"But evolution doesn't care about groups. It only cares about genes."
Evolution doesn't care about anything. The survival of the group increases the survival chances of the individual in that group, ergo the successful transmission of his or her genes.
"Because the plants have a use for them."
You seem to have adopted a very simplified, perhaps comfortable view of nature. Drugs as a protection mechanism is not very effective. Poison for instance, would be a lot more "productive".
"It if was actually productive, evolution probably would have made it available to us without drugs."
Evolution works if the traits is required for survival, allowing for breeding in the said environment. At a bacteria level, productivity helps beat the competition.
With social animals like humans it is a bit more complex. Diversity helps the survival of the group, so even the least productive members have a chance as long as they play their cards well and get laid.
In a wider sense, your logic is somewhat self defeating. Some drugs are made available to us via the evolution of plants, so why do they exist at all?
You may want to put more thought into this; there is a multitude of instances where a relationship with a corporation is not 100% voluntary, starting with air and water pollution (treated as externalities), GMOs and control of seeds, takeover of the very government institutions which you talk about, traditionally via lobbyist and now by direct occupation, privatization of the penal system, ISP's selling of your private data...
You may not care about some of all of them, but you cannot speak for me nor others.
I want to point out that in your example, you could choose not to use the same type (string) for the different instances of the MakeNoise method.
Its just a little more work in C than in C++. Its not so much of a stretch to imagine that C++ was created exactly because of this, and its existence as a pre-processor before existing as a compiler demonstrates that pretty much anything you could do in C++ was implementable in C. C++ just made it easier to implement those concepts and formalized the implementation.
There are probably better examples and a more than a dozen ways to this, but Levine's flex and bison O'REILLY's book (I think the PDF is available legitimately online) example 3-8 shows an implementation of an abstract syntax tree (not the same, but the example holds) where a node of the tree may return an integer or a float. The nodetype indicates how to cast the value when needed and is easily extended to treat anything including strings.
Still for fun, a class implementation in C would be a group of functions prototypes with the associated structure definition. I know you know this, but the existence of the code in a header is strictly a convention, and for the convenience of being able to include the declarations across.c files.
I believe you would implement something equivalent to an abstract class by having some of the functions declared as returning a void pointer ie: "void *foo()" so that you can implement that function for the required return type and cast it accordingly upon return.
I don't know if other languages overtook Pascal because of 'structural flaws', but I myself adopted C over Pascal because at the time it was obviously better for raw power and speed. This is true for the processors and architectures that I have developed on (6502/x86/SPARC/AMD64).
As much as I love C, it is not a good fit on other architectures such as stack machines. Burroughs machines (now UNISYS) use an extended version of ALGOL as a system language with impressive results, especially when it comes to security (not vulnerable to buffer overflows).
I am a C programmer at heart, but have an argument with your assumption that Pascal (or related languages) is dead. I could be wrong, but I think you may be brushing off its merits based on the widespread architecture of today.
Yet, you may have hit the nail when saying it is about the Pascal chip, but that doesn't exclude the language - it makes it a holistic part of the system design.
Some people do. It is a very well defined language worth looking into even if only for academic reasons.
Some would say that everything old is new again; good design merits consideration.
I am not suprised by this. When faced with coming up with something better, why not choose something old (and proven) rather than try to create something new?
My C Compiler is written in Oberon and every time I have to port C to a new platform, I have to compile it with Oberon first, so I might as well use Oberon in the first place...except on the Unisys MCP where they use Algol as a system language.
Ok.. I jest, and despite that have great respect for Niklaus Wirth. But it is not like Oberon is a straight forward drop in replacement for C.
It is not that simple; an ebook requires a device that consumes power every time you read it. Some devices consume more power than others.
I am all for having more trees, but you cannot have an infinite amount of them. As long as a new tree replaces the 'dead' one, carbon is taken out of the atmosphere. Paper is a form of fixated carbon. Although energy is required to get it to its final format, so does a tablet.
I have to assume that this is coming from a uni-lingual Anglophone perspective. Although English is presently the international language of business, it does not mean that it will remain so over time, neither that everyone should conform to your expectations of convenience.
The perceived problem is only from your perspective. From mine, knowing more languages is not a problem, it is an exercise in expansion of the brain. Music is even better. Further more, I find English to by a somewhat dry language. I express myself differently in French and Spanish and would love to be fluent in Russian, German, Mandarin and Cantonese.
As for ASCII have it your way, but I prefer EBCDIC.
Slashdot Mirror
"But evolution doesn't care about groups. It only cares about genes."
Evolution doesn't care about anything. The survival of the group increases the survival chances of the individual in that group, ergo the successful transmission of his or her genes.
"Because the plants have a use for them."
You seem to have adopted a very simplified, perhaps comfortable view of nature. Drugs as a protection mechanism is not very effective. Poison for instance, would be a lot more "productive".
"It if was actually productive, evolution probably would have made it available to us without drugs."
Evolution works if the traits is required for survival, allowing for breeding in the said environment. At a bacteria level, productivity helps beat the competition.
With social animals like humans it is a bit more complex. Diversity helps the survival of the group, so even the least productive members have a chance as long as they play their cards well and get laid.
In a wider sense, your logic is somewhat self defeating. Some drugs are made available to us via the evolution of plants, so why do they exist at all?
Yes it is. Read again.
You may want to put more thought into this; there is a multitude of instances where a relationship with a corporation is not 100% voluntary, starting with air and water pollution (treated as externalities), GMOs and control of seeds, takeover of the very government institutions which you talk about, traditionally via lobbyist and now by direct occupation, privatization of the penal system, ISP's selling of your private data...
You may not care about some of all of them, but you cannot speak for me nor others.
Decentralized government may have it merits, but I am more concerned about Corporations exerting unchecked authority and control over others' choices.
Not that I'm happy with Fukushima Daiichi, but to talk about ignorance while promoting coal as a better health risk is a little rich.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The waste energy of combustion engines can also be quite useful in cold weather.
There's an idea: Stop wasting money watching and making bad films and use it for real exploration.
It can be argued that it is working, albeit in a way to make it appear that Windows is working better.
Most do. I did not infer otherwise.
and to Microsoft what is Microsoft's.
This should not be a surprise and is nothing new.
Don't expect Microsoft to look at anyone's interests but their own.
Replace the old assholes with robots?
"an incredibly relevant and insightful observation"
You are easily impressed.
I just realized that commercial software replaces a lot of human work and should be taxed to offset the loss of jobs.
Linux is not an adjective you can attach on everything.
The people who have not shock whatsoever signing that check are usually not spending their own money.
I want to point out that in your example, you could choose not to use the same type (string) for the different instances of the MakeNoise method.
Its just a little more work in C than in C++. Its not so much of a stretch to imagine that C++ was created exactly because of this, and its existence as a pre-processor before existing as a compiler demonstrates that pretty much anything you could do in C++ was implementable in C. C++ just made it easier to implement those concepts and formalized the implementation.
There are probably better examples and a more than a dozen ways to this, but Levine's flex and bison O'REILLY's book (I think the PDF is available legitimately online) example 3-8 shows an implementation of an abstract syntax tree (not the same, but the example holds) where a node of the tree may return an integer or a float. The nodetype indicates how to cast the value when needed and is easily extended to treat anything including strings.
The structure defining the node is simply:
struct ast {
int nodetype;
struct ast *l;
struct ast *r;
};
Still for fun, a class implementation in C would be a group of functions prototypes with the associated structure definition. I know you know this, but the existence of the code in a header is strictly a convention, and for the convenience of being able to include the declarations across .c files.
I believe you would implement something equivalent to an abstract class by having some of the functions declared as returning a void pointer ie: "void *foo()" so that you can implement that function for the required return type and cast it accordingly upon return.
I make a list of advertisers that annoy me and make a point to go to their competitors.
I don't know if other languages overtook Pascal because of 'structural flaws', but I myself adopted C over Pascal because at the time it was obviously better for raw power and speed. This is true for the processors and architectures that I have developed on (6502/x86/SPARC/AMD64).
As much as I love C, it is not a good fit on other architectures such as stack machines. Burroughs machines (now UNISYS) use an extended version of ALGOL as a system language with impressive results, especially when it comes to security (not vulnerable to buffer overflows).
I am a C programmer at heart, but have an argument with your assumption that Pascal (or related languages) is dead. I could be wrong, but I think you may be brushing off its merits based on the widespread architecture of today.
Yet, you may have hit the nail when saying it is about the Pascal chip, but that doesn't exclude the language - it makes it a holistic part of the system design.
Some people do. It is a very well defined language worth looking into even if only for academic reasons.
Some would say that everything old is new again; good design merits consideration.
I am not suprised by this. When faced with coming up with something better, why not choose something old (and proven) rather than try to create something new?
You do not need to. Free Pascal is well and alive on multiple platforms and is open source. http://www.freepascal.org/
Astrobe looks nice, but runs on Windows only. I might otherwise check check if out, even if it only targets a few ARM microcontrollers and FPGAs.
Fine if you are designing the hardware with the constraint of what the tool supports. It may work for some, but not everyone.
C on the other hand is ubiquitous.
My C Compiler is written in Oberon and every time I have to port C to a new platform, I have to compile it with Oberon first, so I might as well use Oberon in the first place...except on the Unisys MCP where they use Algol as a system language.
Ok.. I jest, and despite that have great respect for Niklaus Wirth. But it is not like Oberon is a straight forward drop in replacement for C.
"Plus it's a 'greener' choice - No dead trees."
It is not that simple; an ebook requires a device that consumes power every time you read it. Some devices consume more power than others.
I am all for having more trees, but you cannot have an infinite amount of them. As long as a new tree replaces the 'dead' one, carbon is taken out of the atmosphere. Paper is a form of fixated carbon. Although energy is required to get it to its final format, so does a tablet.
I have to assume that this is coming from a uni-lingual Anglophone perspective. Although English is presently the international language of business, it does not mean that it will remain so over time, neither that everyone should conform to your expectations of convenience.
The perceived problem is only from your perspective. From mine, knowing more languages is not a problem, it is an exercise in expansion of the brain. Music is even better. Further more, I find English to by a somewhat dry language. I express myself differently in French and Spanish and would love to be fluent in Russian, German, Mandarin and Cantonese.
As for ASCII have it your way, but I prefer EBCDIC.