why cant functions return arrays

D

Default User

James said:
Has anyone noticed how much hypocrisy there is in
some Usenet groups? (As just one example, many
posters celebrate the bug whereby some old news readers
use opening '--' as a discard signal (even though
opening '--' is a common idiom for those of us used
to writing LaTeX input) but refuse to omit trailing
punctuation on URL's, because their old-fashioned
newsreaders can't access a URL, whether properly
formatted or not.)

*plonk*



Brian
 
S

spinoza1111

     Silence your laughter, folks, and remember: This is
the very same Jacob Navia who is only 0.5 Turing Awards
behind Dennis Ritchie himself, who trails Brian Kernighan
by only 0.5 National Medals of Technology, and who has
cut Linus Pauling's once-insurmountable Nobel Prize lead
down to a scant two.  It is only a matter of time before
he overtakes Ozymandias.

Stop disrupting technical conversations with childish bullying and ape
mockery that is more appropriate to the nursery, and grow the **** up.

Please.

Thank you.
 
S

spinoza1111

John Bode wrote:

[snip]
I *suspect* the reason behind the OP's query is that array objects are
non-modifiable lvalues:
    int a[10], b[10];
    b = a;            /* illegal! */
Since you can't assign a new array value to an array type object, it
doesn't make sense to allow functions to return array types.  That
would make it not a mistake in design for no good reason (per Jacob),
but a consequence of how arrays are handled by the rest of the
language.  Whether "how arrays are handled by the rest of the
language" is a mistake in design or not is an open issue.

This is just the same for structures. They have to be the same size.

It would be the same for arrays, arrays would be needed to be the same
size.

But then, since size information is always discarded when passing an
array to a function, this would be difficult to achieve.

What I wanted to emphasize is that the whole handling of arrays
is completely crazy in C.

I think the problem was that its designers had seen Algol come to
grief as Algol runtimes strained to preserve structural information at
run time on storage sizes that were just too small, and for this
reason weren't about to store and pass dope vectors. In my compiler
for "build your own .net language and compiler" I had to do so since
Quick Basic had array subscripts that could start at any integer,
negative or positive. This is no longer the case for Visual Basic.

C is just out of date is all.
 
S

spinoza1111

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.

In my long experience with Heathfield, most of which has given me a
dim view of his personality and technical depth, I have never
suspected him of using stocking poppets. His *modus operandi* is to
enter conversations, determine the apparently more isolated poster,
and then incite others to turn aside from technical conversations to
attacking the "mark's" credibility which is so put into play that
almost immediately, technical progress ceases.

This is far more evil than stocking poppetry.
 
S

spinoza1111

[Nilges] may well be capable of
adequate work when he takes his meds.
Your reference to "meds" is rather offensive.

I apologize.  You should realize, however that many of
your posts are *quite* exasperating: long drifting monologues
with, eventually, accusations that posters in these comp groups
have made anti-Semitic remarks!  If there really have been such
anti-Semitic remarks, please cite them.

You're possibly thinking of something I do claim, which is that people
with unexamined racism and anti-Semitism, too polite to express their
real feelings, play computer "games" in which they permit themselves
to use grammar almost isomorphic to that of racism and anti-semitism.

For example, although the word "troll" means an anonymous poster
posting insincere opinions with intent to disrupt, it is regularly
used here to refer to sincere posters advocating minority or *sui
generis* positions, or claiming and displaying competence above the
low norm. Anti-troll flames, as I have shown, can be transformed by
simple steps to texts worthy of Mein Kampf.
A few days ago, I presented Mr. navia with a simple test puzzle
about a C compiler.  He lacked either the competence or the
intellectual curiosity to cope with that problem.  "Innocent
until proven guilty" is a good rule, but often the opposite
seems more effective when dealing with some of the blowhards
on Usenet.
Tests work in a collegial atmosphere. I was able to use them in the
Shakespeare discussion group to lower the hostility of the group.
However, programmers like to play stupid games, such as Heathfield
played when he confused && and || on a test, so my guess is that Mr
Navia was ignoring you. Furthermore, nobody seems to be claiming that
he didn't "create" a C compiler, which takes far more chops than
solving stupid puzzles.

Perhaps you shouldn't throw swine before pearls?
And speaking of "offensive", lumping me with "incompetent programmers"
... "stealing time from their employers" is offensive on multiple
grounds.
I'm self-employed; you can estimate my competence from my resume.
I have thirty-two U.S. patents in algorithm design.  How many do you
have?

I have diddly squat. How many books have you published? Here my score
resembles Association Football's typical score: me one you nil (I
checked Amazon). More important, how about you stop playing games?
Strictly in response to personal attack initiation and in defense of
and solidarity with others, I'm the foot massage master when it comes
to personal attacks. You'll be a parking lot in no time, son, so don't
mess with me.
 
S

spinoza1111

Firstly doctors don't know everything. Almost every drug on the market can
have extremely serious side effects, even aspirin. However knowing best
isn't the same as being right, and almost always you can trust a doctor to
know best.

Anti-psychotic medication typically makes patients rather worse than they
would be without the drug. They will be tired, unmotivated, often put on
weight and have phsycial problems with motor control. You will see an
improvement on stopping the medication. However when the next trigger for a
psychotic state arrives, they will develop florid psychotic symptoms, which
the drug suppresses. So conventional wisdom is to administer meds all the
time.

I'm not saying every psychiatrist will agree with the conventional wisdom,
or even that you have to be a psychiatrist yourself to have a valid opinion
on the matter. But as a patient or friend of a patient it is foolhardy to
advise someone to stop medication.

cf "Toxic Psychiatry" by Peter Breggin. Psychoactive medicines are
developed for profit and generally, according to Breggin, "work" by
destroying structures that were evolved for survival in a blind way
that generally damages the long term and short term hopes for the
patient. Nash (cf Nasar's biography) walked away from and checked out
of the regimes of the 1960s and he got better because we at Princeton
didn't treat him like shit, like people are treated here and in
corporate environments.

But this is not relevant to my point: it was in terribly poor taste
for Richard to use this childish catchphrase. It was a shallow,
stupid, and discourteous thing to say which if said in meatspace would
cause other people to shudder.

Why must the rules be different here?
 
R

Richard Tobin

James Dow Allen said:
Has anyone noticed how much hypocrisy there is in
some Usenet groups?

Hypocrisy is under-rated. At least a hypocrite is likely to be
right half the time.

-- Richard
 
M

Mike

[Nilges] may well be capable of
adequate work when he takes his meds.
Your reference to "meds" is rather offensive.

I apologize.  You should realize, however that many of
your posts are *quite* exasperating: long drifting monologues
with, eventually, accusations that posters in these comp groups
have made anti-Semitic remarks!  If there really have been such
anti-Semitic remarks, please cite them.

You're possibly thinking of something I do claim, which is that people
with unexamined racism and anti-Semitism, too polite to express their
real feelings, play computer "games" in which they permit themselves
to use grammar almost isomorphic to that of racism and anti-semitism.

For example, although the word "troll" means an anonymous poster
posting insincere opinions with intent to disrupt, it is regularly
used here to refer to sincere posters advocating minority or *sui
generis* positions, or claiming and displaying competence above the
low norm. Anti-troll flames, as I have shown, can be transformed by
simple steps to texts worthy of Mein Kampf.
I beg to differ, Edward. I believe the paragraphs you posted above provide a case-perfect illustration of why some
posters claim that _you_ are a troll. Your arguments are so forthright, so blatant, so passionately reiterated, so
unequivocably wrong, so unbalanced and out-of-balance, that many believe they could not be the output of a being both
sentient and sensible. As a result they conclude, rightly or wrongly, that that these arguments are devised and posted
meerly to provoke. If they are right in their conclusions, then you are indeed a troll, if they are wrong, I believe it
more plausibly reflects on the style and content of your postings than it does on any racist or anti-Semitic tendancies
(examined or unexamined) of these posters.

Mike
 
C

Chad

jacob navia said: [...]
spinoza1111wrote, On 08/05/08 08:51:
<snip>
Navia? Didn't he implement C?
He took a C compiler written by someone else, extended it, added a
debugger and for all I know might have implemented the entire IDE
himself.
This is, I think, a lie at worst.
Your lies are obviously a "neutral description of the facts".
Lies? Are you saying that you *did* write lcc-win32 from scratch? If so,
please make up your mind whether you did or whether you didn't, because
you are on record as saying that you acquired rights to the lcc compiler
and modified it, which is very different from writing lcc-win32 from
scratch. (See below.)
Modifying existing software is often more difficult than writing it
anew.
It is very rare that I can find it in my heart to agree with you, but here
I unhesitatingly concur. It /is/ harder to modify someone else's code than
to write one's own, all else being equal. Nobody has said otherwise, as
far as I know.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that Mr Navia modified an existing compiler.
That statement is not intended either to attack or to support him. It
simply describes what happened. He has said as much himself. So why he
continues to deny it is beyond me.

Whoa. This makes no sense:

"He has said as much himself. So why he continues to deny it is beyond
me."

Navia can't "have said as much himself" AND "continually deny" the
same proposition.

My dear boy, I am aware that last January, you rather froze up while
swotting a sparknotes test over logical and and or as implemented in C+
+, but surely you know that in logic, "p || !p" is always true, and
what you assert above, "p && !p" is NEVER true.

I am sure that as chap says in Terry Gilliam's Brazil, chap who rather
reminds me of you, "computers are your fortay".

Which means that the error above is an indication that your psychotic
posting is causing an overwhelm.

I don't suggest people take meds, since I saw basic honesty, decency
and community work better for Nash. I suggest instead that you take a
hol. Go to Spain, go to Gibraltar, go to a match in what you chaps
call football. But for your own sake and lest you make yourself even
more of a complete buffoon, desist for a while.

You have plenty of non-psychotic personality traits I am sure. Since
"in spite of all temptations to belong to other nations, you are an
English man", I am certain you do not torment small animals, for the
English invented the notion of not pulling the ears off mice and cats.
Above, you intelligently and graciously concede my point as to the
difficulty of software maintenance.

Which is why I am concerned that your addiction may have gotten the
better of you, and this is why I counsel and intervene here.


This may explain why lcc-win32 doesn't claim conformance to any standard..

Yeah, and that's why it's useful. It is logically impossible and
pragmatically a waste of time to "standardize" C, and I can prove it:

1. One standardizes why? For portability in the main.
2. But because of aliasing, #include and #define, no C program, no
matter how conformant, can be ported to another platform, or used in a
truly modular, plug-in way without a line by line audit
3. Ergo, argal (as First Gravedigger said in Hamlet), standardization
is a massive waste of time and we can only conclude that the C99
standardization effort was a play-pen for semi-retired and burned out
programmers who couldn't get chicks, like Herb could.


Precisely. He acquired the rights. He did not write the compiler from
scratch.

Nobody disagrees over this fact, nor its interpretation. You concede
above that his task was more and not less difficult than a from
scratch compiler. I can only conclude that with no case, you continue
your nonsense because you're addicted to bullying people who
accomplish something, and to getting the last word.


There, there, Edward. Time for meds?

**** you, Richard: **** you, very much. Your reference to "meds" is
sickening, because "meds" destroy people, including older programmers
hounded out of the profession (no, not me, ass hole: I leave bad
situations) for insisting that they need to be treated as men and not
boys.


Nobody has suggested there was. In fact, until *you* used the word
"plagiarism", it had not even been mentioned.

**** you, Richard Heathfield: **** you very much. You think you've
mastered the snide little accusation but we're seeing through your
games. You need to desist and you need to seek psychotherapy (not
"meds").


The 'quiet and "factual" tone' is inevitable when I'm quietly stating
facts. And I'm not trying to destroy Mr Navia's reputation, or yours, or
indeed anyone's.

Yes, you are. It's time to act like a man, and admit the pain you
cause people with your behavior, and start to change.

I've met a lot of psychotics in the corporation, and they are
characterised by a constant reference to rules which although they
bend them and circumvent them, are narrated as unchangeable in a way
designed to cause psychological disorder in others, by creating an
addictive system, without a memory.

At any time, working on behalf of a barrister, I can prepare, using
simple tools, an analysis of your behavior which shows you
deliberately and with legally actionable malice entering conversations
constituted on mutual recognition and collegial respect, choosing who
you think is the weaker discussant, and then, using oh so restrained
speech, shitting all over that person, his online standing, and his
offline family and employability, with only the most superficial and
casual reference to technical issues, on which your performance on
last January's test show you to have only mediocre standing.

Bullies think that their conduct is unnoticed even as another form of
addict, the alcoholic, believes nobody smells his breath. But I spoke
to a team of international lawyers and programmers at DePaul Univ in
1995, who were using a data base to analyze specific instances of
extreme bullying (genocide, in fact) in Bosnia during the 1992..1995
war by thugs who you remind me of, and these people have helped to
nail bigtime operators to the wall. You and the rest of your ilk can
laugh as did the murderer Arkan laughed, but the mill of the gods is
grinding away.

You can stop possible legal actions by acting with a basic decency I
know you possess, and simply taking a break as I have, enabling
lurkers and others to start a new conversation.


For ten years I've been trying to help C programmers to become better C
programmers, not just via the book but also via Usenet and IRC. In those
ten years, I /have/, in fact, acquired a reputation - and one that is in
my view undeserved - as a C expert. Actually, I'm not a C expert and I
don't think I have ever claimed to be one - but yes, okay, I know C pretty
well. If I criticise the content of some of Jacob Navia's articles, it is
because they manifest a demonstrable misunderstanding of the C language, a
misunderstanding that can be verified by consultation of the document that
defines the language. (The particular section to consult does, of course,
vary from case to case.)

The C99 standards document simply does not constitute any such
definition. The language was not defined to be portable. All Dennis
and Brian wanted was a cool programming language for the PDP-10, and
in 1971, programmers like them simply had no conception of the sorts
of issues that arise as regards portability. Issues such as lazy
versus nonlazy or and and were being ignored, perhaps not by Dennis
and Brian, but in the general field, and Dennis and Brian simply had
no way of foreseeing how C would be used.

The C99 effort was a fraud using public funds and a precursor of the
shit Halliburton pulled in Iraq, since the industry simply ignored it,
because a conformant compiler would not compile 90% of legacy code,
and since C is so very out of date, that's what a compiler is needed
for!

Linking C99 to the Iraq invasion is probably the most ridiculous that
thing I've heard on comp.lang.c so far.
 
N

Nick Keighley

spinoza1111 wrote:

<something>

I must apologise for responding to this idiot.
In future I will confine myself to correcting things that are
obviously
technically wrong and on-ish topic
 
S

santosh

rio said:
2) Psychiatry and psychology are not science

Not rigorous science, but their methods are scientific, even if the
hypothesis can never be mathematically proved. They are certainly
vastly superior to something like exorcising.
3) medicines are all wrong (for me meds too)

Sometimes medicines are necessary unless you want to deteriorate or die.
Careful lifestyle can prevent many problems, but not all.
7) i think to drink beer or wine or whisky
one little (the equivalent of 1-bottle of 66cl beer for day)
(if it is ok in its component) is good too.

I don't think whisky is good at all.
 
S

spinoza1111

[Ed's meds]

spinoza1111said:
But this is not relevant to my point: it was in terribly
poor taste for Richard to use this childish catchphrase.

In message-ID
"Herr Steinberg" is a known Jew, and should always be
ignored. Xyklon-B is VERY effective.

The remarkable thing is that you seem to see no conflict here. If you wish
to be taken seriously as an arbiter of good taste, you still have a great
deal to learn. (You also have a lot to learn about the effective use of
irony, but then you have so much to learn about so many things...)
Why must the rules be different here?

They're not. Fortunately for you, however, the comp.lang.c rules (which,
since comp.lang.c has no charter, are the same default set of rules as for
any newsgroup, and which basically boil down to "be bright, or at the very
least be civilised") can only ever apply to people who are bright,
civilised, or both. Others (like yourself) can, and do, ignore those rules
with carefree abandon. That's why killfiles are so popular.

Now then - let's talk about C, shall we?

--
Richard Heathfield <http://www.cpax.org.uk>
Email: -http://www. +rjh@
Google users: <http://www.cpax.org.uk/prg/writings/googly.php>
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999

Richard, you're not "bright", although you think you are. You froze up
and got angry on a test. Bright people don't do this. Nor do you have
the confidence to write code extempore: instead you refer people to
unusable material. Bright people, when confronted with different
approaches such as those of Navia's, are curious and friendly as was
Hamlet who said "as a stranger give it welcome".

You are an instance instead of the "programmer" whose lack of mental
skills, not being acknowledged by him because he's filled his mind
with saws and trivia, is no longer permitted within the corporation,
to actually program.

Nor are you civilized. Civilized people, let's say at parties to which
generally only civilized people get invited in the first place, in
which they can anticipate engaging in Habermas' communicative action,
do not walk up to a group, try to spot the more isolated person, and
proceed to make remarks about this person's qualifications to speak on
the topic, typically in the form of linked list headers; instead of
taking the risk of making assertions or writing extempore code, you
post headers which upon investigation turn out to be of the form

.->.->.->[wildGooseChase]->[bullshit]

You are a boor, a cad, a bounder and a barbarian, and I wish you'd go
away. You've ruined every group you've been in.

No, the same cannot be said honestly, as it nonetheless will, about
me. Boors, cads, bounders, and barbarians all like to either reverse
the terms or create confusion so as to create an illusion of moral
equivalence; but there is absolutely no moral equivalence between us.
You're a rotter, and I'm not.

I really can spend no more time on this issue. I would note in
response to another poster, gape jawed and drooling that I should
connect the war in Iraq with programming: suck on it. Donald Rumsfeld,
in his tenure at Searle and from his well-paid perch during the
Clinton administration, terrorised my friends who needed to contract
program at Searle to support families with his stinking, rotten
arrogance, the liquid and foul siftings drifting down from his ass on
top of people who crossed him. His mission at Searle was to destroy
ANY employee of the FDA who questioned his cancerous Aspartame
sweetener. He was a destructive man who sent men to their deaths, and
the programming manager whose incompetence destroys families is his
micrcosm.

Most of you work for men like this and instead of managing your anger
and finding creative lives, you sit here and attack people.

And as I have said, to say to a person who posts sincerely and with
courage because non-anonymous, that he's a troll, is isomorphic to
calling a person a Jew to discredit him in Nazi Germany. I do not
understand at all why the crime today is to keep the memory of the
origin of the Holocaust alive by tracing it to demotic thuggee, and
I've in particular had it up to here when pompous fat Krauts tell me
I've "offended" them in so doing.

I have work to do. But I shall return when I have code and/or status
on the spinoza language.
 
N

Nick Keighley

rio wrote
i can speak only for me
in what i have seen in my little experience
but this is only for me and without responsibility

1) Religion and pray are good

I can't accept religion as a unalloyed good.
The sufferer may be adding another delusion
to his repetoire. The more predatory evangleists
seek out people with mental health problems.

<snip>
 
E

Eligiusz Narutowicz

spinoza1111 said:
You are a boor, a cad, a bounder and a barbarian, and I wish you'd go
away. You've ruined every group you've been in.

These are interesting words I needed to refer to in the dictionary. They
seem to be very apt for his petty man.
 
S

spinoza1111

[email protected] says... said:
[Nilges] may well be capable of
adequate work when he takes his meds.
Your reference to "meds" is rather offensive.
I apologize.  You should realize, however that many of
your posts are *quite* exasperating: long drifting monologues
with, eventually, accusations that posters in these comp groups
have made anti-Semitic remarks!  If there really have been such
anti-Semitic remarks, please cite them.
You're possibly thinking of something I do claim, which is that people
with unexamined racism and anti-Semitism, too polite to express their
real feelings, play computer "games" in which they permit themselves
to use grammar almost isomorphic to that of racism and anti-semitism.
For example, although the word "troll" means an anonymous poster
posting insincere opinions with intent to disrupt, it is regularly
used here to refer to sincere posters advocating minority or *sui
generis* positions, or claiming and displaying competence above the
low norm. Anti-troll flames, as I have shown, can be transformed by
simple steps to texts worthy of Mein Kampf.

I beg to differ, Edward. I believe the paragraphs you posted above provide a case-perfect illustration of why some
posters claim that _you_ are a troll. Your arguments are so forthright, so blatant, so passionately reiterated, so
unequivocably wrong, so unbalanced and out-of-balance, that many believe they could not be the output of a being both
sentient and sensible. As a result they conclude, rightly or wrongly, that that these arguments are devised and posted
meerly to provoke. If they are right in their conclusions, then you are indeed a troll, if they are wrong, I believe it
more plausibly reflects on the style and content of your postings than it does on any racist or anti-Semitic tendancies
(examined or unexamined) of these posters.

Mike- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Mike, I need also to reply to you, since yours was a thoughtful post,
if filled with the usual dull hatred we see in these groups. The only
register in which you are at all serious is when you are saying
something hateful such as the above, therefore this is gonna hurt.

I'm afraid, Mike, that you've based your entire argument on an
incorrect premise. Because work in the corporation, in any standing,
requires continual anger management because the fiduciary job of the
corporation is to expropriate its employees, you've been socialized to
scan documents without parsing them, like the first phase of a
compiler.

When you read my posts, I believe, you are alarmed, reasonably enough,
by a diversity of reference and vocabulary which is the first
statistical feature you notice in your "scan". You're also alarmed by
a quantitative and qualitative difference between my texts and most
posts. There are more verbs and subordinating words in sentences and
sentences are longer.

Since another corporate meme or mood is a constant artificial urgency
and time famine, it's at this point you realize that you'd better get
back to work, so you hit a button you've mislabeled "troll", using it
isomorphic to "jew" or "n*r".

"An Internet troll, or simply troll in Internet slang, is someone who
posts controversial and usually irrelevant or off-topic messages in an
online community, such as an online discussion forum or chat room,
with the intention of baiting other users into an emotional
response[1] or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion."

I'd add to this wikipedia definition the fact of anonymity which was
an important feature of the earlier usage.

The key is insincerity: in the wikipedia definition, the troll trolls
TO get a response. But my goal is to get to agreement to certain
propositions, such as "C is an outdated language" and "programming is
political".

I'm not a troll. Instead, I've a wider view which unlike the
executive's big picture takes account of the details, and this
normalization of subjectivity versus objectivity, which reverses their
(incorrect) exchange such that today "objectivity" means being
superficial and rule-driven so as to replicate the "subjectivity" of
power. As such, I've been called unique, sui generis, along with a lot
of other far worse names.

I really must sign off. You people aren't worth committments,
therefore my committments are not to you but just time management on
my part.

Edward G. Nilges
 
S

santosh

Eligiusz said:
These are interesting words I needed to refer to in the dictionary.
They seem to be very apt for his petty man.

Please, let's try to keep this flamefest to just two posters. Not ideal,
but better than everyone joining in, as was the case in
<news:comp.programming>.
 

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