No, I'm not.
We do, however, let specialists in a field point out that a particular
teacher doesn't know the field.
I do not think you have sufficient chops as a specialist in the field
to make and enable a serious personal attack on a man that included
the transformation of his patronym into a barnyard and playground
ephitet.
You had not at the time published a computer book, although I you have
published "Beginning Portable Shell Scripting" and co-authored a book
on Unix(R) in 2005. Neither of those books is on C. You also seem to
have been involved with C Unleashed, a rather silly book which is out
of print, and this would explain a lot of your bad behavior and
collusion with Heathfield in this thread.
You have not, by your own admission, taken a computer science class. I
understand that you said that in former years many experts such as
Dijkstra had not taken compsci, which was a very silly counterexample
(and grievously disrespectful to true pioneers). It was a silly
counterexample because those experts were creating computer science.
It was grievously disrespectful because people like Dijsktra were MEN
who had the courage to frame IDEAS which might OFFEND powerful
corporations: they didn't lash out against their colleaugues by name
like BOYS.
You have made some extremely silly claims based on your lack of
academic chops, such as telling Schildt not to say that C negatives
are [mostly] twos complement, and getting your panty hose in a tangle
about what main returns.
In other words, you don't care about truth, you care only about status.
I care about knowledge production, and based in part on my experience
as a wikipedia contributor (whose contributions survived editing prior
to 2006 and the invasion of the Hitlerpedians, and which still grace
the Adorno, Kant, IBM 1401 and other pages), I don't think that you
have access to the truth, only to cycles of self-referring texts. And
you ARE concerned with status, indeed in a vicious and evil way. As
opposed to respecting authorities, you make a fetish of creating
negative anti-authorities, dream figures like Schildt and me who
justify, in their own putative wrong doing and "insanity", your own
wrong-doing and what you think of as your sanity...merely because they
are different.
The status you seek is that of the Freudian Horde, of sons who kill
the father but will never succeed him.
Fine.
You know, your ability to read for comprehension is pretty minimal. I'm
a programmer. The specific case in which I don't do programming but merely
filter things is when I'm passing compiler bug reports on to a vendor...
But note that even CREATING those bug reports is often programming beyond
what most people would ever need to do.
If you say so. But I need more detail. I already believed that like
any competent little techie, you create software tools to make your
life easier, and sure, if they are any good, your mates might use
them.
I don't like the term "script kiddie". But the question is if you
SHIP.
My code is run by all our customers, not just internally.
This contradicts what you've said. But you've only described a 5000
line tool. But even if you're a full scale programmer, which I'll
admit if you can give more evidence without violating non-disclosure,
I'll still be right based on the text of The Vitriolic Tirade. It
lists trivia, claims they are the known problems, and makes reference
like Joe McCarthy to "many more errors".
That's nice.
I did not represent him as anything, I merely pointed out that what was
said wasn't true of C, but perhaps it was of another language.
But it IS true of C, as Michael Scott writes on p 111 of Programming
Language Pragmatics, that "If a language permits recursion, static
allocation of local variables is no longer an option, since the number
of instances of a variable that may need to exist at the same time is
conceptually unbounded. Fortunately, the natural nesting of subroutine
calls makes it easy to allocate space for locals on a stack." Scott is
talking about a class of languages which includes C. C permits
recursion. Luckily for C (to paraphrase Scott) we have a mechanism
that handles recursion.
It's possible that a nonstack method will be found to handle
recursion. I know of none. It's also possible that there's a highly
optimized, embedded compiler for C, written by some clown whose mother
was frightened by a stack when he was in her womb and who hates
stacks, which manages to flatten all recursion in most cases, and
which refuses to compile all other cases, and it's possible that this
clown was in on the development of the Standard...which doesn't
recognize the stack.
Flipping through Scott, by the way, I find statements that could be
subject, at-will, to the sort of deconstructive literary criticism
that you used on Schildt, where the goal is to (1) find a scenario
where the author might be wrong, and then (2) generalize this into a
charge that the author is ignorant of the material. For Scott writes,
of C: "Here the keyword const applies to the record to which r points;
the caller must pass the address of its record explicitly, but can be
assured that the callee will not change the record's contents".
The "assurance" here is real in one sense, not in another. Given the
zany logic you applied to Schildt, we can always find counter-examples
as if we were searching on the job for compiler bug reports. But a
book is not a program.
But I have shown how to implement a C runtime without the thing Schildt
actually describes, which is not "a" stack but "the" stack, and is
specifically asserted to have very specific trait which are not universal..
No, you have not. If this runtime, which I have not seen because of
the large volume of posts on this matter, handles recursion, then it
implements, we have seen, a thing which is mathematically a stack.
This is not true. The document you see was never shown to any technical
people at McGraw hill, or indeed, to anyone at McGraw Hill. They got
a vague letter asserting that there appeared to be errors.
OK, I accept this explanation and withdraw the claim. You're still on
the hot seat.
I posted them on the Internet and have welcomed comments and feedback
for fifteen years. In all that time, I've gotten no bug reports which
withstood even casual analysis.
You've just gotten The Mother of all Bug Reports from me with buy in
from Kenny.
When someone proves to me that the statements therein are false, sure.
Done. And they don't have to be false. They are also misleading and
offensive and small-minded and nasty.
Your problem, I think, is that all the fathers they've gone down, true
love they've been without it: and all their daughter put you down
because you don't think about it...to quote, yes, Dylan. That is:
something rather dramatic has happened to the human psyche.
The corporate-academic father of the fifties failed to show his sons
the way. The abandoned Freudian horde were left to their own devices
to create new systems of morality, for the corporate morality of the
"man in the grey flannel suit" was amoral and the son could see that.
Now, some of these sons evolved a sort of false techie morality of
"truth" because in their world, filled as politics and law are with
seemingly irreconcilable claims, where politicians, lawyers and
corporate types will believe anything and say anything for money,
nothing seemed true. They stumbled on an apparent truth machine or lie
detector, not quite realizing that this was just frozen labor like any
commodity (read Marx).
Like cargo cultists the abandoned Sons thought to construct a
libertarian world of pure "truth" but as productive forces evolved,
guys like Schildt with a job to do messed up their truth.
So **** the business world. I am not interested in writing something
based on systematic inequality; I am interested in writing something true..
You're in the business world. I am weary of the way in which little
computer programmers pretend they are not part of capitalism, because
they are embedded in it.
My training experience, in C, at Princeton and in Chicago, and the
unhappy experience of my Chicago client with a previous C trainer, and
their happiness with my results constitute a cite.
Students in calculus and C need above all to get started. Showing a
simplified but working model is an age-old pedagogical tool.
Have you ever taught? I see where you're a "fellow Apress
author" (which means you shouldn't be calling your mates insane: what
goes around comes around) but you don't seem to have classroom
experience.
I'm talking real world experience.
Depends on the teacher.
If that actually happened, you'd have a point. Howeve, Schildt made
it clear that he was specifically talking about the directions and
relationship of their growth.
M O D E L. They could have gone in the opposite direction, and any
fool can see that. Alternatively, a fixed max amount could have been
allocated for the stack and the heap separately.
But to add this complication would be like showing high school kids,
not Euclid's proof of the Pythagorean theorem, but Dijkstra's
generalization for oblique triangles (
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/
EWD/transcriptions/EWD09xx/EWD975.html).
Consider: Schildt asserts that the stack can run into the heap. Why
can it run into the heap, but not run into the program code? Because
he's describing a specific system's implementation, but claiming it to
be "how things work".
Bullshit. If his remit was to say "how things work" he'd write an
academic book on computer science.
Furthermore, you seem to be deficient even in your understanding of
comp sci. I say this because comp sci's natural and most effective
philosophy of mathematics isn't Platonism (the belief that mathematics
is based on timeless truths in a world of forms) it is
"constructivism" alternatively, "intuitionism", which DOESN'T ACCEPT
AS TRUE mathematical statements that can only be proved by way of
proof-by-contradiction.
Your Platonism causes you to treat negative propositions and barren
possibilities such as "C doesn't need twos complement" or "C might not
need the stack" as timeless and eternal Platonic forms, a mistake even
Plato didn't make.
Herb shows a constructive truth. To "prove" the existence of a stack
in all, or let's say nearly all, C runtimes, Herb constructs an
existence proof in the form of a working model.
This model, when the accidents such as growth in one direction or the
other are disregarded, PROVES that "C can be elegantly run using a
stack of some sort".
Contrast your Platonist, shading into Scholastic, "proof" that "Mom!
Herb is wrong"! It is to cite a standard almost as if the Standard is
Holy Writ. This is blasphemy even in religious terms, for the Standard
is just a horseshit work of fallen man, isn't it?
I think I would have had to submit them.
And you didn't.
