HeathField Strange Ideas!

[Kelsey Bjarnason]

They are only OT in the eyes of a small but vocal group who are slowly
killing this NG.

You mean this NG which has existed since before the great renaming, since
before charters, based on exactly this sort of pedantry - ensuring it
remains useful by keeping out the dross like "Why doesn't WinMain work
properly" or "Where do I get OpenGL for the Commodore 64", simply because
someone is using C to code their apps? That sort of pedantry? That sort
of killing the group?

 

[jacob navia]

You mean this NG which has existed since before the great renaming, since
before charters, based on exactly this sort of pedantry

This is a lie. The charter of this group says:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Newsgroups : net.news.group, net.lang.c
From : eagle!jerry
Date : Fri Oct 22 01:28:04 1982
Local : Ven 22 oct 1982 01:28
Subjet : C language newsgroup started

My suggestion for a "C" newsgroup met with support and no
opposition so net.lang.c (note lower case) has been created.

It's purpose is to carry on discussion of C programming and
the C programming language. Appropriate topics are

Queries on how to write something in C
Queries about why some C code behaves the way it does
Suggestions for C modifications or extensions
C coding "tricks"
Compiler bugs
Availability of compilers
etc.

Jerry Schwarz
BTL -- Murray Hill
harpo!eagle!jerry
-------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE PEDANTS:
Suggestions for C modifications or extensions

It wasn't always like this!!!!!

[snip nonsense]

 

[Kenny McCormack]

You mean this NG which has existed since before the great renaming, since
before charters, based on exactly this sort of pedantry

This is a lie. The charter of this group says:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Newsgroups : net.news.group, net.lang.c
From : eagle!jerry
Date : Fri Oct 22 01:28:04 1982
Local : Ven 22 oct 1982 01:28
Subjet : C language newsgroup started

My suggestion for a "C" newsgroup met with support and no
opposition so net.lang.c (note lower case) has been created.

It's purpose is to carry on discussion of C programming and
the C programming language. Appropriate topics are

Queries on how to write something in C
Queries about why some C code behaves the way it does
Suggestions for C modifications or extensions
C coding "tricks"
Compiler bugs
Availability of compilers
etc.

Jerry Schwarz
BTL -- Murray Hill
harpo!eagle!jerry
-------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE PEDANTS:
Suggestions for C modifications or extensions

It wasn't always like this!!!!!

[snip nonsense]

Very true. Of course, you are arguing with a moron.
But whatever floats your boat...

 

[Chris Hills]

Yes, I know *you* know that. I'm trying to find out what Chris Hills
thinks I should have done, since any mention that something is
off-topic seems to bother him so much. (In a public forum like this,
it can be hard to tell whether a question is directed to the group at
large or to a single person; I should have made that clearer.)

Chris?

This looks reasonable to me.

 

[Ernie Wright]

Only to prove that it can't be done, and where it can be done it's not
much use, perhaps.

I disagree.

For example, no, that's not the reason, because there's no ASCII
encoding for ^A...^Z, either.

Furrfu.

Caret notation is a digraph representing the otherwise unprintable ASCII
control characters. The ASCII code for the digraph is the ASCII code of
the second character, minus 64 (decimal).

^A...^Z represents the range of ASCII control codes from 1 to 26.

Conveniently, it's also possible to imagine, and write about, and denote
using this digraph notation, control characters that don't exist. <^.>
is one of these.

(unsigned)(('.' - 64) & 0x7F)

or 110 decimal, isn't an ASCII control code. It does not encode an
ASCII control character.

These digraphs are *also*, historically, a notation for a very common
keyboard mapping of the ASCII control characters in which the caret
represents the Ctrl key. This mapping isn't arbitrary. It's closely
related to the ASCII encoding.

In fact, historically, ASCII *is* a keyboard mapping. You can't treat
them historically the way we do now, as independent abstractions. The
*point* of the ASCII standard in 1963 was to standardize codes emitted
by input devices and understood by output devices.

- Ernie http://home.comcast.net/~erniew

 

[Kelsey Bjarnason]

[snips]

This is a lie. The charter of this group says:

Nothing, as this newsgroup has no charter.

 

[Mark McIntyre]

Kelsey Bjarnason wrote:

This is a lie.

No, your own statement was the lie. One of these days, someone will
call you on this more formally, and you'll end up in a pickle.

The charter of this group says:

Just to be clear, the group /has/ no charter. It predates charters.

The message you love quoting is the proposal mail for net.lang.c and
is a quarter of a century old.

NOTE PEDANTS:
Suggestions for C modifications or extensions

Here's you wanting things to change - well, CLC changed, discussion of
extensions / modifications are no longer topical.

[snip nonsense]

You needed a bigger snip.
--
Mark McIntyre

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it."
--Brian Kernighan

 

[Keith Thompson]

Kelsey Bjarnason wrote: [...]

You mean this NG which has existed since before the great renaming,
since before charters, based on exactly this sort of pedantry

This is a lie. The charter of this group says:

[snip]

That's not a charter. Newsgroups created today tend to have formal
charters; net.lang.c did not have one.

NOTE PEDANTS:
Suggestions for C modifications or extensions

It wasn't always like this!!!!!

Right, we didn't always have comp.std.c.

 

[Walter Roberson]

That's not a charter. Newsgroups created today tend to have formal
charters; net.lang.c did not have one.

Though to present historical context, within a few weeks of
the initial posting, there was a posting in net.lang.c
entitled "charter issues" from which it is clear that there was
already disagreement over what was permitted and what was not.
That posting is one of only three postings that Google has from 1982
(in any newsgroup) that mentions newsgroup charters. Thus, the
-idea- of charters existed when net.lang.c was created, but
the initial posting in net.lang.c was not actually a charter.

 

[Al Balmer]

I can see why the regulars consider this kind of discussion radioactive.
I personally think the conversation would be enriched by the occasional
comparison between platforms among the experts here. Platform-specific
groups are too parochial for that, and general programming groups lack
the depth of C knowledge.

Breadth, perhaps, but not depth, considering that some of the most
expert here also participate in general programming groups.

 

[Richard Bos]

I disagree.


Furrfu.

Caret notation is a digraph representing the otherwise unprintable ASCII
control characters. The ASCII code for the digraph is the ASCII code of
the second character, minus 64 (decimal).

The discussion wasn't about control _characters_, but about ctrl _keys_.
There is nothing against having a keycode for ctrl-period. Yes, some
systems have the ctrl keycodes be the same as the control characters,
for obvious and hysterical raisins, but that is
- very definitely not ISO C, and
- not even defined by ASCII.

That _your_ system happens to have the ctrl keycodes the same as the
common written representation of the ASCII control characters, and that
you do not see that this is entirely by the choice of the designers of
your system, not a demand of the ASCII or ISO C Standards let alone an
immutable law of the universe, only proves my point that a general
discussion about keycodes in an ISO C context is impossible.

Sheesh.

These digraphs are *also*, historically, a notation for a very common
keyboard mapping of the ASCII control characters in which the caret
represents the Ctrl key. This mapping isn't arbitrary. It's closely
related to the ASCII encoding.

No, it's almost entirely arbitrary. With the same simplicity and
arbitrariness, ctrl-. could have been pseudo-defined to return ASCII
127. But it wasn't. Why not? Arbitrary decisions.

Richard

 

[Ernie Wright]

The discussion wasn't about control _characters_, but about ctrl
_keys_.

As I've already explained, it was about the way programs worked more
than 30 years ago, at a time when this was a null distinction. ASCII
keyboards emitted ASCII codes, not some arbitrary key scan codes that
bubbled through several layers of hardware and OS translation.

If you insist on viewing this anachronistically, you are powerless to
explain the program behavior Dik described.

That _your_ system happens to have the ctrl keycodes the same as the
common written representation of the ASCII control characters,

Uh, no, my system does not. As far as I can recall, no keyboard I've
used in the last 20 years has emitted ASCII codes.

and that you do not see that this is entirely by the choice of the
designers of your system, not a demand of the ASCII or ISO C Standards
let alone an immutable law of the universe, only proves my point that
a general discussion about keycodes in an ISO C context is impossible.

Ah, I see. Well, yes, if you're going to make unwarranted assumptions
about how impossibly stupid and narrow-minded I am, I suppose it will be
difficult to have a useful discussion.

- Ernie http://home.comcast.net/~erniew

 

[Walter Roberson]

Richard Bos wrote:

Uh, no, my system does not. As far as I can recall, no keyboard I've
used in the last 20 years has emitted ASCII codes.

I've used a keyboard that emitted ASCII codes within the last two
years. When you are using routers and the like, it's still darn
useful to have an old VT100 or the like hooked up to the serial
console for those times when the device goes foobar and you have
to get in at a low level.

 

[David Thompson]

On Sun, 26 Aug 2007 16:33:00 +0100, "Malcolm McLean"

Chacters are a bit of a special case because the applications programmer
seldom converts them to a table index, in fact tends not to think of them as
indicies into a table. However they are, usually, ultimately used for
indexing operations, because that's how you get the human-readable pattern
of dots.

1. Not all char's are characters. Sometimes they are used as/for
arbitrary memory, because C doesn't have a separate 'byte' or
'memunit' type -- which IMO is actually a problem, unlike (as you
assert) size_t, although not a very serious one. Yes, unsigned char is
better for this, but plain char works on enough systems and in enough
situations it gets used.

2. Not all characters are displayed. When you (or at least a typical
person, if not you) browse the web, probably a good half of the
characters transmitted back and forth are never displayed just for
HTML. For images and "media" which are usually compressed, and things
like PDFs and other deflated text or data, the bytes transmitted
aren't even characters or pixels/samples at all, although they can be,
and often will be, decoded by a process that pulls out individual bits
or groups of bits, uses them for table lookups AND computations, and
eventually ends up with canonical data.

3 and least. There are still some hardcopy devices around where output
doesn't involve any lookup of character codes. But not many.

- formerly david.thompson1 || achar(64) || worldnet.att.net