Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet@bsb.me.ukwrote:
It's an elephant, all right: it's strong, it's intelligent, and if you
want to handle it professionally you'd better know what you're doing.
But if you want to go into the jungle, there's nothing better, not even
a military-designed vehicle.

Richard

"Bartc" <bc@freeuk.comwrote:
It's also not hard to read between the lines of those clamouring for
wholesale changes to the Standard, and seeing there that they're
compensating for their small reproductive members and the lack of love
they got from their mothers. But that would be equally unwarranted as
your jumping to conclusions about Doug Gwyn.
No, it's called post-modernism. It works in literary criticism, but not
in computer science, where we're supposed to get things done instead of
just stating our opinions again and again.

Richard

jacob navia <jacob@nospam.comwrote:
Whereas I propose that, since you get money from your C implementation
(however much or little - it really does not matter, it's a point of
principle, not centimes), you stop freeloading already and shell out for
the tools of your trade. It's easy to demand of others that they do your
will, but if you want to prosper by those demands, that's no longer
called arrogance, it's called slave-driving, and it's as illegal in
France as anywhere else. _You_ want this, _you_ use it for monetary
gain, _you_ stump up the ante. Nobody else.
I wait without bating my breath.

Richard

Richard Bos wrote:
That was funny bos. Just keep the good work.

:-)


--
jacob navia
jacob at jacob point remcomp point fr
logiciels/informatique
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~lcc-win32

On Sep 4, 8:12*pm, Richard Heathfield <r...@see.sig.invalidwrote:

<snip>
TAOCP uses C?

<snip>

--
Nick Keighley

On Sep 4, 6:32*pm, Antoninus Twink <nos...@nospam.invalidwrote:what about Alogol-68!
definitly not Jacob's view

--
Nick Keighley

Nick Keighley said:
Yes, albeit rarely. (That's how I got my cheque - by spotting a bug in C
code.)

--
Richard Heathfield <http://www.cpax.org.uk>
Email: -http://www. +rjh@
Google users: <http://www.cpax.org.uk/prg/writings/googly.php>
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999

On Fri, 2008-09-05 at 05:25 -0700, Nick Keighley wrote:I think he did once in the chapter introducing MIX, when explaining
why he chose to make up a language instead of using one. (IIRC, he
said something like "There's a good argument for using C, but..."
and proceeded to say something that sounded reasonable the last time
I read it.)

--
Andrew Poelstra <apoelstra@wpsoftware.com>
To email me, change .net to .com in the above address.

On Sep 4, 8:47*pm, "Malcolm McLean" <regniz...@btinternet.comwrote:so why did IPv6 use 128 bits?

--
Nick Keighley

jacob navia <jacob@nospam.comwrote:
My name, unlike yours, is spelled with an initial capital. Please have
the decency.

Richard

On Sep 4, 10:45 pm, jacob navia <ja...@nospam.comwrote:And if you need the three elements 'n', 'n+1' and 'n+2', do you search
or each of them from the start of the list (what operator[] would have
to do), or do you only write a loop to the first one, and access the
other two by following a link from the element you currently have?
And when you find that you only access successive elements, you drop
the library that foolishly uses operator[] to access elements in a
linked list.
You would have to change the code, but you get a several orders of
magnitude performance gain in return.
Bart v Ingen Schenau

"Bart van Ingen Schenau" <Bart.van.Ingen.Schenau@ict.nlwrote in message
news:aa9740e4-ef5a-4c61-95b6-4d10330dd27e@d45g2000hsc.googlegroups.com...I created a scripting language once with arrays implemented as a linked list
(actually, as a block of 8 elements).

This remembered the last visited element, so [] indexing was reasonably
quick provided the application acccessed the array more or less
sequentially.

For C which is used to array accesses taking a couple of machine
instructions, even doing this would be quite a performance hit. Memory
management would be far easier though.

But, if the alternative was to use a higher-level (interpreted) language for
the extra
flexibility, then C + linked-list arrays + []indexing could be viable.

--
Bartc

jacob navia <jacob@nospam.comwrote:Obviously. Like I said, however, the committee does try to meet in
various locations to make it easier for people to attend, but we're
limited to locations where someone is willing to host us (which requires
a not insubstatial expense). As you can see from the committee's web
site, we've been pretty successful in the past:

<http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/meetings>
That's because you proposed it in comp.std.c, which you already know
most committee members don't read! And the reason we don't do it is the
same as the reason most members don't read comp.std.c -- if we did, we
would be inundated with half-baked suggestions from dilettantes who
would expect us to spend time and effort seriously considering their
suggestions and providing detailed feedback on their merits and
demerits. We simply don't have the resources to do that. Insisting
that people expend a certain amount of time and money to actually attend
a meeting weeds out people who aren't serious and allows face-to-face
discussion which is far less rancorous and much more productive than
on-line discussions. It also increases the committee's resources to
help offset the increased work load.
Next week in San Jose, CA, USA. The meeting schedule (as far as is
known) is posted on the above page. Meetings for next year have not
been finalized yet, but there are outstanding or pending invitations to
meet in Toronto, CA in April and Santa Cruz, CA, USA in October
(according to the minutes from the last meeting, which are also posted
on the web site).
--
Larry Jones

I don't NEED to compromise my principles, because they don't have
the slightest bearing on what happens to me anyway. -- Calvin

Richard Heathfield <rjh@see.sig.invalidwrites:
I would sooner boil my nuts in a vat of sun flower oil than agree that
operator overloading in C is a good idea.
--

"Nick Keighley" <nick_keighley_nospam@hotmail.comwrote in messagemaybe it wasn't well designed. I can't imagine they had more than 2^64 bytes
of memory installed.
OTOH it might have been a signals processing device. These don't really use
integers in the normal C sense of the term. The integers are representations
of real valued signals, and highly specialised.
--
Nick Keighley

Richard wrote:
Should I send you olive oil maybe?


--
jacob navia
jacob at jacob point remcomp point fr
logiciels/informatique
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~lcc-win32

On Sep 5, 1:45*pm, Nick Keighley <nick_keighley_nos...@hotmail.com>
wrote:That's as in TCP/IP the internet protocol. "old" IP (v4) used 32-bit
addresses (usually shown in dotted notation eg. 192.12.0.1). Because
the
address space is sparsely used they started to run out of addresses.
Telephone numbers suffer from the same problem. Hence London (UK) got
renumbered *twice* in recent years.

One fix for the IP address problem was a "new" IP standard, v6 (no-one
knows what happened to v5 :-) ). Initially 64 bits was proposed.
According
to their model this would allow everyone on the planet to have an IP
address.
But looking the then rate of technological progress it was realised
they should allow multiple IP addresses per person. This has now
happened;
my home isn't particualrly technology dense but I have several
ip addresses. Hence they went for 128 bits which is expected to last
for
quite a while. So there is already an application that finds 64 bits
inadequate without the need for 16 exa-bytes of memory.

--
Nick Keighley

Nick Keighley wrote:....This is little to do with needing 128-bit integers. This application needs a
16-byte identifier for the same sorts of reasons that credit cards mostly
use 16-digit numbers.

And it's unlikely that IP addresses need ALU support for +, -, * and /
operations. Possibly logical operations but this can easily be achieved on a
64-bit CPU without having a 128-bit word length.

--
Bartc

Nick Keighley said:

<snip>
Furthermore, cryptographically-inclined programmers will happily take the
biggest ints you can give them, and then beg for still bigger ints.

--
Richard Heathfield <http://www.cpax.org.uk>
Email: -http://www. +rjh@
Google users: <http://www.cpax.org.uk/prg/writings/googly.php>
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999

"Nick Keighley" <nick_keighley_nospam@hotmail.comwrote in messageI'm of the opinon that 3074457345 telephones ought to be enough for anyone,
if 64 bit integers were distributed fairly instead of being hogged by the
rich nations.

--
Free games and programming goodies.
http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~bgy1mm

Ian Collins <ian-news@hotmail.comwrites:
The difference being that Heathfield often uses C when it might not be
the most appropriate tool for the job.

One must always think of maintainability and the workforce required to
perform that maintenance. The likes of RH will not always be in ones
employ.

Willem <willem@stack.nlwrites:

Because its called comp.lang.c and experienced "standard" C programmers
with an opinion reside here? Simple really. I am astonished you could
not draw that conclusion yourself.

jameskuyper@verizon.net writes:
All may be true. But to discuss it here is easily the best thing to do
since real programmers can dissect ideas "in the real world".

In article <g9u4ti$jt9$5@registered.motzarella.org>,
Richard <rgrdev@gmail.comwrote in response to some chump:
....It really is amazing. The problem is that this newsgroup is totally,
100%, hung-up on the idea of what C "is". As has been pointed out many
times, it is a dogmatic position not found in any other subspecies of
the computing profession. It is, of course, much more at home in a
religious context.

I know of no other comp.* newsgroup where this sort of obsession (*) exists.

(*) Obsession with things as they are and absolute paranoia about
discussing how things might be (i.e., what they could evolve into).

Richard wrote:....If his arguments were intended to promote a discussion in which he
would hear differing opinions about his proposed changes to the
standard and take them into consideration when putting together his
presentation for the committee, that would make a certain amount of
sense. But we're talking about jacob navia; he's apparently incapable
of tolerating (or even reading clearly and correctly) opinions that
differ from his own. He also seems, based upon the examples we've
seen, to be incapable of putting together a proposal that's
sufficiently complete and detailed to be taken seriously by the
committee; and unwilling to take the steps needed to actually place
his proposal before them.

In any event, the original question was posed by Richard Heathfield:In reference to jacob's comment:The point of the matter is, "insisting" on it here won't do any good.
"insisting" on it in a discussion with committee members actually has
a chance of success, however slim that chance might be. The chances
would be better if he'd replace the word "insist" with something like
"suggest", which more accurately reflects his position in the scheme
of things. No one (except possibly the ISO secretariat) has the
authority to "insist" that the committee do anything other than what
the committee itself thinks is the best thing for it to do.

Richard wrote:But he doesn't want his ideas dissected - the only thing he's open to
is unthinking uncritical acceptance of the "fact" that his ideas are
both sufficiently good that they should be approved without
modification, and sufficiently important that they should be approved
immediately. Present him with any disagreement, no matter how trivial,
and all you'll receive in response is a stream of vituperation.

Granted, he won't get uncritical acceptance from the Committee,
either. However, at least from the committee he has some vanishingly
small chance of getting his ideas approved; something that this
newsgroup has no authority to do (and neither does comp.std.c).

jameskuyper@verizon.net writes:

Total and utter nonsense.

He rises to Heathfield's arrogant posturing now and again but more often
than not Jacob is willing to discuss.

Richard<rgrdev@gmail.comwrites:
<snip><snip>Odd, then, that your contribution to this mature debate was:

| I would sooner boil my nuts in a vat of sun flower oil than agree
| that operator overloading in C is a good idea.

to which Jacob simply suggested supplying an alternative oil. Why did
you not think Jacob would be receptive to a more technical critique at
the time?

--
Ben.

Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet@bsb.me.ukwrites:
Its called a joke. We had discussed it before and I explained my
"practical" objections to operator overloading in any language. i
realise I am in a minority. I remember when I thought they were
"kewl". Then I had to maintain and extend poorly written code which
absolutely thrashed the use of them. It was horrific.


--

Ben Bacarisse said:

<snip>
What makes you think Richard Riley is capable of a more technical critique?
From what I can recall of those articles of his that I read before
plonking him, he rarely posted anything even remotely to do with C, and on
the few occasions when he did he was typically wrong. He sticks to
bitching because bitching is all he knows how to do, and (unless he has
improved remarkably in recent times) he doesn't do that terribly well
either, poor chap. Perhaps we should organise a whip-round or something.

No, if you want a critique of operator overloading in C, you'll have to
look elsewhere. And unfortunately there's no point looking in my direction
for such a critique, because I kind of like the idea!

--
Richard Heathfield <http://www.cpax.org.uk>
Email: -http://www. +rjh@
Google users: <http://www.cpax.org.uk/prg/writings/googly.php>
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999

Richard wrote:*Anything* can be misused Richard, and operator overloading i