Yeah? So can one hit by a drunk driver. You prove nothing by anecdote. If you want cold, hard statistics, look here:
http://swill.co.za/chem/law/howbad.html
The long and the short of it is Deaths in the USA per year, by substance:
Deaths from tobacco 1,000,000 Deaths from alcohol 400,000 Deaths from heroin and related opiates 2,500 Deaths from sniffing solvents 1200 Deaths from ecstasy 80 Deaths from LSD 10
Or how about a (true) counter-anecdote: I know a psychiatrist. Part of her job is to look after psychotic people who have had their psychosis triggered by LSD. She uses LSD 2 or 3 times a year.
"the VALIANT VENTURE LTD corporation based in the Bahamas" ... "The Bahamas-based Company plans to build a laboratory in a country where human cloning is not illegal and will offer its services to wealthy parents worldwide" ... Who cares if it's illegal in the yankee police-state, when the rich can route around the law?
>Psychologists have studied this to a large extent and found that LSD does gives only the "illusion" of insight:
Well yes - it makes everything seem bigger, deeper and brigher. Everything is meaningfull. Thus LSD does not give insight, it makes thoughts seem more insightfull.
> the users are just fooling themselves.
Hm, so someone should tell roller-coaster users that they're not really in danger of falling, they are just fooling themselves. If they realise that, then the thrill of riding the rollercoaster would be gone. Sheesh, get a clue.
> Similarly, scientists have studied Extasy and found it has massive detrimental longterm effects to your IQ.
Can you provide a reference for the study that you base this conclusion on? I follow this stuff, and it's news to me. Or are you just blowing smoke out of your ass?
Virtual class var? That's just the Factory method design pattern. (see the Gang of 4 Design patterns book) - "Define an interface for creating an object, but let subclsses decide wich class to instantiate".
You can implement this in C++, Java, Delphi etc, so what's the big deal?
> Penrose's whole argument was based on quantum
> level computations taking place in the
> nanotubes of the glia, rather than at a neural > net or higher level. Hardly a mainstream view.
Translation: thought by most to be a load of crap.
Dennet's reply to that is that cockroaches have the same microtubules and they're not conscious.
Penrose argues that we don't and can't have an algorythym that is guaranteed to produce some of the results that humans have produced.
Dennet's reply is that is missing the point. The human wasn't *guaranteed* to produce that result. He tries heuristics and hunches with the posibility of failure. Given enough silicon, which is not that far off, that process is 100% replicatable. it won't guarantee sucess, but it will be better than human thought.
My response: In the highly unlikely event that consciousness does turn out to be dependant on "nanotubes of the glia" or whatnot, right then is when someone will start building artificial microstructures that can do much the same job.
Penrose is talking from wishfull thinking: his argument boils down to "computers can't do the same stuff as us because, well it just stands to reason". True, but it also stands to reason that the earth is flat and the sun goes around it.
> Eventually the police made statements through a loud speaker. They told us we were all guilty of unlawful assembly and we must leave immediately. Everyone tensed up, as this has consistently been followed within seconds by teargas, rubber bullets, and police advances.
Been there. Cape Town, South Africa, 1988. Some things (Ie police behaviour) are universal.
Re:No to encryption on new storage media
on
A 140GB CD-ROM?
·
· Score: 1
>Then if the disk needed a specific codec, it could simply ship with it, or the computer could grab it off the net.
Would it be legal to set up a web site a la CDDB, but which dished out DVD decryption keys or DIVX viewing keys to all comers? I think not. You would be shut down real quick.
What you seem to be saying is that, seeing as today we can crack & work around such schemes with some trouble, in the near future it will be even easier. This is an appealing notion, but only holds if the movie & music industries do not continue to try to improve thier daft encryption schemes, which benefit them but not consumers. Unless hit over the head, they will do so, which is why it is important for the makers of new media not to support them in this.
No to encryption on new storage media
on
A 140GB CD-ROM?
·
· Score: 1
To the makers of this and other such new devices: Please don't let the Movie and Music Industries convince you to buy into thier dumb-ass encryption, regionalisation, locking or content scrambling schemes. They don't work, and just waste everyone's time. Design the device as a bucket o' data files.
> humanity's most enduring plagues and problems, from AIDS...
AIDS is hardly an "enduring plauge", it has only become a problem recently.
Last night I read an article on the next centry in Time Magazine where the author of "The Hot Zone" suggested that increasing population, especially in the tropics, coupled with increasing global mobility of people will bring out new diseases, and make AIDS seem like the opening battle in a viral war.
Sure Time Mag is dumbed down & the author is biased, but does that mean that they must be wrong? Maybe thay have a point.
And why not? if an idea is in existence already, never mind where it came from, then how can anyone patent it?
> Just assume someone lets a large cluster of machines produce "inventions" and publishes the results (on a website?). > Would this stop others from patenting those inventions?
Surely a demostration that a machine *could* generate a design shows that it is obvious from prior art? If new design = (Prior art + mechanical process), then that to me is just about the definition of "obvious"
In other words couldn't you throw out an existing or new patent idea on the grounds that your new GA machine could generate it any time.
...Old news. I pointed all of this out weeks ago on slashdot in a article on Genetic Algorythms. The thing is, what is non-obvious today may be obvious tomorrow. Witness how these learning programs usually start off by discovering all the solutions that we know about already - including the ones that have been patented.
Any computer is still a lot less intelligent than any human (in most ways). and IMHO if an invention can be found by a computer executing a detrministic program, then it shouldn't be patentable. Any existing patent should be revoked.
> For example, how can you be accountable for your lies about a product, but at the same time anonymous enough to speak out against a totalitarian regime? One requires untraceability, one requires traceability
Of course you can have both. I trust the product reviews of Tom's hardware page a lot more than I do those of "Anonymous coward". The first time I read the question, I took it to mean that a trustworthy-seeming source was wrong and that an elaborate deception or large corporate payoff had taken place. On rereading it, I see that there is no such assumption.
Let's take the internet out of the picture:
1) Searching for a new snack in a bar, you find a grafitto in the loo in which the grafittist raves about a particular snack. You buy the snack and discover it is revolting. You desire to prevent this person's writings from harming anyone else--and you desire to prevent the snack from disappointing anyone else.
Answer: Hit yourself over the head with a mallet until you pass out.
Salary of Senior Programmer: around R14 000 ($2300) per month gross. Take off R4000 for tax. Salaries will be higher in Joburg, but you couldn't pay me to live there.
Other factors: Housing, food: Cheap and good Natural environment and weather: great! Public transport: what's that? Roads & highways: Adequite, under 1 hour to work from outlying suburbs. Health care: Private health care is good, public health care is apalling Internet: Local phone calls charged *per minute* Crime rate: Appalling
Good geeks are steadily leaving to earh real money in the 1st world.
I had a hotmail box for anonimity reasons. It is spammed to hell and back (mainly becuase I made 2 mistakes in the early days - I put the unmangled email address on a web page, and I wrote angry replies to spam).
About a month ago I moved over to webmail.co.za becuase I was sick of deleting 40 useless messages every week. Praise to hotmail, it's just to late.
I had the LASIK operation done in April last year in South Africa. This is before it was available in the USA. Think of me as your 3rd world guinea pig! This was after they had been doing it for about 5 years here so I thought it was safe enough now.
My conclusion: I love it!
The operation is done under local anaesthetic (some numbing eyedrops) and naturally, your eye is open during the lasering so you can see everything (except for the main event when they lift up a flap of the cornea - it goes blurry then). However it is over in 20 minutes for both eyes, and the actual laser is on for maybe 20 seconds per eye. It is no more nerve-wracking than a body piercing. You walk out. They like to do the ops on Fridays so that the patients can be back at work on Monday.
What the other posters have said is true - things will be blurry for a few days, it takes weeks for your vision to settle down, there are starbursts around lights at night for a while, the operation is probabilistic thing (but with a very good chance (95%+) that your vision will improve a lot). As my doctor explained - the greater the defect, the less chance of getting perfect vision. However, The greater the defect, the greater the miracle from near-perfect vision.
Also, though you may feel Ok after, lie low for a few days. No computer for 2-3 days:(.
I know a guy who when to a party and sat around a fire maybe 2 days after the op. Bad move - he got an infection. I remeber setting the font on my email program to "really huge" so that I could get a fix on the first blurry day.
Now if I've already designed the field for my object, and made the necessary accessors to modify it, what added functionality does the property declaration syntax offer? Isn't this just syntactic sugar? It looks cute...
Well, yes but... The property inspector for visual components wouldn't work without it. That sugar is pretty sweet! The principle here (in the design of Delphi 1 as a VB competitor) was that Delphi had to do what VB could do (ie visual inspection of object properties) and also do it without any "magic", with the mechanism there for all to see and use.
When I saw the Javabeans thing, where a pair of methods called Get_XYZ and Set_XYZ are automatically assumed to form a property called XYX, my immediate reaction was that they had looked at Delphi properties, but not quite gotten it. The programmer should specify what the propery name is (does not have to match the name of the gettor & settor methods, same getteor and settor methods can be used in more than one propery if you want) and should decide to surface read or write independantly, irrespective of if there are private/protected methods that can do that internally.
I've not only seen code like what you describe, I have to live with it almost daily. My Sypathies.
> I'm sure C++ programmers feel the same way of their language as well.
Um, fine but IMHO the design of OP pays a lot more attention to source code readability than the design of C++ does.
> Are all these different words really necessary?
Hm. I always thought that "syntactic sugar" was something that looked nice and read well, but actually didn't contribute any functionality. For E.g. in C++ MyObject1 += MyObject2; (with the += operator overloaded to do something obscure) is syntatically no different from MyObject1.AddValuesFromAnotherObject (MyObject2); It just looks cuter.
Many of the constructs that you describe, (stdcall, {$R BUTTONS.RES} compiler commands, WideChar WideString PChar vs String, far external ) are quite the opposite: They are ugly and everyone knows it, but they are neccesary to get the program to work with the outside OS of Windows. They are not needed internally. You should see the syntax that was added to get Delphi to do COM!
For the property declaration syntax, Property MyPropertyName: TMyType read MyGettorMethod write MySettorMethod; IMHO it is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Simple, unambiguous, flexible and readable. If you want the source code to be terse as well - sorry, OP consistently compromises terseness in favour of those other goals. Unlike C. But then maybe that was a reasonable consideration back in 197x when C was thought up. It sure isn't now due to large hard drives & code generation & helper tools.
> Maybe Delphi is better when compared to that (VB is the closest thing to Delphi after all, or is it the other way around).
Ouch. But let's see - VB came first, Delphi did it better, and with a real language under the hood.
> takes a serious effort to change your way of thinking from procedural to OO (I'd say easily 18 months, even if you practice OOP almost daily),
From experience that sounds about right.
> Don't know my Delphi enough to tell how generic programming is achieved using Object Pascal. If at all?
Hm, some can be achieved with clever use of objects (ie TObject is the ancestor of all object classes, there are list/queue etc. classes that deal with it.) However it is kinda lacking.
The original point hat I was on about is this: I have reviewed code and seen the same procedure attached to 10 different forms, when it could just as easily been written once as a free-standing function in it's own code unit. So many "programmers" (who probably learned their tricks on VB) have barely come to grips with procedural programming, let alone OO. You may think that this is the exception, but after many code reviews I can assure you that it is not. VB is IMHO to blame for a lot of this.
>I'm sorry but I can't agree on this. Object Pascal is far from being an elegant language.
I'm sorry but I can't agree on this.
> . It suffers from a buttload of unuseful syntactic sugar
eh? I find it very readable.
> very obviously alot of features have been put in to keep people used to C++ idioms happy
If you mean things like virtual methods & function overloading, naah, they are put in because they are useful.
> Unfortunately they also introduced the same flaws as C++ has.
Hm. They purposefully left out C++ style multiple inheritence and templates as these were regarded as not worth the complexity. C++ Operator overloading - now there is unuseful syntactic sugar. Guess what, Delphi doesn't do it.
I honestly don't know what flaws you are refering to, unless you are one of them wussy VB programmers that regards real OO as a flaw because it's "too hard"
> Object Pascal can only be called an elegant programming language if you happen to think C++ is an elegant programming language
I beg to differ. I think C++ code is ugly write-only typrographic soup, and Delphi code is elegant.
> Any good VB programmer avoids the data bound controls like the plauge.
Ah, I was not aware of that. It makes sense though. I have long said the same about good Delphi programmers.
Unfortunately, the majority of VB code will use databound controls. Last time I used VB, there wasn't much else you *could* do. I could also add an opinion that any good VB programmer doesn't use VB, but that would just be stirring up trouble.
One of the design goals of Delphi was to do everything that VB does, and a depressing number of Delphi programs don't even venture beyond "VB for dummies".
> There isn't a tool out there that makes adding GUI elements easier than VB (save Delphi...which has a very VB'ish interface).
Please don't think that this makes Delphi the same as VB. I have used both, and know that VB quickly runs out of steam when trying to do interesting stuff, whereas Delphi gets you 95% as far as C++ does.
However, if you want to, you can use Delphi like VB. Perhaps this is not a good thing - As someone who often reviews Delphi code from programming job applicants, it is sad to see how low the bar has become. The VB, Data bound, cut & paste, drag & drop programming style is very noticable. Some of these people barely know procedural programming, let alone OO.
What you are describing is perpetual motion - using the energy put out by a system (in this case photons from the tree) fed back into the system to power it. You *cannot* make this worthwhile - The laws of thermodymanics say that you can't win, and you can't break even. Anyone who says otherwise is a crank.
In the best case your enegry efficiency is near 100% - ie you collect most of the energy that you sent out, and don't gain anything, only lose a little.
In the real world, energy effiency is likely to be very low, i.e. 1) Energy lost while powering the luciferin/luciferase reaction 2) Only a fraction of the emited light will hit the tree's leaves. 3) Photosynthesis in those leaves will be inefficient.
Therefor there is no way that the tree doing this this would increase the yield of the plant - quite the oposite.
> If you are not the fittest then in time you will die out
Yeah, let's nuke the Amazon rainforest. The wussy bugs and trees don't deserve to live now that we have the means to obliterate them! It's only a matter of time anyway before they die out anyway.
> - I don't necessarily hold the same opinion for animals which have been eradicated by humans. Also, I am not the worlds greatest historian and I don't know what it was that killed them off
OK, this is the score. Wooly mamoths, the European rinocerous and the sabertoothed cat all died out at about the same time that homo sapiens (our great granparents) started wandering about the landscape and throwing spears around. Note that these are all large mamals that would be either tasty to cavepersons (mamoth, rhino) or compete for space in caves and try to eat thier children (sabretoothed cat). Hmm.
> I don't necessarily hold the same opinion for animals which have been eradicated by humans
So you should be in favour of bringing back the mamoth. Or perhaps humans "au naturel" before civilisation don't count? You cannot draw lines like that.
Humankind was, is and always will be a part of nature, and a extinction caused by humans is as "natural" as any other.
That doesn't mean I won't miss the bengal tiger though. Which life is worth more - a person or a gorilla? Hm, let's see, there are 6 billion people, a few 1000 gorillas in existence. I'd have to go with the gorilla.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah? So can one hit by a drunk driver. You prove nothing by anecdote. If you want cold, hard statistics, look here:
http://swill.co.za/chem/law/howbad.html
The long and the short of it is
Deaths in the USA per year, by substance:
Deaths from tobacco 1,000,000
Deaths from alcohol 400,000
Deaths from heroin and related opiates 2,500
Deaths from sniffing solvents 1200
Deaths from ecstasy 80
Deaths from LSD 10
Or how about a (true) counter-anecdote: I know a psychiatrist. Part of her job is to look after psychotic people who have had their psychosis triggered by LSD. She uses LSD 2 or 3 times a year.
"the VALIANT VENTURE LTD corporation based in the Bahamas"
...
"The Bahamas-based Company plans to build a laboratory in a country where human cloning is not illegal and will offer its services to wealthy parents worldwide"
...
Who cares if it's illegal in the yankee police-state, when the rich can route around the law?
>Psychologists have studied this to a large extent and found that LSD does gives only the "illusion" of insight:
Well yes - it makes everything seem bigger, deeper and brigher. Everything is meaningfull. Thus LSD does not give insight, it makes thoughts seem more insightfull.
> the users are just fooling themselves.
Hm, so someone should tell roller-coaster users that they're not really in danger of falling, they are just fooling themselves. If they realise that, then the thrill of riding the rollercoaster would be gone. Sheesh, get a clue.
> Similarly, scientists have studied Extasy and found it has massive detrimental longterm effects to your IQ.
Can you provide a reference for the study that you base this conclusion on? I follow this stuff, and it's news to me. Or are you just blowing smoke out of your ass?
Virtual class var? That's just the Factory method design pattern. (see the Gang of 4 Design patterns book) - "Define an interface for creating an object, but let subclsses decide wich class to instantiate".
You can implement this in C++, Java, Delphi etc, so what's the big deal?
> Penrose's whole argument was based on quantum
> level computations taking place in the
> nanotubes of the glia, rather than at a neural > net or higher level. Hardly a mainstream view.
Translation: thought by most to be a load of crap.
Dennet's reply to that is that cockroaches have the same microtubules and they're not conscious.
Penrose argues that we don't and can't have an algorythym that is guaranteed to produce some of the results that humans have produced.
Dennet's reply is that is missing the point. The human wasn't *guaranteed* to produce that result. He tries heuristics and hunches with the posibility of failure. Given enough silicon, which is not that far off, that process is 100% replicatable. it won't guarantee sucess, but it will be better than human thought.
My response: In the highly unlikely event that consciousness does turn out to be dependant on "nanotubes of the glia" or whatnot, right then is when someone will start building artificial microstructures that can do much the same job.
Penrose is talking from wishfull thinking: his argument boils down to "computers can't do the same stuff as us because, well it just stands to reason". True, but it also stands to reason that the earth is flat and the sun goes around it.
...is how you spell that old fish.
> Eventually the police made statements through a loud speaker. They told us we were all guilty of unlawful assembly and we must leave immediately. Everyone tensed up, as this has consistently been followed within seconds by teargas, rubber bullets, and police advances.
Been there. Cape Town, South Africa, 1988. Some things (Ie police behaviour) are universal.
>Then if the disk needed a specific codec, it could simply ship with it, or the computer could grab it off the net.
Would it be legal to set up a web site a la CDDB, but which dished out DVD decryption keys or DIVX viewing keys to all comers? I think not. You would be shut down real quick.
What you seem to be saying is that, seeing as today we can crack & work around such schemes with some trouble, in the near future it will be even easier. This is an appealing notion, but only holds if the movie & music industries do not continue to try to improve thier daft encryption schemes, which benefit them but not consumers. Unless hit over the head, they will do so, which is why it is important for the makers of new media not to support them in this.
To the makers of this and other such new devices: Please don't let the Movie and Music Industries convince you to buy into thier dumb-ass encryption, regionalisation, locking or content scrambling schemes. They don't work, and just waste everyone's time. Design the device as a bucket o' data files.
> humanity's most enduring plagues and problems, from AIDS ...
AIDS is hardly an "enduring plauge", it has only become a problem recently.
Last night I read an article on the next centry in Time Magazine where the author of "The Hot Zone" suggested that increasing population, especially in the tropics, coupled with increasing global mobility of people will bring out new diseases, and make AIDS seem like the opening battle in a viral war.
Sure Time Mag is dumbed down & the author is biased, but does that mean that they must be wrong? Maybe thay have a point.
>Could a computer's invention count as prior art?
And why not? if an idea is in existence already, never mind where it came from, then how can anyone patent it?
> Just assume someone lets a large cluster of machines produce "inventions" and publishes the results (on a website?).
> Would this stop others from patenting those inventions?
Surely a demostration that a machine *could* generate a design shows that it is obvious from prior art? If new design = (Prior art + mechanical process), then that to me is just about the definition of "obvious"
In other words couldn't you throw out an existing or new patent idea on the grounds that your new GA machine could generate it any time.
...Old news. I pointed all of this out weeks ago on slashdot in a article on Genetic Algorythms. The thing is, what is non-obvious today may be obvious tomorrow. Witness how these learning programs usually start off by discovering all the solutions that we know about already - including the ones that have been patented.
Any computer is still a lot less intelligent than any human (in most ways). and IMHO if an invention can be found by a computer executing a detrministic program, then it shouldn't be patentable. Any existing patent should be revoked.
> For example, how can you be accountable for your lies about a product, but at the same time anonymous enough to speak out against a totalitarian regime? One requires untraceability, one requires traceability
Of course you can have both. I trust the product reviews of Tom's hardware page a lot more than I do those of "Anonymous coward". The first time I read the question, I took it to mean that a trustworthy-seeming source was wrong and that an elaborate deception or large corporate payoff had taken place. On rereading it, I see that there is no such assumption.
Let's take the internet out of the picture:
1) Searching for a new snack in a bar, you find a grafitto in the loo in which the grafittist raves about a particular snack. You buy the snack and discover it is revolting. You desire to prevent this person's writings from harming anyone else--and you desire to prevent the snack from disappointing anyone else.
Answer: Hit yourself over the head with a mallet until you pass out.
Salary of Senior Programmer: around R14 000 ($2300) per month gross. Take off R4000 for tax. Salaries will be higher in Joburg, but you couldn't pay me to live there.
Other factors:
Housing, food: Cheap and good
Natural environment and weather: great!
Public transport: what's that?
Roads & highways: Adequite, under 1 hour to work from outlying suburbs.
Health care: Private health care is good, public health care is apalling
Internet: Local phone calls charged *per minute*
Crime rate: Appalling
Good geeks are steadily leaving to earh real money in the 1st world.
I had a hotmail box for anonimity reasons. It is spammed to hell and back (mainly becuase I made 2 mistakes in the early days - I put the unmangled email address on a web page, and I wrote angry replies to spam).
About a month ago I moved over to webmail.co.za becuase I was sick of deleting 40 useless messages every week. Praise to hotmail, it's just to late.
I had the LASIK operation done in April last year in South Africa. This is before it was available in the USA. Think of me as your 3rd world guinea pig! This was after they had been doing it for about 5 years here so I thought it was safe enough now.
:(.
My conclusion: I love it!
The operation is done under local anaesthetic (some numbing eyedrops) and naturally, your eye is open during the lasering so you can see everything (except for the main event when they lift up a flap of the cornea - it goes blurry then). However it is over in 20 minutes for both eyes, and the actual laser is on for maybe 20 seconds per eye. It is no more nerve-wracking than a body piercing. You walk out. They like to do the ops on Fridays so that the patients can be back at work on Monday.
What the other posters have said is true - things will be blurry for a few days, it takes weeks for your vision to settle down, there are starbursts around lights at night for a while, the operation is probabilistic thing (but with a very good chance (95%+) that your vision will improve a lot). As my doctor explained - the greater the defect, the less chance of getting perfect vision. However, The greater the defect, the greater the miracle from near-perfect vision.
Also, though you may feel Ok after, lie low for a few days. No computer for 2-3 days
I know a guy who when to a party and sat around a fire maybe 2 days after the op. Bad move - he got an infection. I remeber setting the font on my email program to "really huge" so that I could get a fix on the first blurry day.
Now if I've already designed the field for my object, and made the necessary accessors to modify it, what added functionality does the property declaration syntax offer? Isn't this just syntactic sugar? It looks cute...
Well, yes but... The property inspector for visual components wouldn't work without it. That sugar is pretty sweet!
The principle here (in the design of Delphi 1 as a VB competitor) was that Delphi had to do what VB could do (ie visual inspection of object properties) and also do it without any "magic", with the mechanism there for all to see and use.
When I saw the Javabeans thing, where a pair of methods called Get_XYZ and Set_XYZ are automatically assumed to form a property called XYX, my immediate reaction was that they had looked at Delphi properties, but not quite gotten it. The programmer should specify what the propery name is (does not have to match the name of the gettor & settor methods, same getteor and settor methods can be used in more than one propery if you want) and should decide to surface read or write independantly, irrespective of if there are private/protected methods that can do that internally.
I've not only seen code like what you describe, I have to live with it almost daily.
My Sypathies.
> I'm sure C++ programmers feel the same way of their language as well.
Um, fine but IMHO the design of OP pays a lot more attention to source code readability than the design of C++ does.
> Are all these different words really necessary?
Hm. I always thought that "syntactic sugar" was something that looked nice and read well, but actually didn't contribute any functionality. For E.g. in C++ MyObject1 += MyObject2; (with the += operator overloaded to do something obscure) is syntatically no different from MyObject1.AddValuesFromAnotherObject (MyObject2); It just looks cuter.
Many of the constructs that you describe, (stdcall, {$R BUTTONS.RES} compiler commands, WideChar WideString PChar vs String, far external ) are quite the opposite: They are ugly and everyone knows it, but they are neccesary to get the program to work with the outside OS of Windows. They are not needed internally. You should see the syntax that was added to get Delphi to do COM!
For the property declaration syntax, Property MyPropertyName: TMyType read MyGettorMethod write MySettorMethod; IMHO it is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Simple, unambiguous, flexible and readable. If you want the source code to be terse as well - sorry, OP consistently compromises terseness in favour of those other goals. Unlike C. But then maybe that was a reasonable consideration back in 197x when C was thought up. It sure isn't now due to large hard drives & code generation & helper tools.
> Maybe Delphi is better when compared to that (VB is the closest thing to Delphi after all, or is it the other way around).
Ouch. But let's see - VB came first, Delphi did it better, and with a real language under the hood.
> takes a serious effort to change your way of thinking from procedural to OO (I'd say easily 18 months, even if you practice OOP almost daily),
From experience that sounds about right.
> Don't know my Delphi enough to tell how generic programming is achieved using Object Pascal. If at all?
Hm, some can be achieved with clever use of objects (ie TObject is the ancestor of all object classes, there are list/queue etc. classes that deal with it.) However it is kinda lacking.
The original point hat I was on about is this: I have reviewed code and seen the same procedure attached to 10 different forms, when it could just as easily been written once as a free-standing function in it's own code unit. So many "programmers" (who probably learned their tricks on VB) have barely come to grips with procedural programming, let alone OO. You may think that this is the exception, but after many code reviews I can assure you that it is not. VB is IMHO to blame for a lot of this.
> ... great potential benefits of MP3 ... in education, particularly language instruction ... the possibilities are astounding.
Yeah, that's what they said about TV.
>I'm sorry but I can't agree on this. Object Pascal is far from being an elegant language.
I'm sorry but I can't agree on this.
> . It suffers from a buttload of unuseful syntactic sugar
eh? I find it very readable.
> very obviously alot of features have been put in to keep people used to C++ idioms happy
If you mean things like virtual methods & function overloading, naah, they are put in because they are useful.
> Unfortunately they also introduced the same flaws as C++ has.
Hm. They purposefully left out C++ style multiple inheritence and templates as these were regarded as not worth the complexity. C++ Operator overloading - now there is unuseful syntactic sugar. Guess what, Delphi doesn't do it.
I honestly don't know what flaws you are refering to, unless you are one of them wussy VB programmers that regards real OO as a flaw because it's "too hard"
> Object Pascal can only be called an elegant programming language if you happen to think C++ is an elegant programming language
I beg to differ. I think C++ code is ugly write-only typrographic soup, and Delphi code is elegant.
> Any good VB programmer avoids the data bound controls like the plauge.
Ah, I was not aware of that. It makes sense though. I have long said the same about good Delphi programmers.
Unfortunately, the majority of VB code will use databound controls. Last time I used VB, there wasn't much else you *could* do. I could also add an opinion that any good VB programmer doesn't use VB, but that would just be stirring up trouble.
One of the design goals of Delphi was to do everything that VB does, and a depressing number of Delphi programs don't even venture beyond "VB for dummies".
> There isn't a tool out there that makes adding GUI elements easier than VB (save Delphi...which has a very VB'ish interface).
Please don't think that this makes Delphi the same as VB. I have used both, and know that VB quickly runs out of steam when trying to do interesting stuff, whereas Delphi gets you 95% as far as C++ does.
However, if you want to, you can use Delphi like VB. Perhaps this is not a good thing - As someone who often reviews Delphi code from programming job applicants, it is sad to see how low the bar has become. The VB, Data bound, cut & paste, drag & drop programming style is very noticable. Some of these people barely know procedural programming, let alone OO.
> Imagine if there were a VB like tool for Linux
Can you say "Borland Delphi for Linux"?
Include Pascal/Delphi in that list please
Um nice but no.
What you are describing is perpetual motion - using the energy put out by a system (in this case photons from the tree) fed back into the system to power it. You *cannot* make this worthwhile - The laws of thermodymanics say that you can't win, and you can't break even. Anyone who says otherwise is a crank.
In the best case your enegry efficiency is near 100% - ie you collect most of the energy that you sent out, and don't gain anything, only lose a little.
In the real world, energy effiency is likely to be very low, i.e.
1) Energy lost while powering the luciferin/luciferase reaction
2) Only a fraction of the emited light will hit the tree's leaves.
3) Photosynthesis in those leaves will be inefficient.
Therefor there is no way that the tree doing this this would increase the yield of the plant - quite the oposite.
> If you are not the fittest then in time you will die out
Yeah, let's nuke the Amazon rainforest. The wussy bugs and trees don't deserve to live now that we have the means to obliterate them! It's only a matter of time anyway before they die out anyway.
> - I don't necessarily hold the same opinion for animals which have been eradicated by humans. Also, I am not the worlds greatest historian and I don't know what it was that killed them off
OK, this is the score. Wooly mamoths, the European rinocerous and the sabertoothed cat all died out at about the same time that homo sapiens (our great granparents) started wandering about the landscape and throwing spears around. Note that these are all large mamals that would be either tasty to cavepersons (mamoth, rhino) or compete for space in caves and try to eat thier children (sabretoothed cat). Hmm.
> I don't necessarily hold the same opinion for animals which have been eradicated by humans
So you should be in favour of bringing back the mamoth. Or perhaps humans "au naturel" before civilisation don't count? You cannot draw lines like that.
Humankind was, is and always will be a part of nature, and a extinction caused by humans is as "natural" as any other.
That doesn't mean I won't miss the bengal tiger though. Which life is worth more - a person or a gorilla? Hm, let's see, there are 6 billion people, a few 1000 gorillas in existence. I'd have to go with the gorilla.