Any data structure programmer worth their paycheck knows that a trie is an abstract structure which can be realised in many different ways. It is logically a tree of "nodes", where each "node" is a map from a digit (where the key is expressed in some radix) to another node. That map can be implemented in multiple ways. The simplest is an association list (sorted or unsorted), but it could be a simple array, a binary search tree (often realised as a ternary search tree), a hash table (possibly a perfect hash table), a rank/select dictionary, or pretty much anything.
Real-world tries often vary the mechanism depending on how loaded each node is, have special representations for nodes with only a few keys (e.g. burst tries) and sometimes even vary the radix, or skip whole nodes if there is only one child (e.g. Patricia tries).
That's not counting all of the trie variants with different tradeoffs.
So yes, this is completely viable. It requires thought and measurement and profiling, but you've already worked out that the many dictionary implementations floating around that are already written and tested are unsuitable for your needs.
The main difference is DirectX vs OpenGL, and it's possible that a game engine will be optimised for one and not the other.
I say "possible", but the fact is, if you care about any other platform (Mac OS, iOS, Android, Wii, Steam Box), then you need an OpenGL port anyway. But there are a significant number of games out there that are PC and XBox only.
In Australia, when the new release price is $90, $60 isn't that unusual for a used game. And yes, USD and AUD are pretty much at parity.
BTW, Microsoft has officially upped the ante. All they need to do is unbundle the Kinect and pledge support for indie developers, then it'll be more attractive than the PS4.
Is now a good time to put pressure on Sony over region locking?
Even worse is those whose Internet service occasionally goes flakey. There may only be a small number of days a year that you have only smart phone-based access to the net, but it's on precisely those days when you'd really like to play a game.
Senator Obama was made up. President Obama is the real person.
That's at best partly true.
The American people thought they were voting for an idealist constitutional scholar, but actually voted for a politician. Not a career politician, admittedly, but still a politician. That's the true part.
The untrue part is that they are different people. Actually, Senator Obama is just as real as President Obama; they are the same person working under different conditions.
We know this because the psychological forces are extremely well-understood. When you are in a position of great responsibility, the temptation is always there to bend your ethics just a bit in response to a true moral dilemma. The job of POTUS involves weighing up the lesser of multiple evils, and you don't get to punt the choice to someone else. You have to compromise your ethics one way or another.
When you break the rules, even ostensibly for the greater good, you run the risk of becoming desensitised to breaking rules. Eventually, you can get to the point where you know that you only ever break the rules in the service of a good cause, so any rule-breaking you do must be in the service of a good cause. The logical extension of this is the Nixon theory of the legality of the exercise of presidential power.
That's if you don't have a check on your conscience like, oh, a culture of pervasive over-broad secrecy and being surrounded by yes-men.
TL;DR Senator Obama == lawful good. President Obama == chaotic good.
Honestly guys, would you all feel comfortable attending with a bunch of bros in banana hammocks?
I'm a straight guy. I'm pretty sure that I'd feel exactly as comfortable in that situation as I would be in the E3 booth babe situation: I wouldn't care about human bodies, but I'd wonder if anyone was taking the whole "trade show" thing seriously. I'd have to admit there'd be some novelty value in seeing guys objectified at a gaming trade show for a change.
BTW, as an able-bodied person, I'd be comfortable if all buildings contained only wheelchair ramps and no stairs. That's the great thing about privilege, you can go through life being completely ignorant of the fact that you have it.
Gaming is *still* according to the numbers, a male dominated interests, what is wrong with catering to your main audience?
According to the numbers, it's 58% male, 42% female. I guess you could call that "male dominated" and "main audience", but I think that's stretching the meanings of those words. We've been getting closer to parity every year for quite a while now.
I'm going to assume that you didn't know that, and were blowing smoke out your arse about what "the numbers" are. Because if you really did know what the numbers were, it sure as hell looks like you're trying to maintain an illusion that gaming is "male dominated" and men are the "main audience" or, even worse, that you're trying to keep it that way by promoting the alienation of women at industry conferences.
I had this discussion with some developers at my previous job, and their consensus was they didn't really use all that much advanced math compared to what is required on most college degrees.
I've only professionally used a fraction of the maths I learned as an undergraduate. You probably won't either. However, it's impossible to predict in advance which fraction you will use, because the job you'll need it for hasn't been invented yet. It's better to have done a bit of it all, so you'll know that there is something to look up.
Incidentally, for the OP: advanced maths seems like a drudge now, but I guarantee you'll find it interesting when you have a problem to solve that pays money.
It might have done if you hadn't shown yourself unaware of the existence of such thing as a "runtime library".
You appear to think I was saying that the C runtime (which is indeed almost always implemented as a library, though there are notable exceptions) was the C virtual machine. I didn't say that at all. The C virtual machine is, in a compiled implementation, implemented by the compiler and the runtime working together.
Now, so are you saying that the C object file includes a "virtual instruction" that is interpreted on the fly by the VM, or is it instead not usually compiled into a library call?
I am saying that the abstract machine presented to a C programmer includes a bunch of basic operations (you can think of them as virtual instructions if you like), presented as the abstract syntax of the language. It's up to the implementation as to how these basic operations are realised on a specific platform. Some of them may be translated into the native language of the target machine, some may be implemented by threaded code, and so on.
The programmer will not see this as a library call. It's often unavailable to the C programmer as a library call; those bits of the runtime often don't adhere to the ABI of the platform.
I think that the cause of the misunderstanding is that programming language theorists and compiler writers use the term "virtual machine" to mean something more general than people who don't work in that space. That's okay, but but it might get confusing if you need to read the original research.
I don't see why the fact that Port Arthur was once a convict settlement really changes what happened there, but thanks for bringing it up.
Nonetheless, you're right that we're talking about fundamentally different foundations. Australia was not created by a war, it was created by a vote. The number of armed rebellions that it's seen can be counted on one hand, and none of them involved more than about 400 people.
There is a flip side to this, which is that it is the only circumstance under which gun owners would actually resist the government.
Clamping down on freedom of the press, or freedom of speech, won't do it. Increased unreasonable search and seizure won't do it. Programmes of cruel and unusual punishment won't do it. Even rounding up citizens and putting them in internment camps won't trigger the "revolution against a tyrannical government" scenario. We know this because all of the above has happened.
This is why the argument (which I realise you didn't make) that guns are needed to prevent a government becoming tyrannical is complete and utter bullshit. The only civil right that a critical mass of gun owners care about is gun ownership, which makes the whole argument completely circular.
I don't live in your country, so help me out here.
Where you live, isn't alcohol singled out for extra taxation? Aren't there age limits? Licensing schemes for establishments who want to sell or serve alcohol, including regulations about not serving people who are drunk? Aren't there open container laws? Aren't there laws about how much you can home-brew and regulations about who can home-distil?
Isn't alcohol control currently tighter than gun control?
We need to add a few more assumptions, for example that you're not using any C operations that don't have corresponding instructions on the physical hardware which would likely be implemented in the runtime on that kind of low-end hardware, such as floating point or larger-word-size division.
We're not really talking about "C" any more. We're talking about a very cut-down language, but that's okay. Even under all those assumptions, then all the C runtime probably has to do is transfer control to C code, and the rest of the abstract machine can be implemented using static translation alone.
I still don't get why the C runtime is being called a "VM" rather than a "runtime library".
OK, I think we have some confusion here.
The abstract machine which C presents to the programmer is typically realised using several different techniques. There is no hardware in existence which runs C source code directly, so ultimately, instructions in a high-level language must be translated to run on something lower-level. The translation could be dynamic (in which case we'd call it "interpreted") or static (in which case we'd call it "compiled") or somewhere on a continuum between the two.
C is such a low-level language that for the most part, the operations of the C machine map to instructions on modern ISAs. On a typical platform, there are at least three cases where this is not the case.
1. Some of the standard libraries can't be implemented directly in C, because on a modern platform they require trapping into the operating system. However, this is presented to the programmer as a call to a library function. As far as the programmer is concerned, this is a library call, so it is correct to think of this as "library".
2. There are some parts of the startup and shutdown procedure which can't be implemented directly in C, because when the OS gives control to the program, you are not yet "in" C. Some parts of the startup and shutdown procedure can be implemented in C, but are still not presented to the programmer as a library; for example, there's no library that you call to perform argv/envp parsing. Because this is presented as an operation of the machine, rather than a library call, it is more properly thought of as "runtime".
3. You occasionally run into the situation where you have a C operations which does not map directly to instructions on the ISA. For example, 16-bit CPUs may provide facilities for performing double-register arithmetic, thus effectively giving you 32-bit arithmetic for all of the basic operations except division (and modulus). Some CPUs don't have a floating point unit. In these cases, the C implementation generates threaded code for those operations, calling out to a software implementation.
Note that this is different from a "library", because we're talking about operations which aren't presented as library calls. The C compiler generates calls from source code which doesn't call anything. This is more properly thought of as "runtime".
Slashdot Mirror
If you think that Perl is anywhere near as bad as PHP, it's clear that you've never tried to write anything serious in at least one of them.
Of course, you can write PHP in any language.
BTW, one good thing about Perl is that it's no longer trendy, which means that pretty much anyone using Perl today actually knows what they're doing.
Done it.
Any data structure programmer worth their paycheck knows that a trie is an abstract structure which can be realised in many different ways. It is logically a tree of "nodes", where each "node" is a map from a digit (where the key is expressed in some radix) to another node. That map can be implemented in multiple ways. The simplest is an association list (sorted or unsorted), but it could be a simple array, a binary search tree (often realised as a ternary search tree), a hash table (possibly a perfect hash table), a rank/select dictionary, or pretty much anything.
Real-world tries often vary the mechanism depending on how loaded each node is, have special representations for nodes with only a few keys (e.g. burst tries) and sometimes even vary the radix, or skip whole nodes if there is only one child (e.g. Patricia tries).
That's not counting all of the trie variants with different tradeoffs.
So yes, this is completely viable. It requires thought and measurement and profiling, but you've already worked out that the many dictionary implementations floating around that are already written and tested are unsuitable for your needs.
The main difference is DirectX vs OpenGL, and it's possible that a game engine will be optimised for one and not the other.
I say "possible", but the fact is, if you care about any other platform (Mac OS, iOS, Android, Wii, Steam Box), then you need an OpenGL port anyway. But there are a significant number of games out there that are PC and XBox only.
Yeah, I wonder if this is really about killing the rental market or, indeed, any form of "try before you buy".
In Australia, when the new release price is $90, $60 isn't that unusual for a used game. And yes, USD and AUD are pretty much at parity.
BTW, Microsoft has officially upped the ante. All they need to do is unbundle the Kinect and pledge support for indie developers, then it'll be more attractive than the PS4.
Is now a good time to put pressure on Sony over region locking?
Will any sufficiently smart phone do, or does it require Windows Phone? Or (more likely) will this be an under-documented "feature" of Smart Glass?
Cable/DSL != the Internet.
Even worse is those whose Internet service occasionally goes flakey. There may only be a small number of days a year that you have only smart phone-based access to the net, but it's on precisely those days when you'd really like to play a game.
No, that's not the problem. As another follow-up rightly pointed out, broadband is a prerequisite for most online gaming.
The problem is that those friends in rural are locked out from console gaming at all. Well, that's one of the problems, anyway.
Senator Obama was made up. President Obama is the real person.
That's at best partly true.
The American people thought they were voting for an idealist constitutional scholar, but actually voted for a politician. Not a career politician, admittedly, but still a politician. That's the true part.
The untrue part is that they are different people. Actually, Senator Obama is just as real as President Obama; they are the same person working under different conditions.
We know this because the psychological forces are extremely well-understood. When you are in a position of great responsibility, the temptation is always there to bend your ethics just a bit in response to a true moral dilemma. The job of POTUS involves weighing up the lesser of multiple evils, and you don't get to punt the choice to someone else. You have to compromise your ethics one way or another.
When you break the rules, even ostensibly for the greater good, you run the risk of becoming desensitised to breaking rules. Eventually, you can get to the point where you know that you only ever break the rules in the service of a good cause, so any rule-breaking you do must be in the service of a good cause. The logical extension of this is the Nixon theory of the legality of the exercise of presidential power.
That's if you don't have a check on your conscience like, oh, a culture of pervasive over-broad secrecy and being surrounded by yes-men.
TL;DR Senator Obama == lawful good. President Obama == chaotic good.
Dude, we've all seen Idiocracy. That joke was funny ten years ago.
I'm a straight guy. I'm pretty sure that I'd feel exactly as comfortable in that situation as I would be in the E3 booth babe situation: I wouldn't care about human bodies, but I'd wonder if anyone was taking the whole "trade show" thing seriously. I'd have to admit there'd be some novelty value in seeing guys objectified at a gaming trade show for a change.
BTW, as an able-bodied person, I'd be comfortable if all buildings contained only wheelchair ramps and no stairs. That's the great thing about privilege, you can go through life being completely ignorant of the fact that you have it.
According to the numbers, it's 58% male, 42% female. I guess you could call that "male dominated" and "main audience", but I think that's stretching the meanings of those words. We've been getting closer to parity every year for quite a while now.
I'm going to assume that you didn't know that, and were blowing smoke out your arse about what "the numbers" are. Because if you really did know what the numbers were, it sure as hell looks like you're trying to maintain an illusion that gaming is "male dominated" and men are the "main audience" or, even worse, that you're trying to keep it that way by promoting the alienation of women at industry conferences.
Contrary to popular belief, the NSA is not asking for fecal samples.
...or perhaps "anything we'd ever seen" was a low bar?
Pics or it did happen.
I've only professionally used a fraction of the maths I learned as an undergraduate. You probably won't either. However, it's impossible to predict in advance which fraction you will use, because the job you'll need it for hasn't been invented yet. It's better to have done a bit of it all, so you'll know that there is something to look up.
Incidentally, for the OP: advanced maths seems like a drudge now, but I guarantee you'll find it interesting when you have a problem to solve that pays money.
Yes, we do have some confusion here.
You appear to think I was saying that the C runtime (which is indeed almost always implemented as a library, though there are notable exceptions) was the C virtual machine. I didn't say that at all. The C virtual machine is, in a compiled implementation, implemented by the compiler and the runtime working together.
I am saying that the abstract machine presented to a C programmer includes a bunch of basic operations (you can think of them as virtual instructions if you like), presented as the abstract syntax of the language. It's up to the implementation as to how these basic operations are realised on a specific platform. Some of them may be translated into the native language of the target machine, some may be implemented by threaded code, and so on.
The programmer will not see this as a library call. It's often unavailable to the C programmer as a library call; those bits of the runtime often don't adhere to the ABI of the platform.
I think that the cause of the misunderstanding is that programming language theorists and compiler writers use the term "virtual machine" to mean something more general than people who don't work in that space. That's okay, but but it might get confusing if you need to read the original research.
Unfortunately, Poe's Law applies to both sides of the gun control "debate".
I don't see why the fact that Port Arthur was once a convict settlement really changes what happened there, but thanks for bringing it up.
Nonetheless, you're right that we're talking about fundamentally different foundations. Australia was not created by a war, it was created by a vote. The number of armed rebellions that it's seen can be counted on one hand, and none of them involved more than about 400 people.
There is a flip side to this, which is that it is the only circumstance under which gun owners would actually resist the government.
Clamping down on freedom of the press, or freedom of speech, won't do it. Increased unreasonable search and seizure won't do it. Programmes of cruel and unusual punishment won't do it. Even rounding up citizens and putting them in internment camps won't trigger the "revolution against a tyrannical government" scenario. We know this because all of the above has happened.
This is why the argument (which I realise you didn't make) that guns are needed to prevent a government becoming tyrannical is complete and utter bullshit. The only civil right that a critical mass of gun owners care about is gun ownership, which makes the whole argument completely circular.
I don't live in your country, so help me out here.
Where you live, isn't alcohol singled out for extra taxation? Aren't there age limits? Licensing schemes for establishments who want to sell or serve alcohol, including regulations about not serving people who are drunk? Aren't there open container laws? Aren't there laws about how much you can home-brew and regulations about who can home-distil?
Isn't alcohol control currently tighter than gun control?
You kid, but there's a pretty serious point in here. Something like 2/3 of all gunshot victims in the US live in the same body as the gun owner.
We need to add a few more assumptions, for example that you're not using any C operations that don't have corresponding instructions on the physical hardware which would likely be implemented in the runtime on that kind of low-end hardware, such as floating point or larger-word-size division.
We're not really talking about "C" any more. We're talking about a very cut-down language, but that's okay. Even under all those assumptions, then all the C runtime probably has to do is transfer control to C code, and the rest of the abstract machine can be implemented using static translation alone.
OK, I think we have some confusion here.
The abstract machine which C presents to the programmer is typically realised using several different techniques. There is no hardware in existence which runs C source code directly, so ultimately, instructions in a high-level language must be translated to run on something lower-level. The translation could be dynamic (in which case we'd call it "interpreted") or static (in which case we'd call it "compiled") or somewhere on a continuum between the two.
C is such a low-level language that for the most part, the operations of the C machine map to instructions on modern ISAs. On a typical platform, there are at least three cases where this is not the case.
1. Some of the standard libraries can't be implemented directly in C, because on a modern platform they require trapping into the operating system. However, this is presented to the programmer as a call to a library function. As far as the programmer is concerned, this is a library call, so it is correct to think of this as "library".
2. There are some parts of the startup and shutdown procedure which can't be implemented directly in C, because when the OS gives control to the program, you are not yet "in" C. Some parts of the startup and shutdown procedure can be implemented in C, but are still not presented to the programmer as a library; for example, there's no library that you call to perform argv/envp parsing. Because this is presented as an operation of the machine, rather than a library call, it is more properly thought of as "runtime".
3. You occasionally run into the situation where you have a C operations which does not map directly to instructions on the ISA. For example, 16-bit CPUs may provide facilities for performing double-register arithmetic, thus effectively giving you 32-bit arithmetic for all of the basic operations except division (and modulus). Some CPUs don't have a floating point unit. In these cases, the C implementation generates threaded code for those operations, calling out to a software implementation.
Note that this is different from a "library", because we're talking about operations which aren't presented as library calls. The C compiler generates calls from source code which doesn't call anything. This is more properly thought of as "runtime".
Did that help?