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User: weakpawns

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  1. Re:Experience on How Software Engineering Differs From Computer Science · · Score: 1

    I didn't mean to say "functional programming" at all. While I believe in the idea of functional programming, I have to say that, like Scientology, it is a rabid cult best left unmentioned.

    What do you mean by the "idea" of functional programming? Functional programming is not a "paradigm" or whim to be believed or disbelieved in - it IS what programming is. What are you going to program with if not functions? Functions and relations (morphisms) are what the nature has given us. That said, I feel that the comparison of functional programming with imperative programming is unwarranted. Imperative programming is just a particular way to implement a "function" where the programmer wants to manipulate state explicitly. One can very well program imperatively in a "functional programming language" like ML. So imperative programming is just a paradigm, or a style of programming. The important distinction (apart from the type system) is that 'functional' programming languages allow one to work with higher-order functions, whereas imperative languages like C do not facilitate it. One should nevertheless be able to write higher-order functions in C using a painful encoding, just as one would write down the description of a Turing machine on the input tape of a universal Turing machine.

    C was designed by K&R to be useful to them. To be useful to them it needed to be portable from one machine to another and bring its operating system too because platforms were changing quite frequently and every vendor had their own special tools and ways of doing things and if K&R wanted to keep their data they had to bring not just their language to the new platform, but the OS too. So the word I was looking for is more like "useful". Or is that one taken by some cult too?

    In my opinion, C seems to be the result of a desire to get a high-level programming language mixed with low-level access to the memory, in order to be able to write an operating system. It just seems to be a bad design to mix different levels of abstraction in the same language. This mixing of abstraction levels actually makes matters worse for C - things start becoming OS dependent. Because of the low-level access to memory available, one can write C code that would do one thing on one architecture, and a completely different thing on another. This just blows away your argument of C being designed to be 'portable'.

  2. Nothing to worry about on Smile! Urine Candid Camera! · · Score: 1

    It is probably just TSA helping out the porn industry get some new (erm) faces. And yeah, did you see the tiny RFID tag that these cameras shoot on you if you fit the bill?

  3. 20th Century? on Building a Searchable Literature Archive With Keywords? · · Score: 1

    I suppose you meant "drag a professor into the 21st century".

  4. Re:Surprise? on Reliability of Computer Memory? · · Score: 1

    Do you mean to say integers are not real!

  5. Re:Surprise? on Reliability of Computer Memory? · · Score: 1

    I am surprised by your signat