Topic Nazis (OR Mystery: static variables & performance)

[MSG]

Michel Bardiaux <mi*************@peaktime.be> wrote in message news:<G4********************@giganews.com>...

Mark Shelor wrote:

OK, Sidney, I am considering it. I can certainly understand the premise
that a group might choose to entertain ONLY those questions that can be
resolved purely by a reading or clarification of (drum roll please) The
Standard. But how utterly boring, and what a waste of talent. It
reduces the newgroups participants to a mere gaggle of lawyers.

I agree 100% with you.

Mark Shelor's question was off-topic, but not for the reasons
mentioned.

To interface C and Perl, it is necessary to *call* functions. The
standard however does not define the stack size, so the behavior of
any function that calls another function is undefined, and therefore
we can not discuss it here. QED.

Yeah, sure. You can predict the behavior of function calls *if* the
stack is known to be big enough, but by the same logic, you can
predict a lot of things if some extras are known. Well, they ain't.
Not in The Standard!

So, read my lips: no...function...calls!

We can only discuss things that are happening entirely inside
"main()". Everything else ist verboten!

Heil...
MSG

[Joona I Palaste]

Thomas Stegen CES2000 <ts************@cis.strath.ac.uk> scribbled the following:

Erik wrote:

If someone poses a blatant off-topic question, the neatest thingto say
is something like

"that is a good question, however you will stand a much better chance
of getting a good answer on disozer.newsgroup.c.php. In this group one
discusses .... etc."

Please give examples of people being rude, rather than just being blunt,
to a first off-topic post. I your search notice the ratio of people using your suggested approach
to the approach you say people here use. Maybe I am just forgetting the rudeness, but I have the distint
impression gathered over the two years I have been here that people
usually redirect or at least just tell people that they are off-topic.

The thing to remember here is that newbies think differently from
regulars. When a newbie sees "Your question is off-topic" he reads it
as "You're a worthless idiot to ask a stupid question like that! Go
away and leave this newsgroup for us real programmers!" Some people
even react like that when they receive a reply saying that their
message is on-topic, but contains incorrect information. What do they
want? To be pampered?

--
/-- Joona Palaste (pa*****@cc.helsinki.fi) ------------- Finland --------\
\-- http://www.helsinki.fi/~palaste --------------------- rules! --------/
"The trouble with the French is they don't have a word for entrepreneur."
- George Bush

[Mike Wahler]

"Joona I Palaste" <pa*****@cc.helsinki.fi> wrote in message
news:c0**********@oravannahka.helsinki.fi...

Thomas Stegen CES2000 <ts************@cis.strath.ac.uk> scribbled the following:

[topic changed in effort to get rid of that 'word'. :-)]

Maybe I am just forgetting the rudeness, but I have the distint
impression gathered over the two years I have been here that people
usually redirect or at least just tell people that they are off-topic.

The thing to remember here is that newbies think differently from
regulars. When a newbie sees "Your question is off-topic" he reads it
as "You're a worthless idiot to ask a stupid question like that!

I don't think that's the mark of a 'newbie', but of someone who
doesn't actually *think* about what he just read.
Go
away and leave this newsgroup for us real programmers!" Some people
even react like that when they receive a reply saying that their
message is on-topic, but contains incorrect information. What do they
want? To be pampered?

Some folks apparently simply don't like to discover that they're wrong. :-)

-Mike

[Sidney Cadot]

Erik wrote:

[snip]

Calling names and barking ppl off, is counter-productive.

I mean, when you want to point out, someone used the wrong newsgroup,
you have two options: the civilised way and the uncivilised one.
Why choose for the second ?
I wholeheartedly agree that only method #1 is acceptable...
A rethoric question of course, because we all know the answer.

....but there you lost me. Could you do me a favor and spell it out?

Best regards,

Sidney

[Default User]

Sidney Cadot wrote:

Erik wrote:

[snip]

Calling names and barking ppl off, is counter-productive.

I mean, when you want to point out, someone used the wrong newsgroup,
you have two options: the civilised way and the uncivilised one.
Why choose for the second ?

I wholeheartedly agree that only method #1 is acceptable...

A rethoric question of course, because we all know the answer.

...but there you lost me. Could you do me a favor and spell it out?

At this point, he's just trolling, which is why I added him to my
killfile. I suggest others either do the same or just drop the thread.
The redirects that he received to his off-topic post were perfectly
civilized. His reponse to them was not.

Brian Rodenborn

[Erik]

On Fri, 13 Feb 2004 21:21:38 +0100, the right honourable Sidney Cadot
<si****@jigsaw.nl> wrote:

Erik wrote:

[snip]

Calling names and barking ppl off, is counter-productive.

I mean, when you want to point out, someone used the wrong newsgroup,
you have two options: the civilised way and the uncivilised one.
Why choose for the second ?

I wholeheartedly agree that only method #1 is acceptable...

A rethoric question of course, because we all know the answer.

...but there you lost me. Could you do me a favor and spell it out?

Best regards,

Sidney

boredom,
I-smack-you-in-the-face-and-you-can't-do-anything-about-it-hehehe,
teasing for kicks, wanting to look larger than reality and other
normal, but undesireable human behaviour.

[Sidney Cadot]

Erik wrote:

Erik wrote:

[snip]

Calling names and barking ppl off, is counter-productive.

I mean, when you want to point out, someone used the wrong newsgroup,
you have two options: the civilised way and the uncivilised one.
Why choose for the second ?

I wholeheartedly agree that only method #1 is acceptable...

A rethoric question of course, because we all know the answer.

...but there you lost me. Could you do me a favor and spell it out?

boredom,
I-smack-you-in-the-face-and-you-can't-do-anything-about-it-hehehe,
teasing for kicks, wanting to look larger than reality and other
normal, but undesireable human behaviour.

Ah, ok. Have seen a bit of that around here, yes, but not from the
regulars when redirecting off-topic posts, I think. You're free to think
otherwise, of course.

Best regards,

Sidney

[Mark Shelor]

Joona I Palaste wrote:

The thing to remember here is that newbies think differently from
regulars. When a newbie sees "Your question is off-topic" he reads it
as "You're a worthless idiot to ask a stupid question like that! Go
away and leave this newsgroup for us real programmers!" Some people
even react like that when they receive a reply saying that their
message is on-topic, but contains incorrect information. What do they
want? To be pampered?

You're a paragon of strength and toughness, Joona. So much so that I'm
going weak in the knees. Somebody please hand me my swooning fan ...

[Erik]

> You're free to think

otherwise, of course.

Interesting remark:

It might be interpreted as a rationalists remark.

As I said earlier, I like Immanuel Kant's ideas, who said that
knowledge cannot come from thinking alone, which was an idea of the
rationalist philosophers before him.
Kant postulated that knowledge can only come from thinking AND
experience.
He more or less glued rationalism and empirism together.
Put simply and shortly, of course.

My experience is, that I have seen some very rude remarks by people
from whom I have seen frequent postings here, and who may thus be
called "regulars" ?
frgr
Erik

[Sidney Cadot]

Erik wrote:

You're free to think
otherwise, of course.

Interesting remark:

It might be interpreted as a rationalists remark.

That would be reading too much into it, I'm afraid :-)
As I said earlier, I like Immanuel Kant's ideas, who said that
knowledge cannot come from thinking alone, which was an idea of the
rationalist philosophers before him.
Kant postulated that knowledge can only come from thinking AND
experience.
He more or less glued rationalism and empirism together.
Put simply and shortly, of course.

Interesting as this may be: I'm afraid that's not on-topic here.
My experience is, that I have seen some very rude remarks by people
from whom I have seen frequent postings here, and who may thus be
called "regulars" ?

There's a fine line between "blunt" and "rude". I think Jack Klein's
redirect of a few hours ago is the first genuinely rude redirect I've
seen in quite some time.

Best regards,

Sidney

[Richard Bos]

Erik <et57 at correos calor dot com> wrote:

On Fri, 13 Feb 2004 11:09:34 GMT, the right honourable
rl*@hoekstra-uitgeverij.nl (Richard Bos) wrote:

That's a very nice, big statement for a philosopher, but it doesn't take
into account the fact that as an applied epistomologist, I have no
choice but to depend on the work of others, just as my users have no
choice but to depend on me writing solid code, not random junk that just
happens to work today.
well.... depend.... ummmmm
you do test the end result of your work.

Yes. On a system built by someone else.
in the development chain are
a lot of black boxes (who checks the code of the compiler ?), but at
the end of the chain there is the result, which is always checked
against reality, experience and the like.
and that is where Kant comes in.
If the result is incorrect, you would, if you had to, throw out the
whole chain of boxes, so to speak.

Yes. And if the result is correct on your development and testing
machines (where all pointers are small, and your Standard-violating code
happens to work), but not on the production network (where pointers can
be large, and bang goes your database because you clobbered over memory
you do not own)?
That's what the Standard is all about, you see. Not about tying you
down, keeping you from doing all the nifty things you undoubtedly want
to do, but to provide a solid basis for the niftiness - by providing a
lowest common denominator for you and the compiler writer to work with,
so that you know that for that part of your program, you _can_ depend on
him, and not have to check on each and every system that yes, fgets()
does return a char *, and yes, if malloc() fails it returns a null
pointer and does not call abort() on you.

Richard