I'll assume that's enough. And no, don't tell me what happens when you assume; I've heard that enough lately.
Speaking of assumptions. It seems everyone's been assuming that Daria and Tom are going to end up together somehow. I disagree. I think Daria's too bright and cares for Jane too much to put the moves on Tom. It's my opinion that Daria is intelligent enough to realize that if she goes for Tom, she _will_ most likely lose her best friend. And in the words of Ovid, "Men will flee, but the bond between sisters is everlasting" - in other words, if things don't work with Tom and Daria loses Jane, she will be utterly alone. After seeing _See Jane Run,_ I realize that Daria does _not_ want to be alone. I don't think she will risk her friendship with Jane over a man, even if he _is_ Tom.
That said, even if Daria won't risk a relationship with him, she's still warmed up quite a bit to Tom. I can see a strong friendship forming between the two, with Daria joining Jane and Tom more often on excursions. It's my opinion that Daria's apparent dislike of Tom has only been a small factor in why she hasn't gone out with them more often - who wants to be a third wheel in such situations? A lot of the time, being the only person tagging along with a couple is downright awkward, esp. when the couple is as close as Jane and Tom apparently are. This might change, however, as Daria's friendship with Tom changes and a Daria-Jane-Tom group ceases to be "a couple and some chick tagging along" and becomes "three friends out for a good time poking fun at other people."
It's my opinion that if it weren't for the paint, Daria might've gone along with Jane and Tom... I was a bit disappointed by that, as it felt to me like the writers had more to say but had to cut off the episode, so they gave Our Heroine an excuse to go home. Perhaps #407 will explore this in more depth...
I have more to say, of course (youth always has a lot to say, 'cause we think we know everything) but I think I'll shut up for now.
Turn on MTV Monday @ 3:00pm, unless they decide to show "The Best of Real World/ Road Rules Challenge at Spring Break" at the last minute. .::krimren::. http://angelfire.lycos.com/music/7startsgreen/index.html Lenny: Hey, did you hear something? Carl: No. Lenny: Hmm. Did I? Carl: [exasperated] I don't know.
Yes...I know about assumptions. You know what *everyone* says: It makes an a$ out of you and me! :-). But seriously, I think that several things need to be clarified in terms of the idea that makes us so sure that Daria would embark on a relationship with Tom (knowing that things are left unsaid about the entire Trent situation).
Here goes:
Yes, I think that in the best possible scheme of things, she would try to keep her friendship with Jane. But of course, I also think that Daria and Jane have been kind of growing apart this entire season and going off into different directions. Who can forget the fourth season premiere? After all, Jane did realize that Daria was "having a bad day", but of course, she didn't recognize this until Daria had switched to Jodie as a partner. Jane had to think for herself for a change--opposed to what happened when they worked together on a project in "Jane's Addition". Furthermore, Daria and Jane are too close to let Tom threaten their relationship, but then again, Tom did it to them during "Jane's Addition". And I think that sometimes Daria is tired of being the third wheel. Even though it may seem a little sticky (and a little incestuous when Tom is involved knowing how he is related to all parties involved in terms of his friendship), Daria would try to branch out on her own. I think her errand to buy toilet paper wasn't even the significance of the story. Instead, I think the point of the story is that Daria could see life differently if someone *did* treat her kindly--and not always leer at her (like UpChuck) or try to get her to doing something she didn't want to do (like Mr. O'Neill in the mascot's uniform) or ridicule her (like Jane did about the paint). Being that said, I think that Daria was able to see another side of Jane this season. Therefore, this point might even make or break their friendship--because she was able to see Jane more differently--as Tom's "girlfriend" and a somewhat neglectful "best friend". Not to say that Jane's been *that* neglectful in the past.
Yes, that's true. But even so, I still think that Daria is tired of being put on the sidelines. Although she usually cops out of everything, there is always that twist of fate that keeps her involved in such a way. But this time, things took a turn that she didn't expect. And of course, when feelings are involved, being on her own really revealed a lot of aspects of her personality that we haven't seen yet.
I kind of like the ending of #406. It left a lot to the imagination-- especially when it explores "what might have been". The problem of that is that I don't think Daria would have gone with Tom and Jane anyway. The reason being is that since "Jane's Addition", she has felt left out. And because Jane has suddenly gotten a boyfriend, she's filled with a lot of jealousy as well as loneliness because she'll have to fill her time in other ways--opposed to spending it at the Lane House (which makes me pretty sad...I *love* the scenes at the Lane House). Other than that, the ending provided a lot of food for thought--especially around the realization that Our Little Heroine is growing up. She's just not sarcastic. She has *feelings*.
I think you're just assuming that everything is black and white, yes and no, binary so to speak ... ;-)
I don't assume they'll end up together. I do think there's an attraction there, though.
I do agree that it's very unlikely that Daria would pursue Tom, for the reason given (and the additional reason that she's shy).
Mmm ... except that I don't think that Daria *does* think of romantic love as fleeting. If you've noticed, the point at which her crush for Trent weakened was when she imagined being married to him. Daria doesn't fall in love easily; and I think she doesn't fall *out* of love easily.
I
I think that the main reason why Daria might not act on her emotions is fear of *hurting* Jane, even more than fear of *losing* Jane. Daria LOVES Jane. And she's easily smart enough to realize just how badly it would hurt Jane if she took Tom away from her.
That's a good point.
I think the paint was *just* an excuse. I think that Daria felt very uncomfortable at that moment. Note that Tom gave Daria a way to get the paint off and still come with them.
This is an important point. Yet, in terms of Daria's thinking, she does see things in black and white. Therefore, she is always quick to judge something and then realizes her mistakes afterwards. So, especially when this curve ball has been thrown at her, she'll have to go away and dwell on this. Therefore, the repercussions are going to be felt in the later episodes.
As for me, I like to speculate. And, I *love* surprises in a plot-line!
I truly do agree with what you've said so far, but there's one point I'd like to speak about:
Daria--however fond of Jane she might be--fears losing Jane a whole lot more. After all, Jane is her first, best friend--despite the rockiness over Jane's "appreciations" of guys. I think that despite all the other times Daria and Jane has fought over Jane's different "infatuations", this thing is entirely different. What is strange is that everything probably weighs on how Daria is going to react to this.
And of course, in the best of all possible scenarios, Daria could try to take the right course of action. But in human nature, has everyone ever done the *right thing* all the time. We're not perfect. And of course, I don't think the writers are trying to construct Daria as perfect either. Therefore, I think that it would be interesting if Daria were going to take another route. It may reveal more than just being "good" about the entire thing.
Although it would seem rational that Daria would have tried for the best of all possible endings, there is always the matter of love. No matter how seriously she takes it...love is rather contentous and sticky when it comes to fighting the feelings for someone you "appreciate". And what is worse, is that the emotions of love can outweigh any sense of logic. And of course, what happened defied any sense of rational explaination--no matter how Tom or Daria really think about this. They don't appear to be very emotional people, but both of them are very kind and considerate of others. But then again...when it comes to Trent (or Jane, for that matter)...there is another dynamic happening....
Well, a wannabe programmer. It's what I want to do when I get out of school, anyway. Have been taking classes for the last year or so (C/C++, mostly, but some Basic that we were required to take as well) and I really enjoy it, though I'm not very good at it. Yet.
On Tue, 11 Apr 00 03:25:38 GMT, [email] (Mindy) wrote:
Ha. I knew it.
Cool. The world needs more woman programmers. Then Windows 2010 will still crash but at least it'll try to talk about it first ;-) Seriously, I don't think it's helping software that programming is so completely male dominated. And I don't really understand why. After all, women are generally better with language-related stuff.
Were your classes any good? I was in our school's Pascal class and it sucked big time. Regarding C/C++, I hope you focus on the latter. Every minute you spend learning plain C is a minute wasted. And don't let anybody tell you that you start with C and then go to C++. It's wrong. Learning C will only teach you bad habits that you'll have to unlearn when going to C++.
That's good. Do you have a vision? When I started programming I had the dream of writing my own really cool computer game one day. I never realized it, though. I always got stuck with utilities. Best I did was a MineSweeper. Not very cool (even though it is the only MineSweeper I know that guarantees solvability). Speaking of cool computer games. Have you considered learning Java. It's very similar to C++. If I had someone to help me I might consider picking up the D-tag idea again.
That you know that means you're already better than a lot of people.
That's the spirit! MSB
---- They couldn't conquer the world. Now they're out to corrupt our kids! Dirty Drawings from Deutschland...Next on
It's because of people like the guys in my programming classes: "Aw man, we've got a _chick_ in here now... guess we're not gonna have any fun this year." As much as you may be told to the contrary, females still aren't encouraged to go into science or math, not so much because of a lack of support by teachers but because of peers. Stupid peers...
Not really, unfortunately, but I've gotten a lot of opportunities to explore stuff on my own.
Yeah, I thought it was a bit pointless myself... not as pointless as all the time we spent on Basic, though. There are _way_ better ways to teach structure...
A vague one. I want to write a truly awesome RPG game - something on the level of Xenogears for PSX, only not so linear. I've always been very interested in interactive stories, although the things possible with graphics intrigue me as well... I can't wait to get into more advanced stuff at one of my local universities. I'm lucky enough to attend a high school that will not only allow me to take college courses while still attending high school and give me credit, but also pay for it.
I do know a little JavaScript, which is supposedly an extremely wimpy version of Java... I have been looking at it a bit, although I've been so busy lately I haven't had time for _anything_ I really want to do. Stuff like that is why summer exists. ;-) As for D-tag, I thought it was a great idea but I'm not really confident enough in my abilities yet for a Major Project like that (and I definitely understand why you want assistance for such a thing - is a huge undertaking).
[rest of post snipped]
-Mindy Off to start her US History I paper, ugh...
yeah me too, and i'm still _in_ school (possibly, or going back next year at least). i don't know what they teach in IT but from what i've heard, not bloody much.
On Wed, 12 Apr 2000 03:21:58 +0100, "endless, nameless" wrote:
What do you need school for? I didn't learn programming in school and I don't think it's been to my disadvantage. MSB
p.s.: Is anybody interested in an on-line programming course? I could write little teaching units and exercises, put them on a website and you can send me the solutions and questions via email. I'd really love to do that. Programming is the one thing I promote with pleasure even if it means work for me. And no one is too old or too untalented to learn programming.
---- They couldn't conquer the world. Now they're out to corrupt our kids! Dirty Drawings from Deutschland...Next on
Well, I don't know the first thing about programming. You probably couldn't pick a subject I understand less. Computers are like these weird little magic boxes to me, even though I've been using them for years. I'd like to learn but I have no idea even where to begin. It's all very mysterious to me.
Yeah strange thing is when I was at college (it was a computing course), I learnt more stuff that I'm using today, by pissing about with the machines in the first year, than what they actually tried to teach me :)
Here's one.... solve the halting problem :)
Yeah even my mom can write simple basic programs and she's in her 60's :) So what language are you thinking of using ?
I hereby officially announce that if someone is seriously interested I will offer a programming course (lessons and excercises on WWW, solutions and questions via email).
Audience Absolute beginners with no previous programming knowledge, unless all those who are interested have pre-knowledge If you are able to download software and install it on your own you should be fine.
Costs Zero. The course will be free and all the necessary software, too.
Programming language Will be chosen by the participants in the course. (see below for thoughts on the choice of language)
Enrolling Send me an email with the subject [COURSE] and tell me a) how certain you are you will participate b) your preferred programming language (if any) c) your pre-knowledge d) any other comments
Notes on the choice of the programming language:
It's hard to decide on a "best" first language. There've probably been more flame wars about this issue than anything else.
The following are some points I consider important. If someone doesn't understand what I'm talking about, no problem, skip to where it says "Conclusion". This part is targetted at those who already have some pre-knowledge.
a) It should be an object-oriented language. Imperative programming is over and new programmers should rather start thinking in OO terms right from the beginning. Please note that even if you start with OO, you will still be able to read imperative code. b) A free compiler must be available so that the course will not cost anything. c) The language should be portable. d) A free easy-to-use IDE should be available. It's hard to show someone the fun of programming without one. e) It should be a language with real-world significance.
Point a) is the least important. As long as you don't wait too long before going to OOP, starting with imperative programming won't hurt. No matter what language is chosen, imperative programming will be the first thing to be taught anyway because it is the foundation. So the question if a) is important for you is basically the question "do you want to learn OOP from me or somewhere else?". You will have to learn OOP sooner or later.
Point b) unfortunately eliminates Delphi.
Point c) is a "should" if all course participants work under the same OS and a "must" if that's not the case. Portable here does not only mean that *a* compiler must be available for all platforms but that *the same* compiler must be available for all platforms so that all participants use the same equipment.
Point d) is very important. I'd rather give up programming than work without an IDE. Notepad may be enough for a simple beginners course but it's just no fun.
Point e) is debatable. If you know one programming language, it's easy to learn another one, at least if it follows the same paradigm. I have to mention that there are a lot of programming languages that are very different from "conventional" languages like Basic, Pascal, C/C++, Java. The most important among those are probably the functional and the logic-oriented languages. While I would of course be willing to teach one of those, too, it must be questioned if that would be the right way to go. You may be able to write cool games in Clean (a functional PL) and Mercury (a crossbreed) may be really cool to figure out what music you should play at your next party to get the best atmosphere but learning those will not help you should you ever want to enter the industry (Mercury might, I've heard logic-oriented languages are used in rapid prototyping). I would go with a mainstream language.
The above considerations IMHO leave the following choices
a) Java: positive on all points b) C++: positive on all points c) C: positive on all but a) d) Pascal/Modula: a)-c) depend on the dialect chosen. d) is likely to be negative because of the "free" (AFAIK FreePascal's IDE is still beta), e) is positive under Windows, negative under Unix.
Note that c) will be covered in b), too, to some extent. You will be able to read, understand and write C programs after the C++ course (with the help of a C function reference). It doesn't work the other way around. c) is C and only C. But don't be fooled to believe that c) will be easier or faster. It will probably be more difficult for some people. C++ is more intuitive, C requires more thinking like a machine. d) will be hard to realize. The Pascal world is dominated by Delphi and Delphi is neither free nor portable. AFAIK the free Pascal/Modula community is highly amorphous with many different compiler choices. And real-world significance even for Delphi is limited to hobbyists, some smaller companies and scientists.
Conclusion:
Unless you have some good reason to favor c) or d), you should make your choice among a) or b). With this choice, however, I can't help you. They are very similar (Java is a descendent of C++) but have different fields of use. Both are very hot in the industry and very popular among hobby programmers.
MSB
---- They couldn't conquer the world. Now they're out to corrupt our kids! Dirty Drawings from Deutschland...Next on
On Sat, 15 Apr 2000 02:15:50 -0500, Glenn Olson wrote:
I was referring to OOP vs. imperative programming. OOP is normally considered more natural because it allows you to think in terms of objects with certain properties instead of dealing with loosely related functions and pointers. Then there is also the high-level vs. low-level issue. When you're writing in C you have to care a lot more for the actual machine you're dealing with. You have to handle all memory allocation and de-allocation, initialisation and de-initialisation yourself. Especially with the help from the STL and templates in general, C++ allows you to implement algorithms without spending thought on the representation of data. C always forces you to spend time thinking about low-level data types. MSB
---- They couldn't conquer the world. Now they're out to corrupt our kids! Dirty Drawings from Deutschland...Next on
Well if you are doing it in hex then that's actual machine code, though you prolly hand assembled it....one of the things I liked about the ZX81/Spectrum manuals was the list of assembler op codes to hex codes in the back, allowing you to do this straight outa the box :)
Heheheh been there seen it done it... know the soft reboot program in hex off by heart :)
Deterministic Finite Automata. A little hard to explain from the get go, but it boils down to this: picture a "workflow"-type graph. Circles for the nodes, and arrows going from node to node (with little labels). The nodes represent the "state" of the machine, and the arrows represent an the path to the next state based on the current input character. These machines 'accept' or 'recognize' strings of characters from some alphabet (i.e. binary, or the alphabet, or just 'A' and 'B', or some looney symbols you make up... doesn't matter). They're used to represent really basic computers -- and in fact are pretty much the way the core logic of CPUs are designed. The nice thing about them is that they're fairly easy to understand and there's established theory for their minimization (fewest states to achieve the result).
The problem with them is that there are _many_ languages they can't represent (mainly since they only track the current state and the current symbol -- no memory). The next step up from them are NFA's - non-deterministic Finite Automata. The difference is that where in a DFA you take _one and only one_ path from each state based on the input - in an NFA you can possibly take _multiple_ paths concurrently.
Up from an NFA is a PDA (push down automata) - which is basically an NFA with a stack for memory. From there you pretty much get into Turing machines (state, input and output are all on a 'tape' with state transitions detailed by tape contents). The halting problem mentioned above basically boils down to the fact that you really can't tell the difference between a Turing machine that's been working a long while and is about to stop -- and one in an infinite loop. {This is a dramatic simplification for understanding, so no one jump on me here.. :) }
On 13 Apr 2000 23:42:49 +0100, [email] (Phill Harvey-Smith) wrote:
DFA = Deterministic Finite Automaton.
The name says it all. It's a machine that has only a finite set of states and processes an input word in a strictly deterministic manner. It does not have a memory. It should be obvious that the halting problem is trivial for this machine. For a finite input word it ALWAYS stops after a number of steps equal to the length of the input word. The main point is the lack of memory. It is impossible for this machine to do anything else than process the input word character per character because everything else would require something like a pointer (which is impossible without a memory) and a means to save the input word in a buffer. It can also not add characters to the input word because that, too, would require a buffer.
There is also the NFA, which is the non-deterministic variant. Starting with the same state and input character it can have several states to choose from which means it's not predictable how it will process the input word.
Both automatons can be used to recognize languages. You just mark some states of the automaton as accept-states and every input word for which the automaton will stop on an accept state is per definition part of the language. It is obvious that such primitive machines are not capable of modelling all languages. Take a language for instance that consists of all words formed from the letters a and b where the number of "a"s is the same as the number of "b"s. Because neither the NFA nor the DFA has a memory, they are incapable of counting, thus they are incapable of modelling this language.
A language they can model is the language that consists of all words that start with an a, followed by an arbitrary number of "b"s and end with an "a". An automaton to model this language could be the following
NOTATION: The first item in the parentheses is the state that the automaton is in before processing the input character, the second item is the input character. After the arrow is the state that the automaton will be in after processing the data. It is clear that this is deterministic and finite.
So if the automaton gets the input word aba, it would start in state Start and go to state A after processing the 1st character. After processing the second character it would still be in state A. After processing the 3rd character it would enter the state Finish and stop (because no more input). That the automaton stopped on Finish means that the word "aba" has been accepted by the automaton, which is correct as "aba" is a word that complies with the specifications. Let's take the word "ab". This is not compliant with our language because it does not end with an a. In this case the automaton would stop in state A, which is not an accept state. So the word has been rejected. The word "bbb" would be rejected, too, because the automaton would enter the Error state which is not an accept state.
A question that is now interesting to computer scientists is whether NFAs can describe more languages than DFAs. This is the same question as the NP=P question. Does the automaton's non-determinism give it more power, make it accept more words? Unlike the NP=P question which has not been solved so far (I'm just too lazy to write the proof and I don't want to be famous anyway, if you're interested in the answer, it's NP!=P as one would expect), this question can be answered. Surprisingly NFAs and DFAs are equivalent. Every NFA can be transformed into a DFA that accepts the same language.
Another interesting fact is that the languages described by DFAs/NFAs are the same that can be described with regular expressions, i.e. for every regular expression you can build a DFA that matches the same words.
Let's get back to the original topic, the halting problem. The halting problem (and its insolvability) Phill has heard about somewhere is the halting problem for Turing Machines (TMs).
Turing Machines are really cool machines. They have an assembly line that carries colored plates with letters on them. And there's a grabber that rotates and grabs one of those plates and puts it on the analysing pod. Then the analyser (which has lots of funny lights), comes in - whooosh! - and it analyses the letter on the colored plate. Depending on the current state of the machine, the internal rule table defines a new state and a new letter. If the letter has been changed, there's a bright flash of light as the transformer writes a new letter on the plate and changes its color. Then the grabber puts it back on the assembly line which moves to bring a new input into position for the grabber. Well, at least this is what the TM looks like in the TM simulator that I programmed because some of the folks in my lecture had trouble understanding the mathematical definition of a TM.
I have put the TM simulator on my Freeware page at
http://www.cip.physik.uni-muenchen.de/~benkmann
if you're interested.
The main difference between a DFA and TM is that the TM has memory, and lots of it, too. It possesses infinite storage. Because the TM has memory, it can describe more languages than the DFA. But the language aspect is less important for TMs. TMs can not only be used to recognize languages, they can also be used to do computations. Included with my Turing machine simulator for instance I have a TM that multiplies any binary number put on its assembly line by 3 (defining this TM was actually the homework for one of my CS lectures).
Because the TM has memory and thus can go back and forth on its data and because of the infinite length of its storage, a Turing machine can enter infinite loops, meaning it will periodically run through the same states over and over again. But this is not all. A TM can compute PI, meaning it will never enter a periodic cycle but it won't stop either because PI has an infinite number of digits and is not periodic. The halting problem for TMs is the question whether a given TM will stop for a given input on the assembly line.
It is generally assumed that the halting problem is unsolvable. To those who have some knowledge in the matter it will appear strange that I say "assumed" because there is actually a proof for its unsolvability. All that this proof does prove, however, is that a Turing Machine cannot solve the halting problem for Turing Machines. As a side note I want to mention that a DFA cannot solve the halting problem for DFAs (but a TM can solve the halting problem for DFAs).
To arrive at the statement that the halting problem for TMs is unsolvable (meaning that no mathematical method exists to do it), we require Church's theory which (in simplified form) says that all computations that can be done with our mathematical methods can be performed by a TM. This is a THEORY. It's NOT proven. It is generally accepted because all machine models, language description schemes and all mathematical functions that have been tested so far were computable with a TM. This is no proof, though.
Maybe someone rememebers what I wrote some time ago about the fact that mathematics can prove that it cannot prove its own correctness. This is a related issue. If the TM is NOT capable of doing all computations (i.e. if Church's theory is wrong) we may eventually prove that. If however Church's theory is true, then we will never prove it because by doing that we would prove that mathematics is correct. How? Well, if we had a proof of Church's theory, we would know that all we can do with mathematics can be done by a Turing Machine. A TM is a machine that can actually be built. It doesn't even require silicon. It could be built purely mechanical without electronics. This means that a TM has the highest form of physical reality (as opposed to mathematical reality). Therefore a TM cannot be contradictory (we assume that mechanics and hence our whole existence is not contradictory). Therefore mathematics cannot be contradictory.
The conclusion of this is that should we ever prove Church's theory and hence the correctness of mathematics we have actually disproved the correctness of mathematics because the proof contradicts the other proof that says mathematics cannot prove its own correctness (Does this start to sound like THGTTG? May Peter Jones rest in peace) Of course another possible interpretation would be that mechanics and thus our whole existance is contradictory which would actually mean that mathematics is correct because it is incorrect.
There is yet another scenario. What if Church's theory is true but someone builds a TM that solves the halting problem, nonetheless. And what if our universe is NOT contradictory. If this were the case than turning this TM on, would create a localized illogicality phenomenon, a point of pure chaos. It would quickly spread till it encompasses the whole universe and turns it back to the state that it was in before the Big Bang. If I take the theory I presented in
"How to create a universe the elegant way or If I was God I wouldn't get my hands dirty" (look it up with DejaNews, if you haven't read it)
as a basis, this would mean the complete de-evolution of the universe. Consequently, the person to build such a machine would not only be the anti-christ, he would be the ANTI-GOD! And now we're getting to the point. I HAVE BUILT THIS MACHINE! I AM THE ANTI-GOD! BOW TO ME AND SERVE ME OR I WILL DE-EVOLVE THE UNIVERSE!
MWUHAHAHAHA!! MSB
p.s.: Too bad no-one is going to read through all of this. Guess, I'll have to wait till I have my own tv show and issue my demands again.
---- They couldn't conquer the world. Now they're out to corrupt our kids! Dirty Drawings from Deutschland...Next on
8< SNIP a lot of interestin, although hard to understand stuff >8
+>Consequently, the person to build such a machine would not only be +>the +>anti-christ, he would be the ANTI-GOD!
Cool :)
+>And now we're getting to the point. +>I HAVE BUILT THIS MACHINE! I AM THE ANTI-GOD! BOW TO ME AND SERVE ME +>OR I WILL DE-EVOLVE THE UNIVERSE!
Well, how do you bow down to the Anti-God? Something like: "Nobody Un-Hail the Destroyer!" ?
+> +>MWUHAHAHAHA!! MSB +> +>p.s.: Too bad no-one is going to read through all of this. Guess, +>I'll have to wait till I have my own tv show and issue my demands +> again.
Hey, I read through all (okay, most) of it...
+>---- +>They couldn't conquer the world. Now they're out to corrupt our +>kids! +>Dirty Drawings from Deutschland...Next on +> +>http://www.informatik.uni-muenchen.de/~benkmann/artwork/index.html
So, where are those "Dirty Drawings"? All I found were some tasteful pictures of Daria & Co. Just how do you match the style of Daria so well?
On Mon, 17 Apr 2000 15:48:27 GMT, [email] (The lone Wanderer) wrote:
A friend of mine who mailed MTV not so long ago says they'll start airing Daria again Mondays 2330, starting with 11 May. They'll rerun seasons 1-3 and then air 4. You do know you can get the episodes via RealVideo already, do you?
Of course they're tasteful by our standards. We don't have people who call for a boycott of Disney's The Little Mermaid because she's too sexy in Germany.
Hard looking and a lot of erasing and redrawing. MSB
p.s.: Could you please change your quoting characters. Those "+"s make me dizzy.
---- They couldn't conquer the world. Now they're out to corrupt our kids! Dirty Drawings from Deutschland...Next on
Leafing through the book of worlds, I found that MSB had written the following on Mon, 17 Apr 2000 20:21:25 GMT :
Yup, I know... but I'm too lazy to save them and cart them home for viewing (no, my Computer does not have a modem... since the PC-Pool of the University is open from 8:00 to 24:00 and just 5 minutes away), besides the quality of those (season 1) episodes I loaded wasn't that good... I'd rather read the transcript than bother with the real-video...
Hmm, must've missed those loonies...
Ah, the normal procedure :)
Ok :) I don't even remember why I'd changed them...
A lone Wanderer ([email])
Who, according to the "Tough Guide to Fantasyland", is neutral (with evil tendencies), takes little part in the action, can generally be expected to be nice and is bold and humorous, but not necessarily good.
Actually, I think those people who chose to boycott Disney had other reasons than the skimpy seashell bra. It turns out that if you watch the wedding scene closely and slowly enough (read: you have WAY too much time on your hands) the priest that is performing the marriage appears to have an erection. (Still not a good reason to boycott the whole company, IMHO.) Disney claims "It's his knee"...but I guess you'd have to see it for yourself. They had a whole news segment on TV once.
On Wed, 19 Apr 2000 13:54:20 -0700, Violator's Toad wrote:
In the Lion King, Simba runs to the edge of the cliff to see the vision of his father, and when he stops at the edge he kicks up some dust. Play it in slo-mo, that dust spells "SHIT", then "SEX"
In Aladdin, there is a season where he's on Princess Jasmine's balcony, and her tiger is edging closer to him. He backs away, the camera looks to something else but you can here him mumbling words in the background, and you assume he's talking away the tiger. Listen carefully, you'll here "Gooood teenagers....takeofftheirclothes". Kyle
Programming was originally taught very poorly in schools, though the situation may have changed over the years. But when I started learning programming at university, we were told the course should be considered an introductory course if we hadn't been exposed to programming at school, and a remedial course if we had, since the stuff taught in schools was considered by the lecturers to be worse than useless. This was in the heyday of "gotos considered harmful" though. I think one of the problems was that schools were teaching people programming using flowcharts and primitive dialects of Basic, whereas if you went into the typical software house you'd have found that flowcharts were completely banned - they certainly were in one big computer firm where I worked for a while. As a result, flowchart templates were like gold dust, and if anyone had one they kept it well hidden, since they were literally unobtainable.
I hope you didn't let it get to you. If it's any comfort, it's not just the girls that get treated bad; I know some of my schoolmates made high school a lot more hellish, and it was mostly the males. I can just feel my Y-chromosome swelling with pride...
Heh. A kindred spirit. I've had the same desires (although I've never played Xenogears), although your education in such matters probably far exceeds mine at this stage.
Yeppers; the misery gets spread around pretty well in high school. I'm lucky enough to go to a school where most of the kids don't really care enough to give me hell, though.
..my education is _quite_ third-rate in such matters...
Ah... it _is_ high school. I wasn't sure (missed the original message).
If you end up going CS (_not_ MIS -- they seem to get all the frat-boy marketing majors in search of stock options and their Budweiser fantasies), I can pretty much guarantee that you'll get support. On the other hand, you'll probably get obsessive near-worship from some socially inept guys. If you go to an engineering school, I _will_ guarantee it. :)
Heh... one of these days they ought to do a study. At least 90% of the people I know in the department here got into CS originally because they wanted to write a game. Hope you do it! We can always use good RPG games.
On Wed, 12 Apr 2000 08:02:27 -0400, Don Morris wrote:
Heh. I have many friends in the computer field (mostly male), and they're *always* complaining of the lack of women in computers. A particular friend of mine pictures his ideal woman as a female systems analyst. It doesn't help of course, that he's quite socially inept.. as a few of the computer/engineering people are. Believe me, the very idea of a female doing computers or engineering will send hundreds of males to worship at your feet :)
Cheers, Nicole Lee
http://www.neekole.com
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny..." -- Isaac Asimov
"No, no, no, Lisa. If adults don't like their jobs, they don't go on strike. They just go in every day and do it really half-assed." -- Homer Simpson
Daria Code: A D T3 Ws Q+ FN^Fr O- OH+Oo+Od m- c+++ MV C5X F:111,213,313,406 BB- FCD +DT q fN
Damn... don't tell my thesis prof. that. He'll make me do something ELSE for 2 years to get out of here. :P
Actually, while I'm certainly not going to say that programming != CS, I hope _you_ aren't going to tell me that you don't think CS people never program [excepting the people I can't understand who think coming up with new ways of showing that something is in NP is fun... *shudder*]
So, to defend my original point - while everyone who wants to code a game doesn't go into CS programs, 90% of the people _I know_ in the department here originally went into CS to pick up the skills to make a good game.
On Thu, 13 Apr 2000 08:17:38 -0400, Don Morris wrote:
Don't worry. Whatever prejudices I have against CS people, I don't have them without reason. I study CS myself. CS guys may do programming, but the focus lies on the theory behind the programs. That's the difference in thinking between a programmer and a computer scientist. The programmer sees computer science as a tool to write better programs. The computer scientist sees programming as a tool to demonstrate scientific results. It's like physics and mathematics. The problem is that while you can choose between maths and physics, I don't think there are many colleges that differentiate between programming and CS, so all the programmers end up in CS. And for the record, I only study CS because it is easier and less time-consuming than mathematics. I changed my major from mathematics to CS (I do have a degree in maths, though) and I feel like a loser for doing so. So I fit neither of the above categories. I was a programmer once but you can't study maths for 3 years without changing your attitude about theory. Now I fit neither category anymore. I think programmers care too little for CS and computer scientists care too little for mathematics and mathematicians care too little for programming. There's no group I really feel at home with :-(
LOL. What a ridiculous idea. Going through all that CS theory to write a game? How naive can someone be. If you ever try to apply for a job at a computer games company, you better not emphasize your CS studies too much. I've read that in an interview with an executive from such a company (I don't remember the name). They prefer the people who started at age 12, teaching themselves how to write a little Tetris clone to the ones who started at age 20 with CS at college because they hoped the lectures would turn them into game programmers. MSB
---- They couldn't conquer the world. Now they're out to corrupt our kids! Dirty Drawings from Deutschland...Next on
On Tue, 11 Apr 00 21:44:53 GMT, [email] (Mindy) wrote:
The binary spoiler space was pretty obvious. Someone who does that is either into programming or electronics and programming is just more likely.
BASIC is fun to play around with but little else. Like most people who have still witnessed home-computer times I started with BASIC (I feel so old :-). Whenever I get my hands on a home-computer emulator (or better, the actual thing), the first thing I instinctively do is type
10 goto 10 run
Bah. Forget courses. You're not going to learn programming at college. Programming is like masturbating. Learning by doing and when you've mastered it, it's a hell of a lot of fun :-)
Confidence is the key. Or should I rather say a healthy dose of arrogance and ambition. It's hard to learn that, of course. Try thinking about it. Why do you think you can't do it? Is it because you don't have Java experience? What's to it? It's not like learning German or French. Or is it your general lack of experience? Why does that matter? What do you think will happen? Do you think you'll get stuck somewhere, not knowing how to go on. That's what I'm for.
I wouldn't call it "huge" in the sense of complex. I think the proper word is time-consuming. And I don't expect you to design the project. I need a person who can implement the actual methods for the class interfaces I design. That's nothing difficult. That's nothing that requires 10 years programming experience. But it takes time, time I should be spending on the artwork for the game and the general program design. I really think you can do it. You'll just learn how to do it as we go along. You can't expand your horizon if you don't try running towards it. MSB
---- They couldn't conquer the world. Now they're out to corrupt our kids! Dirty Drawings from Deutschland...Next on
That's a real shame because Pascal is a good language to lerna as a first IMHO, teaches you a lot of good practice that for the sake of agument BASIC does not. Also I think it's probably a lot more easily understandable than say C for a beginner (none of that weird syntax that you can use in C).
No, I have to disagree with this, there is a hell of a lot of plain C out there, so being able to understand it is pretty usefull. Depending of course on what you eventually want to do as a programmer.
Actually some Basic implementations are pretty good SuperBasic on the Sinclair QL, had procedures/functions that could be called by name, and passed parameters (for example), propper loop control and the like so once I got used to it I *NEVER* used GOSUB/GOTO (ok, maybe GOTO on very rare occasions).
For me it was fun to go into Dixons (or whatever computer store is near you) and type :-
10 PRINT "Phill was here ! "; 20 GOTO 10
LOL :)
Courses may be able to teach you some of the basic concepts, but yes programing is something you get better at by doing it.
<beavis> mehehehe and then he said 'masturbation' hehehe that was cool. </beavis>
PROCEDURE Spank(Monkey : Penis);
VAR Strokes : INTEGER;
BEGIN;
Strokes=0;
WHILE (NOT Come) DO
BEGIN;
StrokeUp(Monkey);
StrokeDown(Monkey);
Write('Ah ah!');
IF ((Strokes DIV 10)=0) THEN WriteLn('Yes!');
END;
END;
I guess that's not what you had in mind :)
D-tag ?
Yeah just look at Bill Gates prime example....though I seriously doubt he's written any code of great significance in the last 10 years.
Of which I am very glad, I'm crap at languages....even English :)
Yes often if stuck on a programing problem (usually Delphi these days) I'll post on one of the comp. newsgroups and often get helpfull replies.
Then again programming projects are imfamous for being much more complex than they appear at first sight :)
And small pieces in a big project may be a good way of learing new methods of coding....and the like.
Phill....who realised the other day that he has been coding for over half of his life now....that makes me feel old :)
Suddenly realised that this should be something like this :-
PROCEDURE Spank(Monkey : Penis);
VAR Strokes : INTEGER;
BEGIN;
Strokes=0;
WHILE (NOT Come) DO
BEGIN;
StrokeUp(Monkey);
StrokeDown(Monkey);
Strokes:=Strokes+1;
Write('Ah ah!');
IF ((Strokes DIV 10)=0) THEN WriteLn('Yes!');
END;
END;
Good to see you noticed it, too. You still forgot the ":=". Equal signs are something you get an eye for when you're doing C(++). Writing "=" instead of "==" can cause the loss of many nights of sleep trying to find the bug. MSB
---- They couldn't conquer the world. Now they're out to corrupt our kids! Dirty Drawings from Deutschland...Next on
Yeah I believe you are right there....I think the Borland compilers tried to be self consistent with each other (C, C++, Pascal etc), I presume that GNU assumes you know what you are doing......and it is valid in some circumstances to have an = within an if :-
if ((InFile=fopen("/dev/hda","r"))!=NULL) { }
For example.... though admitedly it's the !=NULL that will set the condition :)
On 15 Apr 2000 13:29:39 +0100, [email] (Phill Harvey-Smith) wrote:
That's why Turbo C wouldn't give an error here. Only if you use = for the condition like in
void* Mem; void* Mem2; /* some code here* / if (Mem=Mem2) { /* some code here */ }
Here, the compiler should issue a warning. I actually wouldn't mind an error. I think the designers of C++ should have removed the support for this. It's typical C-obfuscation.
Mem=Mem2; if (Mem!=NULL) { }
is a lot more understandable, especially to programmers who don't use C. I like to write code that programmers of other languages understand, too. Who knows, maybe there'll be some Pascal programmer who wants to look at my code.
MSB
---- They couldn't conquer the world. Now they're out to corrupt our kids! Dirty Drawings from Deutschland...Next on
Which I suppose is understandable, as it is perfectly valid code and probably what you intended :)
Yeah that's one of the reasons I like Pascal, is that this sort of thing cannot happen, though it does preclude the open a file and test successfull that I use in C (as above). Then again Pascal is more strongly typed, and designed not to have this sort of obscurity. I once heard it said that C is a write only language, because you can do things like this in it....I wouldn't go as far as to say all C, just badly written C....
That's true :) Though most of the Pascal programmers I know have also used C....now what if a COBOL programmer wants to read it :)
<Apology> For uttering the word COBOL....twice ! </Apology>
On 16 Apr 2000 02:37:14 +0100, [email] (Phill Harvey-Smith) wrote:
Yeah. If you take a Pascal program and run it through a PAS2C converter the code will remain as readable as before. If that converter used #defines you would actually have a hard time, telling it's C code. You could go so far to do #define WriteLn printf #define GetMem malloc ....
and even a Pascal programmer would have to look really hard to notice it's C code.
COBOL programmer? Isn't that an oxymoron? Aren't those the guys who invented the y2k bug just to make money and secure their jobs? MSB
---- They couldn't conquer the world. Now they're out to corrupt our kids! Dirty Drawings from Deutschland...Next on
Never used Pas2C, have to give it a go at some point and see what it produces.....
Heheheh.
Hehehe yeah actually I have a friend that is a COBOL programmer....though I still maintain that COBOL is ok for processing large amounts of fixed record data :)
Humm add a command to move to the top left of the screen before each print, and a condition to terminate the loop and you have the basis for the counter from my joke bomb program (one of my firstish Pascal programs). I'll post the source if anyone is interested, though the code is a bit crap...I have improved a lot in the last 13 years since I wrote it...
I couldn't agree more. Pascal is the perfect language for beginners. But the bad course was no harm done in my case. I already knew Pascal before I went to that class. I went there just to see what it's like. Pascal was the first language I did any serious programming with and I used it for over 5 years before I switched to C++ because it has the better OOP concepts and is more portable.
How can you understand C++ code but not understand plain C code? If you learn C++, you learn C, too. But you won't pick up the bad habits. After all, C++ is (mostly) a superset of C. I for instance started right with C++ and I have no problems reading C code. And if my word isn't enough for you, the C++ FAQ sees it the same way.
Of course that's not BASIC in the original sense anymore. The BASIC you're talking about is as much BASIC as Java is C++.
A little egomaniac, are we, huh?
<nitpicker mode> That's supposed to be a ":=" not a "=". Provided this is Pascal code and not C code that's gonna be run through a weird pre-processor. No, wait. Judged by the uppercasing of the keywords, could this be Modula? Of course, even then it would have to be ":=" as Pascal=Modula - Dogmatism </nitpicker mode>
Where's the "INC(Strokes);" ? Without it you could write "IF (TRUE)" just as well.
Daria-the adventure game. It's a project I tried to get support for from the group last summer. I failed. No one wanted to help. Even the flow of ideas was just a little trickle. I was very disappointed and eventually put it on hold indefinitely.
He bought the code for DOS. That was the most significant thing he did. I'd really like to know what became of the original programmers. They probably committed suicide. Seeing someone make millions with a program you created and sold for just 50000 bucks must be unbearable.
Yeah. That's the advantage females (and people with female brains) have. Unfortunately I pay for my language abilities with a numeric deficiency.
Tell me about it! It's especially a problem if you want more and more features as you go along.
If I don't count my homecomputer days (that wasn't programming, that was dabbling) that roughly applies to me, too. I'm 23 now, how old are you? MSB
---- They couldn't conquer the world. Now they're out to corrupt our kids! Dirty Drawings from Deutschland...Next on
Fortunatly my Pascal lecturer at college was reasonably good, and supported people like myself that wanted to race ahead and learn things other than what he was teaching :)
Though bothe the portability and OO are addressed by the more recent GNU & FreePascal compilers...both of which are (mostly) Borland compatible. I believe the GNU one will run on pretty much anything that will run GNU C/C++ as I believe it uses the same backend....which means pretty much most unixes, Dos, Win32...and also I believe MacOS :)
That's not what I said :)
Maybe but What I meant was learning C is not nesceseraly a waste of time, IMHO, and as long as you know the differences that is what is what is important I suppose. Than again C/C++ isn't my normal first choice of language....though I do considder myself a reasonable C coder :)
No maybe not but that is what it was marketed as :) Than again if all basics where like SuperBasic then perhaps it wouldn't have got such a slating for all the bad habits it teaches people.
Hey I was only 12 at the time :)
Another favorate of mine on the Oric computer which had BASIC keywords for the sounds : ZAP, PING, SHOOT, EXPLODE was the following :-
10 DELAY 5000 20 ZAP 30 GOTO 20 run
Then scarper to a safe distance and watch the sales droid try and figure out how to kill it :)
DOH ! true. Then again it could be pascal like Psudo-code :)
No it is Pascal, I just have my own unique capitalisation scheme :) use it to a lesser extent in C as well.
I always feel that Var:=Var+1 is clearer to me...also easier to modify if you later need to change it to increment in jumps of 2 :) Sorry I just realised you meant I had not incremented at all....yes I followed up my own post and ammended it :)
And If you are gonna write :-
IF (TRUE) THEN Blah !
You might as well write
Blah !
:)
Ah could maybe be done....how about a TC for something Like DOOM ? Though the group seemd to think that was a bad idea IIRC :)
His claim to fame is co-writing the basic interpreter for the TRS-80 I believe (cirtainly one of the computers of that generation if not the 80).
The really amzing thing about Dos 1, is that iw will run in 12K :) and do usefull work in 16K....then again it was pretty much pure asmbler back then :) I wonder how much of that original Dos code still exists in Windows 9x ?
I'm ok with maths...not much cop at mental arithmetic tho...that's why I have a computer :) yes I can do it on pen and paper it just takes me longer :)
Indeed :)
Humm since I started doing programming at school before I bought a home computer I do...even though it was a ZX81 back then :) did some mucking about in asm on that too....so it wasn't all BASIC :)
I'm 31...as of 21/03/2000....so just old enough to have been at the right age when the home computer revoloution was taking place.
On 14 Apr 2000 00:29:26 +0100, [email] (Phill Harvey-Smith) wrote:
Too bad the IDE is still beta. At least that's what I saw on the website last time I looked.
which isn't an advantage for the OO concepts. When I decided I wanted to make the switch to OOP, I had to choose between either continuing with Pascal or switching to C++. I would have liked to stay with Pascal but C++'s design just seemed better. Portability wasn't an issue for me back then but now I do appreciate that I can just recompile my programs under Linux and they'll work.
Even when you have the option of learning C++ right away?
Are all boys egomaniacs at that age?
Do you want to know a cool trick. It works under Windows 95. I don't know about 98 or 2000. Click on the Start button. Press ALT-keypad_minus and then select "close" in the menu that pops up. Poof! The Start button is gone. Then you can wait and watch how people start searching around for it. Best done on school computers of course. The only way to get it back without rebooting is to restart the explorer but few people know how to do that.
Do you use "#define BEGIN { " for your C programs? I used to have "#define begin {" because I don't like all-caps. But now that I started using the STL, this doesn't work anymore because it defines functions begin() and end(). I thought about going to the standard { and } but it gives the code such a ragged edge, making it uncomfortable to run your eyes down the code. In the end I decided that it might be a nice idea to use block start and end markers that convey a message and I decided to use the 2 principles that I value most, honesty and justice. I shortened them because the long words made the code look so heavy.
Now my C++ code looks like this
if Count==10 then honest /* do stuff */ just;
You may notice that I use macros for "if" too, that allow me to leave away the parentheses around the condition and add a "then". Now don't tell me you have ever seen weirder C++ code. Note to the people interested in my programming course: Of course I'll not teach this weird stuff. You'll learn how to write ordinary, internationally acceptable code. I'll let you develop your own individual peculiarities.
I think the inc(x) syntax is a relic from the times when compilers didn't optimize code. It's supposed to compile to faster code. The x86 for instance has an inc command. On processors before the 386, this command saves one clock cycle in comparison to the add command. And it requires less space in the prefetch queue and requires one less byte to be transferred over the bus. Oh, I feel memories resurfacing about the time when I was a cycle-counter who did everything in Assembler. That was fun. I used to reverse-engineer code to hack out copy protections or shareware limitations. I still remember doing VGACOPY6. That was a hard one. I think the program had self-decompressing and verifying code so you couldn't set breakpoints. Argh! How paranoid can someone be about his program being cracked? I did it eventually, using the 386 hardware breakpoints. Amateur. He should have blocked those, too. The only time I failed was with the hockey game Face Off (cool game, after beating up another player you could jump on him while lying on the floor and give him some extra punches in the face. God, I loved this game.) I found and eliminated the copy protection but then the goalie wouldn't drop the puck. It was so weird. But the coolest thing I ever did was writing my own cracker protection. It was a Huffman-compression-based self-decompressor that worked in 386 protected mode, PLAIN protected mode, no Windows, no DOS, no VCPI, no DPMI, no nothing. You have to handle all the segment descriptors and page tables yourself, basically like writing your own 32-bit operating system. And debugging this is impossible (that was the intent, it was supposed to be the perfect cracker-protection). I think even SoftICE can't work in plain protected mode. So whenever something didn't work, the machine would reboot and I'd have to find the bug just by looking at the code. BTW, I found a bug (or let's rather say behaviour not documented in any of my info) in the 386 in the process. Can you imagine how frustrating it is to look for a bug in your code only to find out after spending much time that it's the processor's fault? Oops, sorry I'm boring you. I was lost in my memories for a moment. Happens to me sometimes when I write stuff this late in the evening.
Never heard of inc(x,2) ?
Speaking of this, what do you prefer
while true do begin (*stuff*) end;
or
repeat (*stuff*) until false;
I always liked the second variant better. I'm more the until type than the while type (need I mention that I use repeat-until-macros for C++?) but most people seem to prefer the first method.
As far as I remember the group was in favor of the idea. But if I ever do a Doom TC it's going to be a Metal Gear TC. And I'm not talking about the Playstation Metal Gear. I'm talking about the original game for the MSX 2. My favorite game. I played it again on an emulator just a while ago.
The basic interpreter used in the MSX computer family (the MS is even for Microsoft, AFAIK) is from Microsoft. I thought it was the only good thing they've ever done but when I started writing an MSX emulator and did some tracing with the Z80 debugger I programmed into the emulator, I found a bug in the graphics routines. And it seems that in all those years and with several MSX emulators in existence I'm the only one who ever found that bug. Talk about me having an eye for the negative things in life.
That would be cool. DOS 1 and even DOS 2 existed for the MSX, btw. Have I mentioned that the MSX was the best home-computer, despite the Microsoft code :-) Ahh, the good old times. I miss them.
I have real trouble with numbers (or is that trouble with real numbers :-). My memory can't retain 2-digit numbers for a minute. And that's no joke. MSB
---- They couldn't conquer the world. Now they're out to corrupt our kids! Dirty Drawings from Deutschland...Next on
Bah, who needs an IDE, IDEs are for whimps :) Ok yeah a good IDE is helpfull to a begginner, hell it's helpfull to an experienced programmer :) One of the things I liked about the Borland compilers was the ability (cirtainly with Pascal, can't remeber if C also did it), to single step the code, set breakpoints/watches etc.
Ah if only Delph had been around at the time, though that of course is only any good for Win programming :(
Well most of the time and assuming you have not used any windows API calls, you also sometimes need to re-write things a little as they work differently under Lunux/Unix as well.
Depends what you want to do with it I suppose...to be fair I've never really looked at C++, the only example I have seen of a bigish C++ program was the Wolfenstein 3D source, which is IMHO a real mess in places....I admire John Carmack(sp?) for being a good programmer, but I'll say this his coding style cirtainly got better Wolf->Doom->Quake :)
They seemed to be, cirtainly this was quite a common occoracnce with the Phill replaced by someone else's name....or alternatly the whole message replaced with some insulting message :)
Couldn't get it to work on Joanne (she is running Win98), will try it on one of the Win95 machines at work tho....
That's mean :) That's why computing support types install things like Fortress to try and lock down the machines, which just ends up with the machines getting even more knackered with people's attempts to un-protect them :)
Nope I'm lazy so I use { & } as they are less typing :) what I do tend to do is :-
if (condition) { do something }
rather than
if (condition) { do something }
As I find it makes it easier to spot where you put one to many or too few braces :)
STL ?
Yeah that's reasonable :)
Yeah, I tend to be a bit over-zealous with brackets, I basically never let the compiler assume anything about operator presedence...at least If I put brackets in I know for cirtain which bit gets evaluated first :) Never really used macros tho :(
Heheheh :)
Which is how it should be....I bet if we sat down to write the same program in the same language we could produce two sets of code that accepted the same inputs, gave the same outputs but the code looked totally different.
That's entirely possible...
This is all indeed true.
Never cycle counted, but then again I never did anything that needed to be that time critical :)
You hacker you :) Actually that's also one of the reasons I learnt assembler......
Unless he wrote it on a 286, in which case he wouldn't have been able to turn them off :) Yeah ok he could detect processor type and turn them off, but it's hard to test that something will run on hardware you don't have access to :)
Yeah I've found bugs like that in games that I have hacked, like giving yourself infinite lives, can sometimes cause the game to go into an infinite loop, because you don't die :)
Yeah that would have made it hard to follow, with anything less than an in-circuit processor emulator/single stepper, which would cost big money.
Yes, or alternatly when things that MS say should work a cirtain way don't and you spend time chasing the bug in your code only to find it's the OS's fault :)
Nah no probs.
Humm didn't know you could do that (just tested it and appatently, you can, well at least in Turbo Pascal 5.5 anyways), sitll prefer the other way though, as it is also more portable accross languages :)
In Pascal I use repeat..until more often, for most types of I dunno how many times I need to do this loops :), unless I definatly don't want it to execute at least once :)
Dunno anything PSX, I try and stear clear of consoles these days...yeah the older games are often the best....that's why I like emulators as well :)
Yeah a lot of the 80's home computers used MS basic, cirtainly the Dragon 32 did, though the Sinclairs didn't, neither did the Commodores.
:)
How so, co-processor board ? or was it just MSX DOS which was similar but not the same as MS/PC dos....then again being Z80 based it could be CP/M
The MSX was a great idea, lots of manufacturers working to the same standards, unfortunatly it was about 10 years too early, and what have we got that does that now the wonderous PC....if only IBM had used the 68000, and put the expansion area at the bottom of the memory map, then we'd have noe of those damn 640k probs :)
Yeah me too :)
I can rember things like hex addresses in programs days later, but it took me 6 months once to rember my phone number, which I suppose is reasonable, as you very rarly call yourself :)
On 15 Apr 2000 14:08:26 +0100, [email] (Phill Harvey-Smith) wrote:
Helpful? Any code developed without an IDE has 10 times more bugs than code developed with an IDE, simply because debugging without an IDE is so painful that most programmers will rather accept a higher bug-count than do some serious debugging. But who works without an IDE anymore, anyway? Even *nixers have their emacs. I certainly will rather stop programming completely than ever do it without an IDE.
Doesn't Delphi have the same OOP extensions as TP 6.0+ ?
I'm using DJGPP for DOS and Cygwin for Windows so it is really just a matter of recompiling.
I don't know where I've put my Wolf3D sources at the moment but as far as I remember it's not really object-oriented.
Is Joanne the name of your computer? Is she named after that boa (which would mean she's not very old) from IHON?. I take it female names are very uncommon for computers. I must admit that my computer doesn't have a name. I do name my HD partitions, though. They get female names. Of course that's only logical as the gender of the word "partition" is female in German (as is that of "hard disk").
Hey, it's their own fault if they spend time looking around for it. Why don't they just choose reboot?
Standard Template Library. One of the newest features of C++. It contains all kinds of useful stuff, like classes for linked lists or strings. All the stuff you need to replace the most error-prone C-specialties like malloc(), char* and arrays.
operator precedence in C is totally screwed. << which is a multiplication after all has lower precedence than + and you can't do any binary operations without parentheses because they have the completely wrong precedence, especially compared to ==. Those things are better in Pascal. In Pascal the compiler always interprets terms the way you expect it.
My reason for learning ASM was an article in a magazine about fast graphics. The listings were in assembler so I just learned it. I loved it so much that soon I did more stuff in assembler than in Pascal. My biggest piece of code is my Molecular Dynamics Simulator which I wrote for my graduation (that's high school, not university, we have high standards in Bavaria, not like those Prussian losers). It prints out to roughly 500 A4 pages. I really impressed my physics teacher with it. And only ONE (!!) bug has ever been found since release (and that was a minor one). I may not write the fastest or most intelligent code but concerning buglessness I'm sure I'm among the top-100 programmers on earth. In the top half.
Don't remind me. When I hacked Populous the modem support stopped working (I fixed that) and when I cheated on Ultima Underworld (which wasn't easy. You couldn't just modify the savegames. I had to use a TSR that reprograms the PIC to still get keystrokes after the game takes over keyboard control) to give me more strength to carry all that stuff around, the game started swallowing important items because the internal structures apparently couldn't manage all those items. Of course UU, like all Origin programs, was packed with bugs.
It was Motorola's fault. They've always had the best processor developers (unlike Intel who's always had the worst) but it's like they have lived and still live in another world. They seem to think that a superior product sells itself which is simply not true. When IBM said "Sorry, there are no cheap 16-bit periphery chips on the market so we can't use your 16-bit chip", the Motorola guys said "But it's the FUTURE. This chip can revolutionize computers. What's a few dollars more." whereas the Intel guys said "You want 8 bit? No problem, we'll just do an 8086SX version of our 8086 which will be 8-bit on the outside. It's a crutch but if you want it." Of course the 8086SX was called 8088. I just wanted to showcase the similarity to the 386SX and the 486SX. MSB
---- They couldn't conquer the world. Now they're out to corrupt our kids! Dirty Drawings from Deutschland...Next on
Humm I do some stuff with an IDE mostly the TurboPas/Delphi, but other stuff without, mostly ASM & GCC, you get the hang of tracking bugs without an IDE to do the work for you, I don't neseceraly thing that debugging without an IDE is that painfull once you get used to it :) then again that's just me I suppose :)
TP 7 I believe, though I also believe that they did change some things in Delphi.
Between those two yes....but I meant for example porting something from Unix to Dos/Win might need some changes for say device access, because the two OSs do it differently....normally all that's needed is an #ifdef round the relevant code :)
No and when I first looked at it I thought ugh ! they got away with this :) still I suppose all the public are genarally concerned with is the fact you get a great game... no I don't rember it being perticually OO, which is I believ why they switched to plain C for Doom & Quake.
One of my computers.....named after a friend of mine :)
Humm lets see we have aurigae...this machine, Joanne under the desk, Jane (the SGI) next to it, Amanda (another SGI), Daria & Trent who are Sun 3/60s, Ami who is a Sun IPC....Judith (IBM AT) & Olga (IBM XT)...so for me quite common, then again I'm a sad computer collector :) ou yeah amost forgot Quinn the Mac Plus.
Makes sense I suppose, though since I have a LAN at home the machines have to have names of some sort, and knowing that Jane is the sgi Is better than machine1...machine2 etc :)
I always thought it odd that hardware was always female in description... motherboard...daughter board etc...but backups male granfather...father son :)
[Snip!]
Ah makes more sense now :)
I still always force, in my mind it gives me peace of mind that it will do what I expect :)
My initial reason was the slowness of ZX81 basic....writing a game that ran at one frame per hour would not have been fun :)
If it works first time then the bugs must be more subtle :) Yeah I can imagine that if it's asm then yeah it could run to 500 pages.
Hey I don't mind where I come in that ranking, as long as it's above Bill G :)
Checksums or something ?
Yeah I once hacked a dragon game and found that after I did it (again pumping up stuff that was being carried by the player), that the data over-wrote part of the program resulting in......CRASH !
Though Intel where the first....
Also IBM where also producing a machine that was based on the 68K, that they didn't want to hurt the sales of....added to the fact that they thought the PC would fail :)
Well it's similar to the 386/386SX which was about busses, but the 486/486SX both have the same bus, the SX has no maths processor tho....so yes is still a cheaper cut down version.
Well I have Amy, aka Little Blue, which is an IBM Thinkpad 365X, Sody Pop which is a Mac Performa 460, and Brittany which is a Mac Classic. My late PCXT Clone with an NEC-built motherboard was Mariko. The Mac G3 I am in front of was originally referred to as Daria, but after showing its flakiness (not sure if it's inherent in the "Yosemite" motherboard or just System 8.5.1 flakiness) I renamed it Trent. Much of Trent's flakiness disappeared after this act, oddly.
Almost all my current computers are named for cartoon characters. There is also Dexter, named after the Boy Genius of "Dexter's Laboratory", which is a K5-166 homebuilt PC; Dilputer, named for Dilbert of the animated series and comic strip of the same name; and Jimmy, named after the Spumco signature character Jimmy The Idiot Boy, a Mac Classic II now living at a friend's house.
The only exception is The Catbox, a 5x86-133 based PC running DR-DOS and Slackware 4 Linux. If I ever network The Catbox in with a network, I will give it the name Felix there, but until then, it's The Catbox. I called it that because I put all kinds of unrelated s**t in that AT case and somehow it all worked together.
Let's hear it for anthropomorphising inanimate computing devices! --.\\<-H--
PS: Yes, I am a sad computer collector too. My collection can be viewed at http://www.msgeek.com/labs.html
Heheheh yeah Little Blue is a good name for that :)
Actually my Trent works better than Daria, well the hardware's just as reliable as they are effectivly the same machines (both 3/60s with 24Mb RAM etc), it's just Trent has a more modern OS NetBSD 1.4 as opposed to SunOS 4.1.1.... I also forgot the CD writer Beavis :)
I didn't think they ever made a K5-166 ? I was under the impression that the fastest K5 was a 100, it's not a K6 is it ? Ok maybe the K5-166 was not available in the UK, only in the US ?
The only other Mac I have is an LC which is without keyboard, mouse & monitor...must scour the computer shows and see if I can get these, as the LC would be more usable than the Plus.
Yeah I have a friend who has named her machine Littertray for much the same reason. Though I have a very old Altos 3068 Unix box that is named after one of my cats, Rascal.
Hheheheh
Will take a look....my rather out of date list is at :-
www.aurigae.demon.co.uk, mirrored at www.aurigae.clara.net
It isn't a K6...it really is a K5-166. There was a K5-133 as well as a K5-166. When those two chips came out, AMD was just coming out with the K6 series and was prolly pushing them harder. Actually from what I understand, the K5 chip is sort of a rare bird...they weren't used by any of the major proprietary companies and were only out for a couple of years at the most.
Actually what would make that LC usable would be an LCIII motherboard...the LC is a 68020 and sloooooow!
Humm ok, K5 > 100 probably didn't sell too well therefore there arn't many around, I stand corrected. I do have a frined that has a K5 tho, believe it's a 100.
But the MacPlus is only a 68000 so even slower, actually I only bought the Plus to have a play with a real Mac, as it was something that I had never used, never intended to do anything serious with it, but the LC was a gift from a mate that was gonna junk it, so it'd be nice to get it going, I do know that it works cause I hooked it up to one of my PC monitors and it produced a badly syncing picture, but it did boot :)
and 68020s an't that bad that's what the Sun/3s Daria & Trent use, though they are 25MHz, as opposed to 16MHz in the LC, and they arn't trying to run a graphical display, which I suppose helps :)
I find that in itself desturbing, so how do you call them in when you want them to come in ? for example. Besides computers if they are networked have to have a unique id, even if it is just the IP address, it's just that most people would find it easier to rember daria.warwick.ac.uk than 137.205.156.161 for example....
Y'know, it's funny. I'm used to being mistaken for a female over the phone constantly, and even fairly often in person (unless I haven't shaved for a while and I'm first seen from the front). But this has got to be the first time it's happened over a newsgroup in which I've already made my gender known.
Is the universe trying to tell me something? Am I really a woman trapped in a man's body? What would Mrs. Barch say?
BTW Glenn, no offense is taken as I'm quite used to that kind of error and never considered it insulting anyway. It's just... weird. :7
On Wed, 19 Apr 2000 10:38:34 -0500, [email] wrote:
Oh. Oops. I have a crappy memory. Sorry about that...
Well, it could be the nick is a sort of freudian message...
Based on what other rad-feminists have said, nothing kind. I am transgendered, and have heard a few of their words...
Some of the more moderate ones are supportive, but the radical ones think it's another symptom of patriarchal domination struggling to maintain oppressive concepts of femininity and women's roles.
Yeah, I know. Used to happen to me quite often. Personally, I found it more flattering than anything else, but from what I said above that should be understandable...
You mean "IdentityCrisis?" Actually, that was more of a self-targeted joke. When I first got online I tried various 30-day internet company trials, the first of which was Prodigy. When I was asked to choose a nick all the choices I tried were already taken. I got frustrated at being forced to keep picking online identities when all I wanted was to see what the internet was like, so I typed in "IdentityCrises" (I later corrected the spelling to the singular form) as a sardonic joke. It stuck, and I've kept the nick or some form of it ever since.
There's no pleasing some people. Oh well, the hell with them.
It is, although I wouldn't take it as far as you have. I'm quite happy as a heterosexual male, albiet one with "feminine" traits (let the radical feminists bitch! ;7 ).
We used to have a black cat called Black Cat, and a ginger cat called Ginger Cat, and there was also a fat cat called Bouncy, as he was shaped like a bouncy ball due to his barrel-like stomach (though I tried to get him renamed Fat Cat to comply with ISO naming conventions).
They did all originally have human-style names, but these fell into disuse in favour of the more sensible descriptive names and were eventually forgotten.
Black Cat actually used to get letters addressed to "Mr B. Cat". He was a very mysterious cat.
when we lived in greece we had a cat called "touti", so named because when my dad was a small child he would mispronounce 'gati' (cat) as 'touti'. our current cat inherited the name.
on a cat-related note, my 'friend' paul killed his cat. he left some fan switched on when leaving the house once, and the cat died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
On Mon, 17 Apr 2000 20:21:06 GMT, [email] (MSB) wrote:
Well, depending on where in the world one lives, one might call them "breakfast" and "dinner." ;-) I don't think that why he doesn't name them, though, I just wanted to point out that not everyone names everything for all sorts of reasons...
That said, though, I'll spare you the stories I used to hear about people eating "roof rabbits" aka "cats." ;-)
On 16 Apr 2000 03:07:57 +0100, [email] (Phill Harvey-Smith) wrote:
Oh no! My computers are going to hate me forever. Of course they have names in our LAN. Argh! How could I forget them. My 2 computers are Buddha and Shaolin. My brother's is named Goomba (The Goombas alone made the MB movie worth seeing). My dad's computer is named Hugo and my mom's is Angel. At the physics dept. they are named after mountains and the new computers at the CS dept. are named after trees and crystals as far as I remember. At the maths dept. they are just called math1, math2,... or sun1, sun2,...
I didn't start with Z80 asm until a few years ago when I wrote my MSX emulator. I never did any ASM back in my homecomputer days.
It never works the first time. I don't even bother starting a program right after I finish it. Every single line of code is traced at least once, every single variable is watched at least once and every single branch of an if-statement is taken at least once before one of my programs is allowed to run without a breakpoint.
I don't remember. I think I didn't find the appropriate locations. Even comparing before and after a value had changed didn't help. Maybe they used compression to reduce the size of the savegame.
<evil_cynicism_better_look_away> So what? The Romans might have been the first but the Nazis were more efficient. OTOH, the Romans did get the Messiah. </evil_cynicism_better_look_away>
The early 486SXs did have a copro (although a buggy one), the not-so-early-anymore 486SXs did have a copro (a functional one that was disabled but AFAIK could be reactivated with a very risky operation) and only the latest 486SXs didn't have a copro at all. MSB
---- They couldn't conquer the world. Now they're out to corrupt our kids! Dirty Drawings from Deutschland...Next on
Yeah at work unless the user directs us otherwise they get the departmental serial as a name, apart from servers & unix boxes, which it helps to have a meaningfull name for, as people generally connect to the remotely.
Oh and my mom's is Daniel (Asimov character for those who do not know).
Lernt some Z80 on the ZX81, but, changed to 6809, when I upgraded to a Dragon32, which was fortunate as Motorola asm always seems more logical and self consistent than Intel/Zilog, prolly why I prefer 68k over 80x86, none of that fiddly pratting about with segment registers.
My desision to run it after first successfull compile is largely based on how much dammage it can do if it does crash and burn....if it could format the hard disk then I step it, if it can only 'not work' then I'll normally run it.
That is entirely possible IIRC Wolf3d's data files where compressed to save space back then, but Doom and eveything since has used uncompressed data files.
Yeah but without wanting to offend anyone, I doubt either where entirely bad. Neither are intel, even though their procesors can be a pile of poo at times :)
All true, cirtainly the bit about 486SXs having a disabled co-pro, would make sense, as Intel would only have to make one chip. The point I was trying to make was that 386/386sx had different size busses, 486/486sx did not.
On 16 Apr 2000 22:03:56 +0100, [email] (Phill Harvey-Smith) wrote:
Mario Brothers. Those Nintendo plumbers. I take it from your comment that you haven't seen the movie. You should rent it. The Goombas are sooooo funny.
The 6809 is a cool processor. I considered building something with it some time ago. Powerful addressing modes.
Wolf3d just uses checksums. Look at the savegames. Too many repeating 0-s for compressed data.
ZDoom might use partially compressed files. They look densely packed and have different sizes. I'm to lazy to look at the source code to check right now, though. MSB
---- They couldn't conquer the world. Now they're out to corrupt our kids! Dirty Drawings from Deutschland...Next on
Oh those guys :) No not seen the movie but I have playied th original "Mario Brothers" video game. (ten point sof anyone that knows what game Mario origionally appeared in....).
I did build something with it, was gonna be a spedo/lap counter and stuff for go-carts never got finished tho, I do have the prototype around here somewhere tho....must put a picture of that on the web at some point :) Indeed and capable of limited 16bit arithmetic and IIEc the only 8 bitter with a propper multiply instruction.
The savegames may, but I believe that the actual game data, sprites and the like are compressed.
Humm that may also have been added after doom's source release, so may not be original ID code :) but yes they could well be.
Humm can't rember what the first one I beat was, probably "Scramble", but may have been some other, used to hang around arcades a lot when I was younger, I suppose one of the benifits of being a child of the 80's, now all you seem to get are boring street fighter clones and driving type games (some of which to be fair are not too bad).
If people are being ZX-spectrum nostalgic, they might want to check out the rather fabby ZX spectrum keyboard font (with every letter being the button that it was on the Spec's KB), over at acidcool.com - Z section. Oh, those 3 function buttons, memories, memories...
On Sat, 15 Apr 2000 22:33:00 GMT, [email] (MSB) wrote:
Wusses.
There's something almost magical about the high I get from finding the bug, after spending two hours in total frustration over it. (Almost as good as Calculus...)
On Sat, 15 Apr 2000 02:15:48 -0500, Glenn Olson wrote:
malloc(), char*, longjmp, arrays, global variables, functions with side effects, accessing structure members directly
to name just a few.
Do you know libpng, the reference implementation for reading and writing .PNG files? It's cumbersome and hard to maintain. Whenever a new feature has to be added you better pray it doesn't break something and keeping compatible to earlier versions is a real pain in the ass. A perfect example of how even good C programmers just can't produce clean code. And for libpng the speed excuse that C programmers like to use to defend bad code (although it's usually humbug) definitely doesn't count. BTW, just so that no one gets the wrong impression. (Non-OO) Pascal doesn't teach you better programming, either.
MSB
---- They couldn't conquer the world. Now they're out to corrupt our kids! Dirty Drawings from Deutschland...Next on
On Sat, 15 Apr 2000 22:32:55 GMT, [email] (MSB) wrote:
Ah. We never touched global variables; in fact, using one was a guarnateed rejection of the lab. Don't recall longjmp either.
We learned malloc, but we were also told of the C++ way to do the same thing (and told either was acceptable.)
Don't know that one either. The course *was* intended to act as a pre-requisite for C++, OOC (object oriented concepts), Windows Programming and Assembly programming. Most likely, they consciously attempted to avoid everything that would have to be unlearned for C++ - unless it was necessary for Assembly.
Truth is, my only real difficulty right now seems to be in switching from terminal to GUI implementations.
On Sun, 16 Apr 2000 04:07:51 -0500, Glenn Olson wrote:
longjmp is a brute force instruction. It restores the CPU state and stack pointer to a value previously stored with setjmp. It effectively allows you to jump ANYWHERE. It's like the original goto in BASIC that allowed you to jump to any program line without restrictions. longjmp is the only way to achieve at least part of C++'s "throw" functionality in C. Speaking of exceptions, someone on the libpng mailing list has just recently released a set of macros that supposedly emulate C++'s exception mechanism.
What C++ way are you talking about? operator new? That's actually only half of the truth and it's not that big an improvement. The container classes from the STL are the most important thing in avoiding manual fiddling with memory management. They are also used to replace arrays (which are inflexible and error-prone). MSB
---- They couldn't conquer the world. Now they're out to corrupt our kids! Dirty Drawings from Deutschland...Next on
On Sun, 16 Apr 2000 17:22:25 GMT, [email] (MSB) wrote:
Ah... no wonder we never learned that. The instructor absolutely hated such things.
Honestly don't recall; but it was not operator new. It was a C++ command that dynamically assigns memory (which was all we used malloc for, if it's got any other uses...)
Well, we did use lots of arrays. And a fair chunk of manual memory management.
If that counts as one of those 'habits,' it's going to be a hard one for me to break...
On Mon, 17 Apr 2000 03:03:43 -0500, Glenn Olson wrote:
That's exactly the problem. In C you don't have a choice. You don't have vector, map, hash_map, deque, set, multi_set, multi_map, string and all the other nice classes from the STL. In 90% of all cases a class from the STL can be used to store your data. And they all have range checking and automatic memory managing. But once you've gotten used to the C way, it's hard to break with it. I don't want to know how many C++ programmers still manage linked lists themselves or use arrays instead of vectors (a vector is like an array that you can grow and shrink and that has its own memory managing so you don't need to use realloc() yourself). MSB
---- They couldn't conquer the world. Now they're out to corrupt our kids! Dirty Drawings from Deutschland...Next on
On Mon, 17 Apr 2000 20:20:54 GMT, [email] (MSB) wrote:
Bah, wouldn't matter if I did have a choice. I'd still have chosen to do it the 'hard way,' for the same reason I got excited about learning Motorola Assembly.
Leafing through the book of worlds, I found that MSB had written the following on Mon, 17 Apr 2000 20:20:54 GMT :
Please excuse me for butting in, but what exactly is the STL?
Any good tutorials available for learning to use it (preferrably under Windows)? One of my hobbies (or "Projects-that-I-will-get-around-to-doing-when-Hell-freezes-over" ) is to learn C++ under Windows... I already tought myself a bit of C++ using DJGPP and various stuff from old DOS magazines and the net. I even got some lines of code to compile (yes, I admit it, I was crazy enough to embark on the quest for the perfect roguelike - it even compiles and you can walk around and pick up stuff and drop it) but I somehow lost interest.... (prbably because it grew over my head... and the Abitur and then University kept interferring)
<emabarrased> Umm... so that is something I should unlearn? </embarrased>
Similar to Perl's arrays?
A lone Wanderer ([email])
Who, according to the "Tough Guide to Fantasyland", is neutral (with evil tendencies), takes little part in the action, can generally be expected to be nice and is bold and humorous, but not necessarily good.
On Wed, 19 Apr 2000 10:09:57 GMT, [email] (a lone Wanderer) wrote:
Have a look at http://www.sgi.com/Technology/STL/
To understand this (or any other documents about the STL) you need a basic understanding of "templates". Any recent book about C++ should include a section about them (look at http://marshall-cline.att.net/cpp-faq-lite/ for book recommendations). Templates are a very important concept in writing reusable code. The sooner you get acquainted with them, the better.
DJGPP supports templates and the STL.
As templates in general and the STL in particular are fairly new features of C++, old DOS magazines will probably not cover them.
Yes, if you a) don't want to waste time re-inventing the wheel b) want to avoid bugs c) want to make life easier for yourself d) want extensible, maintainable and reusable code
I don't know Perl but Perl's arrays and STL vectors are unlikely to be similar. The growing and shrinking aspect is only one among many. vectors have a lot more features than arrays. I was just trying to convey a rough idea. MSB
---- They couldn't conquer the world. Now they're out to corrupt our kids! Dirty Drawings from Deutschland...Next on
Leafing through the book of worlds, I found that MSB had written the following on Fri, 21 Apr 2000 11:23:18 GMT :
Will have a look... thanks :)
Seems I have a bit to learn, then. I know that Templates exist, and can easily look up what they're supposed to do, but I've never used them...
Ah, well. Time to browse through my bookmarks on C++ tutorials again and use the newly discovered WebCopier on them :)
So I got myself a compiler already :)
So I noticed... :(
I think I tried that once too often... :) (come to think of it, I probably only tried to do so twice: writing my own gui using Allegro and DJGPP, when Allegro seems to have a perfectly well working gui, and writing all the code for the linked lists for my roguelike...)
Those are *undocumented features*!!!
that would be nice :)
<clueless> I thought that was what OOP was for? :) </clueless>
Well, thats to be expected. Perl actually is a wonderfull language for working with text-files and is similar to C (as far as I can tell). AFAIK it also allows OOP and is a lot nicer than C where it comes to memory management (don't quote me on that, I know very little about both languages... enough to figure out what well written code does)
Well, I gotta look into it... someday... when hell freezes over... as usual...
On Wed, 19 Apr 2000 10:09:57 GMT, [email] (a lone Wanderer) wrote:
No, because although a template library or whatever can make your programming easier, it's to your benefit that you know how, for example, the inner workings of a linked list operates. If you ever have to program on a system that doesn't have an STL, you'll be able to implement a linked list there. Those who've come to depend solely on time-saving devices would be lost in the wilderness.
As a fellow programmer, I'm always looking for time-saving devices that'll help me be more productive... but on the other hand, I also want to know *how* such things are done. (That's why I took the time to learn Win32 programming directly to the API, in addition to Microsoft's Foundation Classes.) If you put all your trust in "black boxes," you'll inevitably run into trouble if you have to develop for systems that don't support them.
Martin
(send all e-mail to "[email]")
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
Outpost Daria: Your Online Database for All Things Daria!
http://www.lawndale.net -OR- http://systech.simplenet.com/daria/
On Fri, 21 Apr 2000 13:38:52 -0400, Martin J. Pollard wrote:
I agree. My use of the word "unlearn" was a bit misleading. I meant something like "break the habit". Of course, a C++ programmer should know how a linked list works, but he should abstain from implementing it himself because of the reasons I already mentioned. It's the same with the basics of electronics. I don't think anyone can ever be a real programmer without having at least a rough understanding of how an addition works on the transistor level. But for obvious reasons you shouldn't start designing your own CPU just to get a programming job done (you may do it for the fun, though). MSB
---- They couldn't conquer the world. Now they're out to corrupt our kids! Dirty Drawings from Deutschland...Next on
Leafing through the book of worlds, I found that Martin J. Pollard had written the following on Fri, 21 Apr 2000 13:38:52 -0400 :
8<SNIP>8
With "unlearn", I meant something along the lines of "Learn to use tools that do your work for you but know how they work."
That I can imagine :)
Me2 :)
So, do know of any good, freely available tutorials about that subject? Or of any good, not-too-expensive books about the subject?
Well, unless I change what I'm studying from Engineering to Computer Science, I don't think I'll get into that much trouble depending on black boxes ...
But knowing how stuff is done sure helps you when picking up new programming-languages :)
There's a bit more to it than that. Regarding the guy who sold DOS to Microsoft, they actually saved themselves a lawsuit by not marketing it themselves, since it turned out that they'd basically just ported CP/M to the 16 bit Intel chip. So the "original programmers" were actually the guys at Digital Research. The upshot of this was DR-DOS: a legal settlement gave DR the rights to MS's sourcecode for several years afterwards, which is how they managed to keep coming out with their own versions of DOS year after year. This wasn't known for a long time though: sadly a lot of computer history remains hidden for years or even decades after the event due to secret court settlements, or in some cases because it's been classified secret by some government (this happened with the code breaking work at Bletchley Park: it is widely held now that the British built the world's first electronic computer during the war, but America got the credit with ENIAC, because the project the British computer was built for was classified top secret until about 40 years afterwards).
I liked Pascal a hell of a lot better than FORTRAN.
After going through both of those, though, learning C was a joke.
The only difficulty I seem to be having ATM is shifting from terminal to GUI type programming.
Used em both a little, when I was working on my old Vic 20. After that, never touched em again.
What the hell kind of courses are they teaching you guys? I took C in tech school. 1 hour of lecture, 9 hours of lab each week. In labs, we did nothing *but* write code.
On Sat, 15 Apr 2000 02:15:46 -0500, Glenn Olson wrote:
The courses where the teacher stands in front, showing you transparencies with block diagrams while 3 students are crowded around each computer, looking in awe at the guy (it's always a guy, no girl ever has the courage to do the un-girlish thing and claim the place at the keyboard) sitting at the computer who has already solved the homework problem and is now playing Nibbles. MSB
---- They couldn't conquer the world. Now they're out to corrupt our kids! Dirty Drawings from Deutschland...Next on
On Sat, 15 Apr 2000 22:32:56 GMT, [email] (MSB) wrote:
WTF?
Block diagrams??? Next thing you'll be telling me is that they made you hand in flowcharts before they let you even look at the computer...
And in my class, half my friends went to the girls when they were stuck. The other half came to me (well, when I wasn't three weeks behind from not even looking at the last 2 labs until then.)
Heh, I remember well messing around with our old Commodore 64 (the only toy I really remember having in my early childhood days), staring at all those words and not knowing what they meant. In about third grade (at eight years old), I learned some BASIC, and it all suddenly made sense... was just a very cool feeling, having something click like that.
Something that was always fun was having a clueless person run this:
10 PRINT "Input data:" 20 INPUT FOO$ 30 GOTO 10
then watching how long they'd keep entering some mindless data... I got someone to do this for twenty minutes once.
*laughs* I'm afraid I don't know much about masturbating either ;-) ... but I do get your point. Unfortunately, it's really more of a time/motivation issue for me: when I'm taking a class in this, it has a certain amount of priority that forces me to put aside other things to do it, whereas when it's just something I enjoy I always end up putting it off for other stuff like my massive amounts of homework, Family Stuff, etcetera and thuswise...
That, and that I really don't have the time to just sit down and cook up a batch o' experience for myself. And even if I _did_ have the experience, I really don't have the time to help with something like this - I know my habits. I'd be enthusiastic about it at first and then, as I start getting buried in other stuff, it'll gradually get pushed towards the back of my mind until I simply stop doing it. :-(
Someone has more confidence in me than I do... ;-) Seriously, once I get out of school, I'll have enough time to help out with something like this... until then, though, I'm just too damn busy. Stupid life.
-Mindy Who feels guilty now, because she feels like she's blowing you off.
Nope me too, the number of projects I have started and never finished, though most of them at least worked after a fassion. Though I have recently completely re-written my boot manager after keeping putting it off for about 5 years :) Still needs a little work tho....but is more functional than before.
We're all like that. I have folders full of ideas that I'll never even start and the list of projects I have started an will never finish is endless. I fear D-tag will stay on that list, too. A pity. MSB
---- They couldn't conquer the world. Now they're out to corrupt our kids! Dirty Drawings from Deutschland...Next on
Heheheh seems to be pretty common amongst computery types alas :) MultiBoot 6 (though I may change the name :) [Again!]), has at least reached beta stage where it has been released to a limeted number of people for testting, then I must ahem write some documentation for it :)
Phill.... who didn't ever think he'd be descusssing boot managers in a.t.d. :)
On 13 Apr 2000 23:46:47 +0100, [email] (Phill Harvey-Smith) wrote:
Why not? BTW, I've written a boot manager, too. It's been doing it's job nicely and flawlessly for several years now, allowing me to boot Linux, Windows and MSDOS (with 3 different autoexec/config pairs). At one point I had DRDOS (with its own autoexec/config pair) in the menu, too. All The boot manager and all OSs except for Linux are installed in the same partition, btw. MSB
---- They couldn't conquer the world. Now they're out to corrupt our kids! Dirty Drawings from Deutschland...Next on
Just didn't seem on topic....then again this is a.t.d :)
Humm that's something mine doesn't do...I leave the Win/Dos thing to the MS system which does seem to do the job easily enough...and for MS/PC-Dos > 6 they support multi configs anyway. But It would be usefull with dos > 6.
Ah, that's where I took a design desision, MultiBoot, I decided I didn't want to be fixed to having one perticular OS installed...Like Lilo requires a Linux partition I believe, as it loads some of it's code from there, though the boot sleector bit may be in just the partition sector I dunno. Anyway MultiBoot sits outside of the partitions in a bit of the disk that is very often not used....it does detect if that part is uesd and will not install if that is the case :) Hey if you wanna have a look, send me a private Email, and I'll give you the URL....would just post it but it is in Beta at the mo and want to control it's spread. BTW what was yours written in ?
On Thu, 13 Apr 00 02:49:07 GMT, [email] (Mindy) wrote:
How old are you again? I hope you haven't been indoctrinated in some way. You know, there a some people who tell a lot of crap about it, like a) girls don't do it b) it has side effects like blindness, fragile bones, pimples c) it's a sin
To a): I've seen statistics that over 2/3 of women over the age of 16 do it (of course the figure for men is more in the 90+% range). To b) It's plain nonsense, even the pimples! To c) This is based on the misinterpretation of the story of Onan. God was not angry because he masturbated. God was angry because Onan refused to have sex with his brother's wife. You know, after his brother's death (he was killed by God because He didn't like him) it was his duty under the ancient to law to take her as a wife, which he did, and give her kids, which he refused to. Whenever he went to her he would spill his semen on the ground (the bible doesn't even say he masturbated, maybe it was just coitus interruptus, meaning he would get all the fun but the woman wouldn't get her sons) Anyway, God didn't like that and killed him. It's in Genesis 38 if you want to look it up.
Hmm, I have different priorities. Programming was always #1. Something very disturbing (like falling in love) has to happen before I will let my other interests (like writing poetry) move up on the priority list. And I'd definitely not put anything aside for stupid homework.
I know that problem. That's also why I need someone to work with me. So that there'll be a feeling of responsibility to keep me going. If I just start the project on my own, there's nothing to keep me from dropping it again. But if someone else puts work into it, too, I will feel too responsible to chicken out when the going gets tough.
After you get out of school you'll never have so much free time again as you have now (unless you want to become a professional wife). MSB
---- They couldn't conquer the world. Now they're out to corrupt our kids! Dirty Drawings from Deutschland...Next on
<Buzzcut> And we will definatly be spending a lot of time talking about MASTURBATION ! </Buzzcut>
Seem to have done a lot of that here recently....
In article ,
<BH>uhuhuhuh he said 'do it' uhuhuhuh<BH>
All going to prove that Janet Barch is right....Men *ARE* a bunch of wankers :)
Well my eyesight's fine, apart from very slight colour blindness, which I had before I err um you know :)
Yes believe it or not there was a long and amusing thread on this at one point on uk.religion.christian (which I occasionally lurk on). And just how many things are also based on mis-interpretations of what the Bible (or for that matter any book like it) says. Hell if I'd lived a couple of hundered years ago I'd have prolly been burned at the stake by now.... oh well.
I did last year...let the poetry and stuff come to the surface...then again I was on holiday, and the friend organising had insisted on no computers :) I'm a better programmer than poet tho :)
Alas it was this attitude that caused a friend of mine to not pass a 2 year course despite spending 4 years trying to :)
Yes going back to MultiBoot, when I was first writing it (early 90's), I had a group of friends using it that used to hastle me for features so it got driven along....now I have only a couple so progress is on the basis of when I feel like it :)
On 13 Apr 2000 23:59:15 +0100, [email] (Phill Harvey-Smith) wrote:
And there's nothing wrong with that. I think it's better to be doing it yourself than going around on one-night stands. You're not breaking anybody's heart and you can't get STDs from it either.
You're not alone. I think colorblindness occurs in one out of 10 men. It's a defect on the X chromosome you got from your mom that your dad's Y chromosome cannot compensate. Girls usually don't get it because they got an X chromosome from dad, too and it's unlikely that both copies are faulty. I had a physics teacher who was color-blind. When I learned about his problem I finally understood how he could walk around in those brightly-colored jackets all the time.
I think that applies to most of the people on the group.
Homework is usually not graded here. Normally you don't even have to hand it in. The teacher just randomly probes if someone has done it and of course the brains (like me) get checked less frequently.
MSB
---- They couldn't conquer the world. Now they're out to corrupt our kids! Dirty Drawings from Deutschland...Next on
Indeed and as you said in anothe post you get to know your own body a bit better that way :) also you can't get your hand pregnant :)
Yeah I know....when it was first diagnosed, I was about 10, the prob was that we had the test, by being taken out in groups and tested, in an art lesson of all things, the problem was the person doing the testin announced it to all present that I was totally colour blind (which is *NOT* true), and being 10 year olds they spent the rest of the lesson, saying what colour is this time after time. I felt like going on a rampage by the end of the lesson...now where did I put that chain-gun ? I know it is rarer in femailes, though I did have a relative great-great grandmother I believe who was totally colour blind :)
Hehehe must have made optics experements a bit of a pain :) Heheh our physics teacher we used to call penguin, cause he invariably wore a blue suit and waddled :) cause being the good sport he was he played up to it :)
Funny when I wrote that, that's exactly the response I expected :) Nothing if not predictable....... :)
The problem was we got assignements which where counted as coursework, if you didn't get a grade on them then you failed the course, so they where graded :)
On 15 Apr 2000 13:26:29 +0100, [email] (Phill Harvey-Smith) wrote:
What? You didn't notice it earlier? Didn't you have any "hey, why do they put the color grey into this set of pens 3 times" experiences? You do see gray (I always forget which spelling is archaic, so I alternate between the 2) for the colors you can't see, right? Seems logical because the thingies in your eyes that can only do b/w are still there. Or didn't you notice that people were talking about colors where you didn't see any? Or of what nature is your colorblindness exactly? Do you just miss out on some colors (like the very frequent red/green blindness) or is your vision impaired over the whole spectrum?
You didn't leave it on "4"? I put the double-shotgun on "W" because I like to decide myself if I want double or normal. But I didn't see any reason to change the chaingun :-)
I don't worry about it. As long as you don't tell me my you had expected my "automaton" post (especially the end). I hope you've read it. MSB
---- They couldn't conquer the world. Now they're out to corrupt our kids! Dirty Drawings from Deutschland...Next on
Nope never had them, though the school nurse tested me and said I was totally colour blind I am not ! I am very slightly red difficient, which I believe means I don't see red quite as well as other people, which is probably why I like bright reds that (probably) do look too strong to other people.
<Butthead> Whoow we have thingies in our eyes cool </Butthead>
Alas the only colour I see as grey is grey :)
Nah just slight red blindness, which does mean that I could not fly for the millatry...but since I'm too old anyway and not millary minded that don't really matter :)
Heheheh :) Normally just bind a couple of keys to next & previous weapon and cycle them thes days :)
14, turning 15 in June. I just... it's never really seemed a thing to do for me, not because I'm a chick or because I fear consequences in any way. Perhaps I'm just not sexually mature.
School's a bit of a priority for me, because I need scholarships to get to university (not to mention good enough grades to be accepted!). Also, I need a decent GPA to get into college courses next year (something I'm really hoping I get to do).
Right now, I have no faith in my own feeling of responsibility...
Ugh... I think not. Isn't my dream to spend my life dealing with my bratty kids and cleaning up after my loser husband. What I meant by that was in June, when I start my summer vacation (woohoo! Only two more months!) and don't have to do _anything_ except show up in Appleton for three weeks for academic camp.
On Thu, 13 Apr 00 21:15:47 GMT, [email] (Mindy) wrote:
Oh. 14 is still young. It's a very complicated age for girls, body-wise Many girls have difficulties "being friends" with their rapidly changing bodies at that age. That you don't enjoy touching yourself shouldn't bother you. I just wanted to make sure to squash any unhealthy indoctrination before it can settle. Just make sure you don't do it with a guy before getting to know your own body. Don't assume that HE will try to find out what you like and what you don't. And speaking of actual sex, you should consider waiting for marriage or at least engagement. I'm not religious about it but I believe separating sex and serious feelings will not exactly make you happier.
And should you ever feel pressure on you because "everybody's doing it", I want to tell you that it's just because of the strange country you're living in (you can't say "fuck" on tv but everybody expects you to lose your virginity by the age of 16) Other countries have different statistics. Here for instance, only 10% of boys and 10% of girls have had sex at the age of 14. At the age of 15 the numbers are 12% (boys) and 28% (girls). At the age of 16 it's 35% (boys) and 45% (girls) and at the age of 17 it's 55%(boys) and 66%(girls). And in a survey where teenagers were asked what is important in a relationship, "sex" was on the last place. I don't need to mention that our schools don't need kindergartens. BTW, if you're wondering why boys lag 1 year behind the girls, just ask yourself how many teenage girls want to date a guy of the same age (or even younger).
I pity you. I consider free studying for all one the greatest achievements of my country.
MSB
---- They couldn't conquer the world. Now they're out to corrupt our kids! Dirty Drawings from Deutschland...Next on
Ah, happy memories *regards teachinging himself Qbasic entirely from the helpfiles as one of his finest, well, only, achievements*. The thing with basic is that it leads to Visual Basic, which is a great language for people like me, who like programming but don't have the talent or the desire to make a career out of it. Visual Basic is easy, and what you do looks impressive. You're a programming god and your finest completed project is an admittedly very good version of minesweeper, I could probably make one that looks nicer and does much the same thing in four hours in VB (And I reckon I might possibly be able to do guaranteed solvability, 'cos that kind of programming problem solving is the only bit I'm actually good at; that and AI, for some reason). It would be far less of an achievement, but I'd still say that VB is the ideal language for a programming newbie, especially with how easy Controls make things...
Based on that argument I'd say that Delphi was a better choice as it has the drage and drop components, set properties at design time that VB has, but with a better structured language behind it. Alas neither VB or Delphi are portable beyond Windows, or more importantly free. Though I am pretty sure that Delphi versions have been on cover disks, on the previso that they are not used for anything other than learning with.
On 14 Apr 2000 00:38:27 +0100, [email] (Phill Harvey-Smith) wrote:
I've heard Borland/Inprise wants to port their development environments to Linux. Seems, they admit they've lost the fight against Visual C++ and move to a place that Microsoft can't go. MSB
---- They couldn't conquer the world. Now they're out to corrupt our kids! Dirty Drawings from Deutschland...Next on
Analytical ability and logic rather than linguistic ability is what programmers need: programming languages aren't really languages, they're notations. Unfortunately the term "programming language" has caught on the extent that real languages now have to be referred to as "natural languages" to distinguish them from the formal notations used in programming and so on.
That might have been the case when everybody was working with imperative languages where instructions were basically macros for assembly language. OOP is a very natural approach (that's why I enjoy it so much). Creating an OOP program is designing rather than programming. MSB
---- They couldn't conquer the world. Now they're out to corrupt our kids! Dirty Drawings from Deutschland...Next on