Domain: dur.ac.uk
Stories and comments across the archive that link to dur.ac.uk.
Comments · 170
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Which Sean Burke?
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Re:What do they teach in undergrad now?There are actually some pretty good reasons to first teach programming in a language such as Scheme. For example, the fact that it's one of the languages with the simplest syntax and grammar (Whitespace notwithstanding). Parentheses are basically all you need. It may seem like dumbness to you, but when you're trying to introduce students to the real concepts behind programming (algorithms, flow control, etc.) having those keywords and syntactic constructs out of the way can keep them focused on the job at hand. If you've ever tried to teach freshmen you'd understand the pain of getting them to learn that variables in C can only be declared at the start of a block, and don't forget your semicolons, and scanf requires an ampersand when reading integer parameters, oh but not for strings (and you'll have to take my word for it until you learn that screwed-up pointer syntax); boolean equality, AND, OR require 2-character operators (==, &&, ||); etc.
Not that you can keep people from learning these things forever. In fact, those that go on to being more involved in programming definitely will have to be taught something in the procedural/OO C family. But sometimes, the formal aspects of something can end up concealing the more general lessons students need to extract.
Disclaimer: I have never written a single line of Scheme; I have only read a few brief introductions (and found it quite understandable). I have, however, been a TA for many freshmen and there are more horror stories caused by the language than you might think.
- PeeCee
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Download the episode here
Get it while it lasts!
http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/~drg/ -
Re:What about all of these?
And don't forget the white space! That is a clear copy!
Be glad they didn't program in Whitespace.
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Re:'a mere 6 lines'?
But Whitespace takes only three..
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Re:Implementation is importantI've always wanted to be a successful author. Now I know how.
Whitespace by Example: I'll include the Whitespace tutorial and 3500 pages of uncommented, non-annotated examples.
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Obligatory whitespace joke ..
And for completeness, heres the equivalent in whitespace:
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Re:YeaThen I think Unlambda or Whitespace would be better choices.
Brainf**k is a relatively simple stack based language. The only thing about it that makes it hard to understand is its very terse syntax. Unlambda and Whitespace has this as well, and in addition to this they are completely unreadable. The reasons are quite different though: Unlambda because there is absolutely nothing like it (wrapping your mind around a myriad of s's, k's, i's and `'s == pain. I've tried) and Whitespace is just impossible to read (and program for that matter) without the aid of a program that can convert it to something where you can actually tell the instructions apart.)
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Re:Call Me CluelessYes yes, very amusing
:) Obviously Mac IE is not actually "Internet Explorer", it's a different program that happens to have the same name. Much like "Office for Mac" is not what people mean when they say "Microsoft Office".Suffice it to say that a lot of sites don't work with IE for the Mac. This is especially true of internal corporate sites.
As far as I'm aware the only OS that can run the real IE6 that isn't Windows, is Linux.
Amusingly that's the first hit on Google for internet explorer installer. Microsoft Downloads comes second.
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True languages of hackers?
Whitespace and Intercal.
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Strange Security Message
The site ShipItForYou.Com's Internet Security statement is a bit strange:
"ShipItForYou.Com's Internet Security is a VeriSign Secure Site. Our security is unmatched anywhere on the Internet. Your name, credit card number, and all other information are NEVER stored on the Internet. Once you enter your information, they are encrypted and sent directly to our accounting/order processing system that is NOT on the Internet."
If it is not on the Internet, how is it sent to the accounting/order processing system? Do the 'encrypt' it with Whitespace and fax it over? -
Re:Wrong priorities here...
heheh maybe their CGI application is written in whitespace
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Incase of Slashdotting...Here's a WhiteSpace script that prints the ASCII representation:
Enjoy!
/ob -
Scientology
Especially if your mom's truly terrified -- she will make an excellent mark^H^H^H^Hvictim^H^H^H^H^H^Hstudent.
Oh...wait, computer programming...how about Whitespace? ;-) -
Re:Relevant excerpt from the INTERCAL language man
Intercal is a joke language (though there is a compiler, natch).
See also brainfuck, whitespace, etc. -
Other Examples: Whitespace, Java2k, BeatnikI think these programming languages are more or less non-english:
- Whitespace
- Java2k (mostly non-english)
- HQ9+
- Beatnik
Greetings...
hildi -
whitespace
I havent seen nobody mention whitespace, it has no english keywords whatsoever =)
Well at least another poster already posted about brainfuck
I can't remember of any other languages, but maybe one could try machine code, nah, just kidding (are there people who program directly in machine code?, I found this link about the Psion organizer or something, but I didn't get too deep into it) -
Re:brainfuck
And let's not forget about whitespace.
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Another mirror
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Re:Bah. Scheme is better for haikus.
what about whitespace:
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Re:I HATE Dr. Stuart I. Feldman !!!
You'll love whitespace then, I reckon. Unfortunately it isn't Object Oriented so I'm not on topic
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Forgot to mention - Konqueror for uploading
fish://yourname@yourserver/path/to/website (or ftp://yourname@yourserver/path/to/website) plus drag and drop. Fabulous! The MS Windows version ain't as smooth or up to date, but it is a great deal safer than IE. (-:
For images, GIMP 2 doesn't have an image-chopper-upper by default, and while there are plugins to do that, I often prefer to do it (with GIMP, set some guides and then crop to that; you can make some sections of an image JPEG and others PNG (or omit them and replace that piece with flat colour) to suit the content) "by hand". It does have all manner of other nice features, more than enough to keep the average punter occupied for weeks.
To test things with IE 'coz "everyone" uses it, I could maybe-illegally run it under WINE (someone's even done an RPM, but I can't be bothered finding it) but as it turns out, I have a friend with a Windows2003 box exposed to the internet, so I aim rdesktop at that when I want IE-testing. -
Re:Trains vs cars
I have a car. I don't go out of town that often either; the only reason I don't get rid of the car is that carrying myself and a Uni holiday's worth of stuff back to the south of London from Durham is next to impossible by train. I can get to King's Cross station (north London), but getting across London with all my belongings is impossible by public transport.
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Re:It's True.
All of the questions that I ask start with "here's a programming problem, now solve it in whatever language you want".
OK, I choose Whitespace as my language of choice. My solution is on the other side of the page...
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Re:Adaption, but..
And also there's Whitespace.
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Re:Hacking is not an art...
The poem you refer to is a perfectly legitemate program in whitespace. Depending on the use of tabs newlines and spaces in the poem, it might actually do something useful as well.
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WhitespaceThe code lines correspond to blank lines. SCO has obviously copyrighted blank lines.
...which means that the offending code must have been written in whitespace
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Re:It is not the language, it is the paradigm.
:-)
I'm more into whitespace these days though.
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Re:Whatever
And don't forget whitespace. Best coding language ever!
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Re:Winamp 5 on WineI just fixed this. The patch is available here:
http://bylands.dur.ac.uk/~mh/file.c.patch
Apply it in the root of the Wine source tree, like so:
patch -p0 </tmp/file.c.path
then do a make and make install in dlls/kernel. Run the installer - it should install fine apart from complaining about "Sonic Pro" or something.
Be warned. The "modern" skin does some funky stuff with window classes we don't yet support. Use the classic skin.
I'm going to take a look at the subclassing stuff now. As an aside, the NSIS code is awful. Great product, nasty as hell code
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Re:It doesn't bother me!
Yet VB is a real, Turing-complete language.
This is true.
Here's another real Turing-complete language: http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/bf/.
And another: http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/whitespace/.
Maybe Turing-completeness isn't a very useful criterion in evaluating a language. ;) -
My addition
Here it is coded in Whitespace:
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Whitespace?
Hmm, not all the important languages are represented in the list. I didn't see e.g. whitespace implementation.
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Re:UserUtopia?I think everyone agrees that rpms suck
Hmm, no, many distributors like RPM. It's a simple and convenient way to ship a few gigs of software on CDs with your distro and remain sane. I think you mean, users think RPM sucks, and this is where we can start discussing.
Your idea for a GUI to source tarballs has already been done, basically. There are programs like KConfigure that do it all for you, but they don't make installing from source any easier. Why not?
- Source tarballs don't contain dependency information. Or rather they do, but only in the form of configure checks, which are useless for actually resolving dependencies.
- Source tarballs are source code. That means installing the software takes ages, eats disk space and RAM, and so on.
- You typically end up with unstripped binaries.
- Some source tarballs cannot be uninstalled.
- This approach is useless for binary-only packages like (say) games.
The only real way forward out of this mess is to develop a portable binary packaging scheme that allows you to install packages on many different distros WITH dependency resolution. And of course, better developer education - dependencies have a cost. Depending on CVS HEAD of a library in a release is just a big nono. Keeping dependencies fairly mainstream, or better, optional, takes practice and a bit of forethought but can be done (see Wine for an extreme example of this approach).
PLEASE! Will someone serious about standardizing Linux installs do something about this... or desktop Linux will never take off.
You're welcome to help out. The project in my sig is one such approach - we're currently working on dependency resolution from a network.
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The best way to write secure software is....
to use the Whitespace language!
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Re:Could have predicted tenor of threads....
Using a computer language of your choice, write a program that will factor a very large integer of arbitrary precision (1024+ digits) in as little time as possible - Points awarded on speed of execution
Ok, here goes:
You will need a Whitespace compiler to be able to run the listing I provided.
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See guys...
Do a Google search on solar cell window and you quickly realize that this is an old idea.
Korea's into it.
Oberlin too.
Apparently, Durham as well.
But what's important this time I guess is that it's a woman who "discovered" the idea.
And because women are equal to men, an equal number of discoveries must be credited to women. -
Re:quarter million lines of code?
What's that? You say GnuCash is programmed in Whitespace
In that case, how many of the ~250,000 lines are blank - or are ALL of them blank...
(For the humor impaired or clueless, Whitespace is a programming language that consists of spaces, tabs, newlines, etc - so that a print out of the program is totally blank) -
Re:quarter million lines of code?
What's that? You say GnuCash is programmed in Whitespace
In that case, how many of the ~250,000 lines are blank - or are ALL of them blank...
(For the humor impaired or clueless, Whitespace is a programming language that consists of spaces, tabs, newlines, etc - so that a print out of the program is totally blank) -
Re:No Need I Just Released What You Need.
You'll appreciate whitespace and colorForth then.
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From the text:
For the first time, educators can look up a student's attendance, discipline, immigration status, grades, and test scores at one source
For the first time? Haven't universities, and all educational institutions, been doing this for years? They take your marks in, and do things like decide what level of exam to enter you for, or what set to put you in, and so on! It's why they give you tests throughout the year and take in your scores. Sorry to be negative, but this is completely normal
For example: I was at Durham three years ago. Four months into the nine month term, our Maths lecturer called me into his office one day, showed me the results of the homeworks I'd done for the past four months, and told me that the marks suggested I was going to fail. Sure enough, he was right - I got 2% in his module, and also failed every other module on the course. I got to leave the place permanently (thank god!), which was the outocme I'd been looking for. It went to show that they predicted it though.
Am I right, or is there something really major I'm missing here? Educational institutions have been keeping track of student's marks, attendance, behaviour and so on for years, and have also entered this stuff into computers for years, often using spreadsheets to calculate mean scores and so on, which could in turn be used to predict how well students are going to do at the end of the year. It's common sense.
-Andrew -
Mozilla at Universities
A while back, MozillaZine ran Mozilla being used at universities.
Houston, MIT, Durham, Cambridge and The Helsinki University of Technology all use Mozilla in one form or another. -
Besides the well known undocumented feature.....
...that IE is also interpreting ( or compiling on the fly + executing, I don't know the technical details;oP) this famous programming language....
Of course, if you browse a little the sources you'll see that those are are the *only* text files which IE renders without any bugs....;o))))) -
Re:So let me get this straight...
Is the secret code surrounded by super-double-secret code ?
Yes, in fact, it is. You just have to know the language!
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I hate all the text...
That's why I use Whitespace, of course!
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Silicon Does Not Emit Light?Silicon, the main material used in semiconductors, does not emit light, and therefore can't be used in optoelectronic products, Avouris said.
I beg to differ. Silicon has been made to emit light in various ways for over a decade.
"Scientists at Surrey University, led by researcher Kevin Homewood, are showing off a prototype silicon-based light-emitting diode (LED) -- an invention that could be of significance to the whole electronics and communication industry.
"By enabling silicon to emit light, the scientists say they may have found a way to use light to efficiently transfer data around microchips. This could lead to smaller, more powerful computers and improve data communications significantly."
ZDNet UK: Light-emitting silicon boosts chip speeds: 8th March 2001
"The photoluminescence emanating from a regular array of 1.2 m sized dots composed of Si nanocrystals was studied with spatial, spectral and temporal resolution."
New Journal of Physics: Nanostructuration with visible-light-emitting silicon nanocrystals
"GENEVA, Switzerland -- STMicrolectronics claims to have achieved a breakthrough in the creation of light-emitting silicon and said it would have engineering samples of monolithic silicon devices based on the technology, combining electrical isolation and optical communication, before the end of 2002.
"The development allows silicon light emitters to match the efficiency of compound semiconductor materials such as gallium arsenide for the first time, the company said."
EE Times: STMicro claims light-emitting silicon breakthrough: October 28, 2002
"The discovery of visible luminescence from porous silicon [1] has stimulated a large interest in this material. Numerous studies have demonstrated that it is possible to achieve efficient visible luminescence from porous silicon layers [2]. This material system has significant economic potential as efficient visible emitters could be fabricated on silicon wafers and incorporated with current microelectronic devices using existing silicon processing technologies."
[1] L. T. Canham. "Silicon quantum wire array fabrication by electrochemical and chemical dissolution of wafers." Appl. Phys.Lett., 1990, 57 1046 - 1048.
[2] For a recent review of the work in porous silicon see : Thin Solid Films, 1995, 225 and "Porous Silicon", edited by Z. Chuan and R Tsu, World Scientific, Singapore, 1995.
BTW, technically, photocells are optoelectronic devices, as are LEDs.
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Re:Can they make it any slower?
Sure. They could have chosen to write it in Whitespace instead of Java.
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Re:2100: No computer Languages.
I'm already able to program using my thought as a computer language.
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Re:Complex language support?
To be honest, my first thought went to Whitespace.
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A bit of Opportunity
What people need to realize is the sheer opportunity presented by the evil bit! Particularly when used in conjunction with the new Whitespace Programming Language ! Sending an html-based email to your boss laced with WPL and the evil bit set will cause his computer to download all your pr0n for you, as well as send the memo to the finance office to process your raise with haste.
However, the only problem I've come across with setting the evil bit deals with products from a certain Redmond, Washington software development company. Apparently, when the evil bit is set, it negates all the security holes inherent in the OS from this company, and it becomes rock solid secure.
Go figure...