Most IC chips are very sensitive to UV light, thats why the plastic cases are usually black to stop the light. Every now and then, a manufacturer has some personell who don't know that, and they choose the wrong material for the case. Usually can fix it by covering with something opaque. Tinfoil works good, as long as you don't short out anything.
Recursion is a loop with a stack that You Cannot See. It the "Cannot See" that mathemeticians like and experianced programmers hate.
It's like a car that runs on steam and uses the sides and doors as radiators. You can't see it and it all works great, until something breaks and you are scalded to death!
A very good point. More than once I have incidents in my career where I have thought to myself "I can be really clever about this." My follow up question is "SHOULD I really be clever ablout this?"
Ah!... A person who has grown some wisdom. 8-) Anyone young who reads this, remember it. It will save you much grief.
If there is no need to store the local datasets from each pass-through, then use a loop (iteration). If there is a requirement to store each local dataset, such as a need to "unwind" afterward, then recursion might be useful.
But don't fool yourself that recursion releases you of the need to be aware of memory used. Most programs will crash if the stack is "blown away". And even if the OS can push the stack(s) into a swap file in other storage, it will slow the program down so far that the user will probably forcibly halt the program.
Maybe that's ok for your program, but mine right now is for dropping hot asphalt into dumptrucks. If it crashes, people could be killed. (Of course there are other safeties! But I must program as if there were not...)
... Sci-fi nerds think they'll ride on a spaceship and live on Mars, and we all sincerely nod our heads in approval....
No, we just thought that we would be able to fly around the world in a couple of days, carry a pocket telephone that could reach the whole world and own a personal computer that would fit in an extra bedroom. But no-one would believe us and they called us stupid. Of course none of that happened...Oh! Wait! 8-)
... Could I move closer to work ? Not really considering the cost of housing / taxes within a few miles of where I work vastly exceeds my level of pay. ( I can't afford million dollar condos, nor Texas property taxes + mortgage payments on half million + dollar homes )...
You live in the wrong city and work for the wrong company. When you look for work, consider not just the pay, but the cost of living in the area.
Taxes hurt the lower income people more than the very rich. A poor person who looses a dollar hurts more than a middle class person who looses a hundred. Who in turn hurts worse than a very rich person who looses a million. You can't raise taxes without hurting the poor. Taxes are mainly so politicians can get money and power...
For those that don't know, many of these single-line replies are constructs used by the real Elisa program. Which really did fool many people into having long conversations with it, over printer teletype terminals, in the '60s and '70s.
The Earth's "moon" is not a moon, the Earth-Moon system is a double planet. At no point does the Moon's orbit actually curve away from the Sun, it always curves toward the Sun. As it goes on the "inside" of the orbit it flattens out, but does not curve away from the Sun.
In other words, the moon is influenced more by the Sun's gravity, than the Earth's gravity.
Um... I think taping things to someone else's building or bridge is actually illegal, unless you have written permission. Maybe no-one cared in the past, but they do now.
You have to get permission, even to post lost and found posters...
That's so 20th century. Our Government will take care of us, we don't need those pesky rights or even that Constitution. Just let the Government do it all for us!
Funny, thats pretty much what my ancestors in South Carolina said, back before the Civil War. Only, they didn't say "government"...
Next, you'll tell me that Reagan didn't make a deal to commit treason by trading arms to Iran in exchange for holding Americans hostage for a *longer* time...
Um... Actually, he traded hightech arms like aircraft and tank repair parts for lowtech arms like AK-47s. They were then sent to Nicaraugua to the counter-revolutionaries, so they could take out the Soviet backed communist government there (which was way too close to us). A bit sleasy, but it worked. I would consider it illegal by international law, but not treason.
... Companies like Borland found themselves in the middle of this. The ill-fated Kylix is the proof. Partially free didn't work. Now our choices are limited to Free or $10,000.
... Some of the features of Turbo Pascal - like the "with" statement and the set operator - have never been duplicated in any other language....
Topspeed Modula-2 by Jensen and Partners (JPI). Originally planned as Borland Turbo Modula-2 but they declined and the team split off as another company. Very successful for many years. Finally merged with Clarion as Topspeeed, Inc., later SoftVelocity.
In my experience (about 20 years professionally working with Delphi, since the first version), the biggest advantage of Object Pascal over C++ is its strong typing discipline. It makes a program more maintainable on the long run, and errors are easier both to avoid and find....
This is an important point. In a large commercial or industrial program, strong Typing of variables and structures can have a big effect on just getting the program to run in the first place. Not to mention the good effect on long-term maintanence and stability. C and similar languages were made by and for Assembly language programmers and they are good for that kind of thing. Newer languages (at least some of them) were made with a different point of view, and it shows.
How fast you can write a program is not the important thing. How fast you can get it to work reliably, is. 8-)
Whatever you work an every day will seem easy, when you look at something you don't usually work on. You can't really know much until you have used more than one system, in day to day work.
I have used many things, from a dozen flavors of Assembler to Clarion. I write faster in C, but I can't read it fast even when I wrote it myself. I liked Modula-2 (which is industrial Pascal) and found I could read and debug it much faster.
When you talk about which is faster to type, maybe you should consider that modern programmers should hardly ever type much at all!
It's the same in other countries too. The foundation of the state is a monopoly on the legitimate use violence. Haven't you been paying attention for the last few thousand years?
That's why, in 1776 everyone in Europe throught the American Colonies would fail immediatly. Republics in Europe always failed within a few years, except the ones in ancient Greece and Rome which laster a bit longer. The US is a new and different type of government, one where the armed people have the power and the peace is kept by mutual consent.... so far...
But Ancient Greece and Rome each lasted longer that we have so far.
The oaths sworn by the US military are to the Constitution first, not to the Generals or the President. And they all know it. But like he says, it would depend on the individuals.
In times of great danger, people band together and agree to be slaves in order to survive. In times of peace, they want to go their own way in order to be more adaptable.
Both ways work, in their own time and place. It is the transition between that is the problem, either direction.
Slashdot Mirror
Most IC chips are very sensitive to UV light, thats why the plastic cases are usually black to stop the light.
Every now and then, a manufacturer has some personell who don't know that, and they choose the wrong material for the case.
Usually can fix it by covering with something opaque. Tinfoil works good, as long as you don't short out anything.
Recursion is a loop.
Recursion is a loop with a stack that You Cannot See.
It the "Cannot See" that mathemeticians like and experianced programmers hate.
It's like a car that runs on steam and uses the sides and doors as radiators. You can't see it and it all works great, until something breaks and you are scalded to death!
A very good point. More than once I have incidents in my career where I have thought to myself "I can be really clever about this." My follow up question is "SHOULD I really be clever ablout this?"
Ah! ... A person who has grown some wisdom. 8-)
Anyone young who reads this, remember it. It will save you much grief.
If there is no need to store the local datasets from each pass-through, then use a loop (iteration).
If there is a requirement to store each local dataset, such as a need to "unwind" afterward, then recursion might be useful.
But don't fool yourself that recursion releases you of the need to be aware of memory used. Most programs will crash if the stack is "blown away". And even if the OS can push the stack(s) into a swap file in other storage, it will slow the program down so far that the user will probably forcibly halt the program.
Maybe that's ok for your program, but mine right now is for dropping hot asphalt into dumptrucks. If it crashes, people could be killed.
(Of course there are other safeties! But I must program as if there were not...)
... Sci-fi nerds think they'll ride on a spaceship and live on Mars, and we all sincerely nod our heads in approval. ...
No, we just thought that we would be able to fly around the world in a couple of days, carry a pocket telephone that could reach the whole world and own a personal computer that would fit in an extra bedroom. But no-one would believe us and they called us stupid. Of course none of that happened ...Oh! Wait! 8-)
Except if a laser is so powerful... how exactly do you aim it without it burning out the prisms/mirrors that are utilised to aim it?
It would seem that they are already doing it, so they must have a way. One of the test planes had a nose turret with optical aiming. Look it up...
... Could I move closer to work ? Not really considering the cost of housing / taxes within a few miles of where I work vastly exceeds my level of pay. ( I can't afford million dollar condos, nor Texas property taxes + mortgage payments on half million + dollar homes ) ...
You live in the wrong city and work for the wrong company. When you look for work, consider not just the pay, but the cost of living in the area.
Taxes hurt the lower income people more than the very rich.
A poor person who looses a dollar hurts more than a middle class person who looses a hundred. Who in turn hurts worse than a very rich person who looses a million. You can't raise taxes without hurting the poor.
Taxes are mainly so politicians can get money and power...
For those that don't know, many of these single-line replies are constructs used by the real Elisa program.
Which really did fool many people into having long conversations with it, over printer teletype terminals, in the '60s and '70s.
If you think you're smarter than the average philosophy major, odds are that you're wrong. What did you score on your GRE?
If you pass me a napkin with my fries, I'll write it down for you.
Now, that has a whole world of philosophy in it! 8-)
named Dahak.
That's true, but if you tell anyone else I will just claim I was kidding with you... 8-)
Our moon is not a moon? Sorry? ...
The Earth's "moon" is not a moon, the Earth-Moon system is a double planet. At no point does the Moon's orbit actually curve away from the Sun, it always curves toward the Sun. As it goes on the "inside" of the orbit it flattens out, but does not curve away from the Sun.
In other words, the moon is influenced more by the Sun's gravity, than the Earth's gravity.
Um ... I think taping things to someone else's building or bridge is actually illegal, unless you have written permission. Maybe no-one cared in the past, but they do now.
You have to get permission, even to post lost and found posters...
That's so 20th century. Our Government will take care of us, we don't need those pesky rights or even that Constitution. Just let the Government do it all for us!
Funny, thats pretty much what my ancestors in South Carolina said, back before the Civil War. Only, they didn't say "government"...
Next, you'll tell me that Reagan didn't make a deal to commit treason by trading arms to Iran in exchange for holding Americans hostage for a *longer* time ...
Um ... Actually, he traded hightech arms like aircraft and tank repair parts for lowtech arms like AK-47s. They were then sent to Nicaraugua to the counter-revolutionaries, so they could take out the Soviet backed communist government there (which was way too close to us). A bit sleasy, but it worked. I would consider it illegal by international law, but not treason.
The ' obligatory ' XKCD http://xkcd.com/763/
Thanks for posting that. I thought everyone had overlooked that step... 8-)
I see your Internet Of Things, and raise you a few Hackers.
What a house of cards! 8-)
On an instruction cycle basis, there are orders of magnitude more C code executing
This comment was very difficult to read, as you kept leaving off the "OBOL".
LOL !
Just because your current friends don't use something, does -not- mean that no one else uses it. You don't know "everyone". 8-)
... Companies like Borland found themselves in the middle of this. The ill-fated Kylix is the proof. Partially free didn't work. Now our choices are limited to Free or $10,000.
Um... Clarion is only $1000, and works good. 8-)
... Some of the features of Turbo Pascal - like the "with" statement and the set operator - have never been duplicated in any other language. ...
Topspeed Modula-2 by Jensen and Partners (JPI). Originally planned as Borland Turbo Modula-2 but they declined and the team split off as another company. Very successful for many years. Finally merged with Clarion as Topspeeed, Inc., later SoftVelocity.
In my experience (about 20 years professionally working with Delphi, since the first version), the biggest advantage of Object Pascal over C++ is its strong typing discipline. It makes a program more maintainable on the long run, and errors are easier both to avoid and find. ...
This is an important point.
In a large commercial or industrial program, strong Typing of variables and structures can have a big effect on just getting the program to run in the first place. Not to mention the good effect on long-term maintanence and stability.
C and similar languages were made by and for Assembly language programmers and they are good for that kind of thing. Newer languages (at least some of them) were made with a different point of view, and it shows.
How fast you can write a program is not the important thing. How fast you can get it to work reliably, is. 8-)
Whatever you work an every day will seem easy, when you look at something you don't usually work on. You can't really know much until you have used more than one system, in day to day work.
I have used many things, from a dozen flavors of Assembler to Clarion. I write faster in C, but I can't read it fast even when I wrote it myself. I liked Modula-2 (which is industrial Pascal) and found I could read and debug it much faster.
When you talk about which is faster to type, maybe you should consider that modern programmers should hardly ever type much at all!
It's the same in other countries too. The foundation of the state is a monopoly on the legitimate use violence. Haven't you been paying attention for the last few thousand years?
That's why, in 1776 everyone in Europe throught the American Colonies would fail immediatly. Republics in Europe always failed within a few years, except the ones in ancient Greece and Rome which laster a bit longer. The US is a new and different type of government, one where the armed people have the power and the peace is kept by mutual consent. ... so far ...
But Ancient Greece and Rome each lasted longer that we have so far.
The oaths sworn by the US military are to the Constitution first, not to the Generals or the President. And they all know it. But like he says, it would depend on the individuals.
In times of great danger, people band together and agree to be slaves in order to survive.
In times of peace, they want to go their own way in order to be more adaptable.
Both ways work, in their own time and place. It is the transition between that is the problem, either direction.