No offense, but is there any point in responding to a rant that illucid
I think it's time, Peter, to drop your pretense that you are literate
and for that reason an authority on either Schildt's use of language
or the meaning of "clarity".
This is because "illucid", a word you've used several times, is not a
meaningful word, and there are plenty of correct words for what you
stumble to say. Such as unclear.
You see, "illucid" occurs neither in the compact nor unabridged OED,
nor does it appear in the free online Merriam Webster, nor at
dictionary.com. I have never encountered it save from you.
In the complete Oxford English Dictionary, the closest match is the
verb form of the reverse of what you mean: "to shed light upon; to
make clear, clear up, elucidate"! The il- prefix is not a free
operator, and most literate people know that for this reason you may
not make neologisms.
In fact, a poet would use "illucid" as is as the participle for
"illucidated" to make the meter work:
Nilges has once again made all pellucid,
Clear, transparent, glassy and illucid.
He has for us the Eleusinian illucidated
Whilst Seebach with toads and sheep has mated.
"Know thyself". I am not making an inference from a single data point;
that's what you do in the case of Schildt despite the fact that you
don't know Windows programming and have no academic background in
computer science. Instead, I am gradually forming a correct image of
your capabilities, and this is evidence that fits a pattern of error
and pretense. Before you continue your little campaign, know yourself.
with factual points? I have no idea where Nilges gets the idea that I
think using Linux makes me special. I don't even particularly like Linux.
But the pure noise component really dominates any kind of argumentation here.
What does "in a global sense" mean? It means that Nilges has access to a
keyboard, and not much else.
It means that you're a provincial who's trying to tell world
programmers what to read.
Well, to be fair, doesn't he consistently demand the privilege of defining
the rules of success? So I guess that's at least consistent with his other
behavior.
Actually, that's what having a life plan is all about. To the extent
that one does not in fact harm others, one defines the rules of
success.
Me, I have no interest in "defining the rules of success". I am a
descriptive, not a prescriptive, student of programming. If something really
does work, I don't care whether it matches any particular theory. (Contrast
That's interesting, because you've never posted anything that works,
to my knowledge.
with Nilges, whose cover story for not knowing how switch() works is that it's
not properly "structured".)
No, your code was not properly structured in queue.c. It's a separate
fact that C allows (but does not require) an unstructured fall-through
as a legacy feature not used by competent programmers.
Using break() diligently in all switch() statements is core computer
science competence; returning an integer in main() is not. This is
because you cannot back your claim with any reference, outside a
community of mere programmers, to an academic and scientific result.
We don't fallthrough in switch because it was proven by Bohm and
Jacopini that we don't need to, and it was shown by Dijkstra et al.
that good programs restrict themselves to a small superset of the
three Bohm/Jacopini structures which includes case/switch only when
there is a single entry/exit and n distinct paths which never
overlap.
Our praxis is mathematically definable; yours is not. In ours, switch-
case is recognized as a fourth block in addition to process, if-then-
else and do-while, with while-do one trip also often admitted.
But this is because switch-case without fallthrough stands in relation
to the basics in the trivial relationship "you're" has to "you are".
It's a transliteration.
Whereas switch-case with fallthrough is neologistic, and there is no
gain in efficiency, reliability or maintainability. There's no gain in
efficiency because if a switch case is duplicated codewise in the
structured version, no time is lost save in the break() which may
generate a go to in machine language, well worth the investment. The
(slight) reliability-maintainability objection is that you would have
to replicate code, but this is handled as of old: function, inline
function or preprocessor macro.
The reliability-maintainability objection you made is actually sheer
intellectual flaccidity of the sort I learned to expect, increasingly,
as more and more shitheads entered the field: the sort of people who
buy "Don't Make Me Think!".
The gain is of course clarity, especially because modern languages
don't support fallthrough. The usage in fact endangers the quality of
the code to demonstrate membership in an in-crowd. It's a shibboleth,
When I criticize non-portability, it's not
because I have any particular preference for portability *in and of itself*;
it's because my experience has taught me that portability offers a very
substantial return on time and effort invested in it, and in particular,
that writing for portability from the beginning is much cheaper than trying
to bolt it on later.
The rules of success are that if what you're doing works and allows you to
be successful, apparently that's a way of succeeding. No interest in defining
that; it strikes me as a ludicrous effort. It's like demanding the privilege
of defining the laws of physics. You don't get a vote; physics is out there,
and you can cope or not.
This is absurd. Sociology, whether theoretical or applied, is not
physics because you are part of the data, and you make the rules in
equilibrium with others.
For example, you can't just decide to "succeed" by deliberately
trashing Schildt as if social standing and reputation were like heat
in physics, which is conserved in the ordinary physical world as is
demonstrated in a high school laboratory.
Whereas social standing and reputation doesn't accrue to you "just
because" you've taken it away from Schildt or a coworker, by
backstabbing, or allowing a false document to be referenced by others
for ten years. It's not "conserved". It's manufactured by real
accomplishment (such as writing halfway decent code). It's permanently
destroyed and doesn't come back by gossip, online trashing, and lies.
In fact, philosophies of "self-interest" which assume no altruism or
justice-instinct try to reduce social phenomenon to fully explainable
attempts of systems to optimize their standing. They are for this
reason attractive to people with technical backgrounds. The result
here is pretty obvious. The best people are driven away.
