James Allen" gets almost as many search-engine
hits as "Usenet trolling" or "George Bush idiot.")

And while I agree with *many* of Mr. Heathfield's
views, I don't think my alleged puppet master and
his sockpuppet will be sharing each other's code,
at least without a re-indent utility: I use wholesome
and generous 8-space tabs, while Mr. Heathfield
insists on the infuriating and anal-retentive 2-space
tabs which are probably responsible for my rare
ophthalmological disorders.

   *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Excepting spam, posts in this ng can be divided roughly
into five categories: homework/work problems, technical
answers, boring or boorish gibberish, witticisms, and
whining. There are also posts on various meta-topics,
but these can be treated roughly as combinations of
boorishness, witticisms and whining.

There are a few posters whose contributions consist almost
entirely of correct and useful technical information.
Eric Sosman and Chris Torek are among the most obvious
examples of this category, though I don't intend to slight
several other excellent participants.

Of course the best posters are usually also witty people.
Mr. Sosman, for example, once accused me of making a
Pascal's wager. This was probably intended as a euphemism
for hypocrisy but I chose to take it as a flattering
comparison with the discoverer of the Mystic Hexagram!  

Usenet would be a boring place without wit and whining,
but if we do want only homework problems and their answers,
a simple solution is possible: authorize only Mr. Sosman
and a few others to respond to queries and provide a bot
which responds after 36 hours to any unanswered query with:


Since most homework problems will have a single obvious
answer, it follows that most of the posts here will be
whining or witticisms. (I'll lump boring gibberish with
whining though usually the whining is more interesting.)

There are many examples of postings I find far more
annoying than even Dr.Nilges' whining. Many posters
don't even understand the concept of "fragment" where
a program excerpt is provided for brevity, even though
it's not a self-contained compilable unit. I don't
have any problem with an otherwise appropriate answer
that contains a line like> BTW, don't forget to #include stdio.h when calling

but lately I've seen several responses to homework which
consist *solely* of such trivia. In most of these cases
it would take any competent C programmer about 20 seconds
to identify and fix the student's actual bug, but the whiner
who trots out his pretentious stdio.h cliche -- though
wasting several *man-hours* of other people's time since
thousands of c.l.c. readers will need to hit their 'n'
key -- can't be bothered to spend 20 seconds answering
the homework question!

(Another annoyance is the Chuckie_BF bot which sends an
automated reply to every "top poster." We can be sure
*this* is a bot since any real human who uses the
Internet would be well aware that the annoyance of
improper quoted-material editing in e-mail and newsletters
dwarfs any minor transgressions in this newsgroup.)

Anyway, after ignoring spam, homework problems, and the
rarish useful responses, c.l.c is simply another forum
for wits and whiners. No need to complain about that --
the level of debate here is still better than, say, much
of Rupert Murdoch's media -- but of course we all prefer
to read posters with a high wit-to-whine ratio (WWR).

IMHO, Mr. Heathfield has a higher wit-to-whine ratio
than most of his detractors, though I'm afraid many
of his helpful but ironic responses are over-clever.

It will be difficult to get general agreement on any
particular poster's WWR score. Many witticisms will seem
like whining, especially to a thin-skinned OP. I'm sure
my WWR score will be judged as quite poor, but this is
partly due to my Scottish sense of irony and whimsy.
(Mr. Heathfield, do you also have Scottish ancestry?  
Adding a winking smile ;-) is contrary to the whole tone
of Scottish irony, but perhaps I should change my ways:
I recall once making an absolutely hilarious reply,
advising an OP on pharmaceuticals for obsessive-compulsion
disorder and felt any emoticon would be redundant, but
OP shot back an enraged rejoinder about my own
pathologies and pharmaceutical needs!

   *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Many many of the technical newsgroups seem dominated
by B-grade level sophomores showing off to C-grade
level freshmen, but I don't mean to impugn sophomores
or even B-grade students. (After all, the probable
next Pres. of the U.S. graduated near the bottom of
his class.) PhD's are no bargain either, as anyone
with real-world experience knows. Dr.Nilges' degrees
are probably authentic and he may well be capable of
adequate work when he takes his meds. Mr. navia seems
like a sophomore but he could have a degree for all
I know (though I doubt if he's ever written the world's
fastest image compressor, or coded an OS from scratch
in 9 weeks). Here, I've given him a chance to improve
his wit-to-whine ratio with something like:


Well, I hope this diatribe amuses someone, and doesn't
detract too much from the on-going discussions about
the evils of a "void main()" declaration.  I also hope
I've offended no Scotsmen with my comments on "Scottish
sense of humor" -- I now wonder if this concept was just
an invention of my mother who had to live with the
sarcasm of my father (whose name, coincidentally
enough, was James Dow Allen Jr.).

Sincerely,
James Dow Allen   ... (I think!)

Navia? Didn't he implement C? Perhaps I'm not the only person to
accomplish something in the real world, only to encounter a shit storm
of abuse from people who've done nothing and use anonymous demiblogs
to spit their resentment at people who have. Schildt wrote Tiny C and
best selling books, but fatass creeps target him on wikipedia.

Life sucks!