On 12/31/25 13:55, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
On 2025-12-31, c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> wrote:
On 12/30/25 20:01, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
On 2025-12-31, c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> wrote:
Ah, LISP, the only language composed entirely
of randomly spaced brackets :-)
Lots of Irritating Spurious Parentheses
Were they parens ? It's been a long time.
Anyway ... seemed that 99% of the lang was
nothing but those ... nesting nesting nesting
and more nesting until you couldn't keep track
of it at all.
I wonder whether it's coincidence that the Structured Programming
revolution was happening at about the same time. Lots of tiny
modules ... nesting nesting nesting and more nesting until you
couldn't keep track of it at all.
I'm sure it was part of that trend. Did it START
the trend ???
I've writ stuff with five or six levels of nesting
but don't like it, usually if/then/else stuff. Oft
re-did it later to be more easy to follow. IMHO
readability/comprehensibility is as important as
functionally correct code.
Can't wait to see what the AIs are cranking out in
a few years ... 29 levels all bunched together into
one gigantic line ? :-)
On Thu, 01 Jan 2026 19:12:29 +0000, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:
Waldek Hebisch wrote:
But are 'expert systems' really AI?
What is really ?AI?? At one point, the argument was over whether
computers could ?think?. Then you had to define ?thinking?, and
somebody tried to settle the question by saing: ?thinking is what
computers cannot do?.
The only succinct definition of ?AI? I ever saw was: ?solving NP
problems in polynomial time?.
It was always rather flexible. Currently it?s a label you put on things
to attract venture capital or other forms of finance.
Best definition yet. It's already started with the 'smart' phone but I'm waiting for the marketers of consumer goods to tack AI onto frying pans
and everything else.
It wasn't very smart but it was sad to see Roomba go under. If nothing
else it was good for terrorizing cats.
On 2025-12-31, c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> wrote:
Can't wait to see what the AIs are cranking out in
a few years ... 29 levels all bunched together into
one gigantic line ? :-)
Shades of APL.
On 12/31/25 19:55, rbowman wrote:
On Wed, 31 Dec 2025 20:41:51 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote:
On Wed, 31 Dec 2025 15:38:19 -0000 (UTC), Lars Poulsen wrote:
To anyone who has studied Kant, it is clear that it is the mind that >>>>> invented 'quantum theory'...
The mind may have "invented" quantum theory" ...
I wonder what kind of mind invented Kant?
Hume. Disclaimer: I didn't get far enough into Kant to qualify as study.
Maybe it was a bad translation or my mind works differently.
"Immanuel Kant was a real piss-ant who
was very rarely stable ....." :-)
I spoke of re-arranging the arcade of fun-house
mirrors over and over and claiming to see some
Great Truth through the current configuration.
Kant is just one of those re-arrangers, tortures
semantics and perspectives like so many others.
In alt.folklore.computers The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
On 01/01/2026 14:28, Peter Flass wrote:
On 1/1/26 05:49, The Natural Philosopher wrote:IIRC it (Turbo Pascal. The amateurs language) had unions of some sort,
On 01/01/2026 03:07, c186282 wrote:
On 12/31/25 17:35, The Natural Philosopher wrote:My one and onlyÿ experience of trying to make Pascal do what was
On 31/12/2025 19:21, c186282 wrote:
I've writ stuff with five or six levels of nesting
ÿÿ but don't like it, usually if/then/else stuff. Oft
ÿÿ re-did it later to be more easy to follow. IMHO
ÿÿ readability/comprehensibility is as important as
ÿÿ functionally correct code.
100% agree.
Often write little functions that are only called once. Merely to
lexically separate atomic functional blocks.
No idea whether the compiler/linker inlines them or not.
There is nothing worse than making top level decisions followed by >>>>>> some nitty detail to detect some low level error.
e.g. assume a call to allocate memory always works or the call will >>>>>> do the appropriate jump to a global error handler to abort things
cleanly.
The point of structure was supposed to be to elucidate program flow, >>>>>> not obscure it with elegant formally correct cruft.
ÿÿ Agree.
ÿÿ As I've said before, I'm still quite fond of Pascal and
ÿÿ write apps of various size in it (oft first proto-ed
ÿÿ in Python). The structure is 'elegant', but you CAN
ÿÿ carry it TOO far, to where it gets in the way instead
ÿÿ of helping things.
trivial in 'C' led me to resolve never ever to touch it again.
If you are trying to write - as it turned out I was - a disk driver in >>>> pascal, where a given sector may be a byte stream, a series of 16 bit
integers,ÿ or a structure defined by thee first few bytes in the
sector, you end up with a massive union that is so cumbersome it is
almost impossible to read - let alone use.
Doesn't Pascal have variant records?
but I would have needed about 100 to cover all cases and it was even
then messy.
Turbo Pascal could do essentially all thar C could do (and do things
which were not strightforward in C, but this is irrelevant here). And
do this in a very similar way, once you knew how Turbo Pascal constructs worked. If you really needed 100 variant record in Turbo Pascal,
then you needed 100 unions in C. If you could do this more
simply in C, you could do this more simply in Turbo Pascal too.
Given what you wrote, it looks that you simply lacked experience
writing Turbo Pascal. In other words, you were unqualified to
do the job that you were supposed to do (write the driver in
Turbo Pascal), so you decided to do thing that you know how to
do, that is to write it in C.
IMO biggest drawback of Turbo Pascal was poor speed of generated
code (and size too). For me deal breaker was fact that Turbo
Pascal was 16-bit and tied to DOS. DJGCC gave me 32-bit
integers and slightly later I switched to Linux, so Turbo
Pascal was not longer relevant for me. But if you were
programming 16-bit DOS and did not mind poor speed of generated
code, than IMO Turbo Pascal was quite decent programming
language, quite competitive in expressivity to C.
The existing code was shit anyway so I rewrote the lot
That could be true. But given that you apparently do not know
what Turbo Pascal can do, it is not clear if you are qualified
to judge the code.
BTW: It is normal and common for programmers to want to
rewrite/write from scratch instead of understanding and
improving existing code. But in most cases working on
existing code leads to better effect.
Back when electronics became cheap, remember how clocks were
incorporated into just about everything? I had a ball-point pen with
a clock in it.
"If it can done, it should be done." That's one of a collection of
sayings that someday I'll compile into an essay titled "Memes that
Will Destroy the World".
In alt.folklore.computers Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
The only succinct definition of ?AI? I ever saw was: ?solving NP
problems in polynomial time?.
Well, for me AI is process (and its results) of trying to solve
problems that we can not solve using known (at given time) methods
and which seem to require inteligence.
In alt.folklore.computers rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:
On Tue, 30 Dec 2025 19:47:23 -0500, c186282 wrote:
They've THOUGHT they had 'AI' more than once. Minsky was sure it'd be >>> easy during the 60s. Then, as you said, the 80s came and went but no >>> 'AI' worth a damn.
Much of the neural network operations are still the same today but the
hardware didn't exist to do millions of tensor operations in any finite
time for anything but a toy app. 'I need 50 billion to build a center that >> will suck up the power and water from three states' wasn't going to happen >> even if the hardware did exist.
The neural network approach was taken over by 'expert systems' The
problem was you more or less needed a human expert on hand.
But are 'expert systems' really AI? Theoretically so called
expert system shells could do smart things, but examples I saw
were essentially a bunch of "if ... then ..." which could be
written in almost any programming language. One example of
samewhat succesful 'expert system' is supposed to guide a user
trough installing Unix. Description suggests that is is not
smarter than modern Debian installer. And nobody thinks that
Debian installer is AI.
Blend NN and
expert and you have something that sucks in petabytes of data, sort of
links together tokens (words) that commonly are used together, declares
itself an expert, and spits out pieces it has acquired like a vomiting
magpie.
Statistics people for ages construct decision trees. NN-s seem
to be much smarter, but once you have a decision tree (or more
fancy thing like forest with voting), you get quite ordinary
program.
On Fri, 02 Jan 2026 02:18:42 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
Back when electronics became cheap, remember how clocks were
incorporated into just about everything? I had a ball-point pen with
a clock in it.
Not really. The Raspberry Pi computer still doesn?t include a clock
chip, because it would add too much to the cost.
"If it can done, it should be done." That's one of a collection of
sayings that someday I'll compile into an essay titled "Memes that
Will Destroy the World".
I?m sure if you can write it, you should write it.
On 01/01/2026 01:07, c186282 wrote:
Ah, Python cheat, 'try/except' ... you don't JUMPExactly.
ÿÿ out of an inescapable fabrication, you deliberately
ÿÿ create an error and let the 'except' catch it
ÿÿ further down and out. Then YOU didn't write an
ÿÿ evil jump instruction, just fooled Python into
ÿÿ doing it for youÿ ?
Every if construct has an implicit goto [IFNOT].
The problem seems to be that three cinatraints, rwo of them aretifical,
weem to be in play againts eaxh other.
1. The way machine code operates is full of gotos.
2. The desire of practical coders to have code that is easily understood.
3. The desire of compScis to have code conform to some arbitrary
standard of completeness op elegance or some other bollocks. And then
impose that on a language.
On 01/01/2026 02:50, c186282 wrote:
On 12/31/25 17:28, The Natural Philosopher wrote:That is your metaphysical assumption. It doesn't make it true.
On 31/12/2025 16:46, c186282 wrote:
On 12/31/25 10:08, The Natural Philosopher wrote:You could, but I wouldn't.]
On 31/12/2025 14:21, c186282 wrote:
I'm not qualified to fine-critique Penrose. However
ÿÿ when he insisted brains MUST be quantum ... some
ÿÿ little red light went off in my head.
Yes. To anyone who has studied Kant, it is clear that it is the
mind that invented 'quantum theory'...so to make it an emergent
property of its own creation, is the wrong sort of feedback
ÿÿ Well, you can argue that the QM nature of brain/mind
ÿÿ always existed - but it's only just now we (Penrose)
ÿÿ figured it out. :-)
QM is just another invention of the mind. What it refers to may well
not be of the mind though.
And it makes the analysis simpler to consider that it is not.
ÿÿ Let's say things SEEM to be 'quantum'. But then
ÿÿ we're little 3-D beings barely out of the trees
ÿÿ and still sometimes throw shit at each other.
ÿÿ Strictly, everything is 'quantum' anyhow, protons,
ÿÿ electrons, quarks, everything.
No. that is a *metaphysical* assumption. we can assume it pro tem to
see where it gets us. Into a right buggers muddle. Along with Penrose.
Assume insteadÿ that consciousness is absolutely independent of
quantum reality and redraw the relationships.
ÿÿ That we both seem to agree on ... at least insofar
ÿÿ as 'mind' goes. The 'material' stuff of brains,
ÿÿ there, so far as we can tell, quantum defines its
ÿÿ existence/actions at the ultra-fine level, but
ÿÿ we can have 'consciousness' without having to
ÿÿ worry about that tiny stuff.
If you examine the matter at the most fundamental level, you discover
that all classical science and the classical worldview implicitly
depends on the concept of the 'detached observer' . I.e. a consciousness that stands outside of that which it observes and whose observations do
not affect the thing under observation.
It is *defined* to be immaterial. A late-model version of the 'immortal soul'.ÿÿ That is the concept of this immaterial and immortal entity that stands outside of time and space peering in, is *implicit* in the
classical worldview.
And yet scientists want to make it an emergent property of the worldview
it studies..
That cant be done without contradiction.
ÿÿ Computers can be made to compute using quite a numberWell that is one rather less sophisticated version of the same thing, yes. What comprises the material world is real, but not as we know it, Jim.
ÿÿ of physical media - hell, you could make a 'hydraulic
ÿÿ computer' if you had the space, one out of wooden parts,
ÿÿ and it would be as accurate as any 2nm transistor model.
ÿÿ The logic is the logic, independent of the means.
ÿÿ Neuron networks are just another 'means'.
It all becomes simpler.
ÿÿ I suspect we're drifting towards Buddhism here ... and
ÿÿ I learned long ago to bail out once a certain level of
ÿÿ 'metaphysics' creeps inÿ :-)
It is a *transform* of it. And the agency doing that transform is the mind/consciousness/spirit/soul or whatever BS name you want to refer to
it by.
That is the minimum number of elements *necessary* for an entity to
become aware of an externality.
Something thatÿ has been blindingly obvious for thousands of years.,
ÿÿ Gimme what demonstrably WORKS, what is USEFUL. FuckWell all science is ultimately about what (seems to) work. The problem
ÿÿ args about the 'fine context(s)/interpretation(s)",
ÿÿ the "Game Of Nuances and Twisted Semantics". People
ÿÿ have been at this for many thousands of years,
ÿÿ endlessly re-arranging an arcade of fun-house mirrors,
ÿÿ "If you look at it all like THIS you shall find
ÿÿ the Great Truth" ........
of consciousnessÿ is that it doesn't work 'like wot it orta'.
Hence the need for a different metaphysical rule set to accommodate it.
Just as Einstein had to rewrite the concept of absolute space and time. Because the experimental results didn't make sense otherwise.
The transcendental idealism of Kant et al makes it all work, but at the expense of completely abandoning the classical world of everyday sense
as *primary*.
And sticking human consciousness as more primary, in its place.
Which is unacceptable to the vast number of scientists reared on the
creed of material realism.
Hence the dichotomy. And hand waving of consciousness as 'just quantum
shit, or something'
Turbo Pascal for CP/M-86 could access the graphics hardware on the
DEC Rainbow. A niche to be sure, but one my CSCI graphics class did
its projects in.
On 01/01/2026 03:07, c186282 wrote:
On 12/31/25 17:35, The Natural Philosopher wrote:My one and onlyÿ experience of trying to make Pascal do what was trivial
On 31/12/2025 19:21, c186282 wrote:
I've writ stuff with five or six levels of nesting
ÿÿ but don't like it, usually if/then/else stuff. Oft
ÿÿ re-did it later to be more easy to follow. IMHO
ÿÿ readability/comprehensibility is as important as
ÿÿ functionally correct code.
100% agree.
Often write little functions that are only called once. Merely to
lexically separate atomic functional blocks.
No idea whether the compiler/linker inlines them or not.
There is nothing worse than making top level decisions followed by
some nitty detail to detect some low level error.
e.g. assume a call to allocate memory always works or the call will
do the appropriate jump to a global error handler to abort things
cleanly.
The point of structure was supposed to be to elucidate program flow,
not obscure it with elegant formally correct cruft.
ÿÿ Agree.
ÿÿ As I've said before, I'm still quite fond of Pascal and
ÿÿ write apps of various size in it (oft first proto-ed
ÿÿ in Python). The structure is 'elegant', but you CAN
ÿÿ carry it TOO far, to where it gets in the way instead
ÿÿ of helping things.
in 'C' led me to resolve never ever to touch it again.
If you are trying to write - as it turned out I was - a disk driver in pascal, where a given sector may be a byte stream, a series of 16 bit integers,ÿ or a structure defined by thee first few bytes in the sector,
you end up with a massive union that is so cumbersome it is almost impossible to read - let alone use.
C's ability to say if this byte is such and such then what follows may
be considered to be a structure, or else 17 integers, or else a text string....the point being that the people who constructed the software
that wrote to the (ram) disk didn't write in Pascal. They wrote in Assembler. They had AFAICT ripped off CP/M.
I threw the pascal out and rewrote everything in a Frenchÿ B & B over
the weekend.ÿ In C. Probably the best work I ever did.
For which the guy who I did it for didn't pay me till I took him to court.
Whereas the best money I ever made was to go to London and get paid œ450
to snip the leg on one capacitor...
On 1/1/26 05:49, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 01/01/2026 03:07, c186282 wrote:
On 12/31/25 17:35, The Natural Philosopher wrote:My one and onlyÿ experience of trying to make Pascal do what was
On 31/12/2025 19:21, c186282 wrote:
I've writ stuff with five or six levels of nesting
ÿÿ but don't like it, usually if/then/else stuff. Oft
ÿÿ re-did it later to be more easy to follow. IMHO
ÿÿ readability/comprehensibility is as important as
ÿÿ functionally correct code.
100% agree.
Often write little functions that are only called once. Merely to
lexically separate atomic functional blocks.
No idea whether the compiler/linker inlines them or not.
There is nothing worse than making top level decisions followed by
some nitty detail to detect some low level error.
e.g. assume a call to allocate memory always works or the call will
do the appropriate jump to a global error handler to abort things
cleanly.
The point of structure was supposed to be to elucidate program flow,
not obscure it with elegant formally correct cruft.
ÿÿ Agree.
ÿÿ As I've said before, I'm still quite fond of Pascal and
ÿÿ write apps of various size in it (oft first proto-ed
ÿÿ in Python). The structure is 'elegant', but you CAN
ÿÿ carry it TOO far, to where it gets in the way instead
ÿÿ of helping things.
trivial in 'C' led me to resolve never ever to touch it again.
If you are trying to write - as it turned out I was - a disk driver in
pascal, where a given sector may be a byte stream, a series of 16 bit
integers,ÿ or a structure defined by thee first few bytes in the
sector, you end up with a massive union that is so cumbersome it is
almost impossible to read - let alone use.
Doesn't Pascal have variant records?
On 2026-01-01 15:28, Peter Flass wrote:
On 1/1/26 05:49, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 01/01/2026 03:07, c186282 wrote:
On 12/31/25 17:35, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 31/12/2025 19:21, c186282 wrote:
ÿÿ Agree.My one and onlyÿ experience of trying to make Pascal do what was
ÿÿ As I've said before, I'm still quite fond of Pascal and
ÿÿ write apps of various size in it (oft first proto-ed
ÿÿ in Python). The structure is 'elegant', but you CAN
ÿÿ carry it TOO far, to where it gets in the way instead
ÿÿ of helping things.
trivial in 'C' led me to resolve never ever to touch it again.
If you are trying to write - as it turned out I was - a disk driver
in pascal, where a given sector may be a byte stream, a series of 16
bit integers,ÿ or a structure defined by thee first few bytes in the
sector, you end up with a massive union that is so cumbersome it is
almost impossible to read - let alone use.
Doesn't Pascal have variant records?
Free Pascal at least does.
https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/ref/refsu15.html
I have a book somewhere that came with a floppy, and it had several
examples of using files with variant parts. It was easy.
On Thu, 1 Jan 2026 10:30:54 -0000 (UTC), Waldek Hebisch wrote:
But are 'expert systems' really AI?
What is really ?AI?? At one point, the argument was over whether
computers could ?think?. Then you had to define ?thinking?, and
somebody tried to settle the question by saing: ?thinking is what
computers cannot do?.
The only succinct definition of ?AI? I ever saw was: ?solving NP
problems in polynomial time?.
On Thu, 1 Jan 2026 23:54:37 -0000 (UTC), Waldek Hebisch wrote:
IMO biggest drawback of Turbo Pascal was poor speed of generated code
(and size too). For me deal breaker was fact that Turbo Pascal was
16-bit and tied to DOS. DJGCC gave me 32-bit integers and slightly
later I switched to Linux, so Turbo Pascal was not longer relevant for
me. But if you were programming 16-bit DOS and did not mind poor speed
of generated code, than IMO Turbo Pascal was quite decent programming
language, quite competitive in expressivity to C.
I never used the DOS TurboPascal, only the CP/M version. I used the BDS C subset compiler on CP/M and moved to DJGPP eventually.
If you really needed 100 variant record in Turbo Pascal,
then you needed 100 unions in C.
BTW: It is normal and common for programmers to want to
rewrite/write from scratch instead of understanding and
improving existing code.ÿ But in most cases working on
existing code leads to better effect.
Exactly my experience.
TP let you write, test, re-write, test ... inAs I said the amateurs language. BASIC in all but name
ÿ mere MINUTES and helped you along all the way.
Similarly, politicians dream of re-arranging laws (and adding more,
of course, never repealing) in pursuit of the dream that the right combination of legislation will result in Paradise.
NNs are 'different'. Not 'expert', not 'fuzzy', not LLM.
ÿ A little closer to how biological brains work. The bitch
ÿ has been finding suitable elements that can be compactly
ÿ put on chips. They're getting better at that. Maybe 10
ÿ years and decently good 'AI' will fit INSIDE a bot instead
ÿ of a 20 acre gigawatt data center.
On 1/2/26 00:59, rbowman wrote:
On Thu, 1 Jan 2026 23:54:37 -0000 (UTC), Waldek Hebisch wrote:
IMO biggest drawback of Turbo Pascal was poor speed of generated code
(and size too).ÿ For me deal breaker was fact that Turbo Pascal was
16-bit and tied to DOS.ÿ DJGCC gave me 32-bit integers and slightly
later I switched to Linux, so Turbo Pascal was not longer relevant for
me.ÿ But if you were programming 16-bit DOS and did not mind poor speed
of generated code, than IMO Turbo Pascal was quite decent programming
language, quite competitive in expressivity to C.
I never used the DOS TurboPascal, only the CP/M version. I used the BDS C
subset compiler on CP/M and moved to DJGPP eventually.
ÿ Look ... consider the existing environment. It WAS
ÿ the M$/IBM multi-pass Pascal compiler (still have
ÿ that in a VM and DO use it once in awhile for fun).
ÿ TP was a TOTAL REVOLUTION ... not only because of
ÿ the integrated development environment but because
ÿ of the BLAZING compilation speed.
ÿ If/when the final code was a bit bigger than the
ÿ old compilers - WHO CARED ???
ÿ TP let you write, test, re-write, test ... in
ÿ mere MINUTES and helped you along all the way.
ÿ In short it SET THE STANDARD for how IDEs
ÿ should be. From there on everybody expected
ÿ equal or better.
ÿ And yes, I love Pascal ... still use FPC/Lazarus
ÿ quite a bit. There's just a certain 'elegance'
ÿ to Pascal ... reminds of composing classical
ÿ music somehow ........
On 01/01/2026 23:54, Waldek Hebisch wrote:
If you really needed 100 variant record in Turbo Pascal,
then you needed 100 unions in C.
No. You simply used *casting* .
k=*(int *)(buffer +4) etc etc.
I see what you're aiming at - and it's largely true.
ÿ There's long been the trend to trying to separate
ÿ 'the material' from some kind of higher/essential/
ÿ 'spiritual' take on things. Probably because life
ÿ was so long (STILL in lots of places) so SHITTY.
ÿ But IMHO it's a delusion, emotional cherry pie.
ÿ All are one and one is all ... a great Gordian knot.
On 02/01/2026 02:18, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
Similarly, politicians dream of re-arranging laws (and adding more,
of course, never repealing) in pursuit of the dream that the right
combination of legislation will result in Paradise.
You really think that they do?
In reality they would prefer to take the salary and the perks and do
fuck all. The best ones.
The worst ones are those with Big Beautiful Ideas.
Most problems that haven't been solved already are not amenable to
political interference anyway: the best thing is to give people the
freedom to sort them, themselves.
On 2026-01-02 11:37, c186282 wrote:
On 1/2/26 00:59, rbowman wrote:
On Thu, 1 Jan 2026 23:54:37 -0000 (UTC), Waldek Hebisch wrote:
IMO biggest drawback of Turbo Pascal was poor speed of generated code
(and size too).ÿ For me deal breaker was fact that Turbo Pascal was
16-bit and tied to DOS.ÿ DJGCC gave me 32-bit integers and slightly
later I switched to Linux, so Turbo Pascal was not longer relevant for >>>> me.ÿ But if you were programming 16-bit DOS and did not mind poor speed >>>> of generated code, than IMO Turbo Pascal was quite decent programming
language, quite competitive in expressivity to C.
I never used the DOS TurboPascal, only the CP/M version. I used the
BDS C
subset compiler on CP/M and moved to DJGPP eventually.
ÿÿ Look ... consider the existing environment. It WAS
ÿÿ the M$/IBM multi-pass Pascal compiler (still have
ÿÿ that in a VM and DO use it once in awhile for fun).
ÿÿ TP was a TOTAL REVOLUTION ... not only because of
ÿÿ the integrated development environment but because
ÿÿ of the BLAZING compilation speed.
ÿÿ If/when the final code was a bit bigger than the
ÿÿ old compilers - WHO CARED ???
I don't remember at what version, 4 or 6, the binary program became much smaller. A HelloWorld was roughly 2 KB, while in C it was 28. They
invented smart linking.
ÿÿ TP let you write, test, re-write, test ... in
ÿÿ mere MINUTES and helped you along all the way.
ÿÿ In short it SET THE STANDARD for how IDEs
ÿÿ should be. From there on everybody expected
ÿÿ equal or better.
ÿÿ And yes, I love Pascal ... still use FPC/Lazarus
ÿÿ quite a bit. There's just a certain 'elegance'
ÿÿ to Pascal ... reminds of composing classical
ÿÿ music somehow ........
On 2026-01-02 11:59, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 01/01/2026 23:54, Waldek Hebisch wrote:
If you really needed 100 variant record in Turbo Pascal,
then you needed 100 unions in C.
No. You simply used *casting* .
k=*(int *)(buffer +4) etc etc.
Borland Pascal also had typecasting.
BYTE(MyChar)
On 1/2/26 06:27, Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 2026-01-02 11:59, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 01/01/2026 23:54, Waldek Hebisch wrote:
If you really needed 100 variant record in Turbo Pascal,
then you needed 100 unions in C.
No. You simply used *casting* .
k=*(int *)(buffer +4) etc etc.
Borland Pascal also had typecasting.
BYTE(MyChar)
ÿ Yep. TP was a slight 'super-set' of Wirth Pascal.
ÿ Cleaned up a few lackings. Wirth, though practical,
ÿ was still kind of an 'academic' and didn't always
ÿ address typical real-world problems. Easy type-casts
ÿ made things a LOT better.
On 02/01/2026 11:54, c186282 wrote:
On 1/2/26 06:27, Carlos E.R. wrote:How did it handle pointers...?
On 2026-01-02 11:59, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 01/01/2026 23:54, Waldek Hebisch wrote:
If you really needed 100 variant record in Turbo Pascal,
then you needed 100 unions in C.
No. You simply used *casting* .
k=*(int *)(buffer +4) etc etc.
Borland Pascal also had typecasting.
BYTE(MyChar)
ÿÿ Yep. TP was a slight 'super-set' of Wirth Pascal.
ÿÿ Cleaned up a few lackings. Wirth, though practical,
ÿÿ was still kind of an 'academic' and didn't always
ÿÿ address typical real-world problems. Easy type-casts
ÿÿ made things a LOT better.
On Fri, 02 Jan 2026 02:18:42 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
Back when electronics became cheap, remember how clocks were
incorporated into just about everything? I had a ball-point pen with a clock in it.
I used those little round stick-ons to keep track of project hours. When I couldn't find one I bought a $5 wrist watch at a flea market. The
department manager advised me I shouldn't leave a valuable watch by the monitor. At least a blue stick-on didn't look lile much.
A friend bought a very early calculator for several hundred 1970s dollars.
I must have pissed them all off but I have several calculators that were
in the begging letters from various organizations in lieu of mittens or return address stickers. The must go for 10 cents in volume.
Damn! Nobody sent me a calendar! I'm going to have to buy one. Or not.
$ cal 1 2025
January 2025
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29 30 31
Still works!
On Fri, 2 Jan 2026 02:53:45 -0000 (UTC), Waldek Hebisch wrote:
In alt.folklore.computers Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
The only succinct definition of ?AI? I ever saw was: ?solving NP
problems in polynomial time?.
Well, for me AI is process (and its results) of trying to solve
problems that we can not solve using known (at given time) methods
and which seem to require inteligence.
You don?t see crossing the P/NP divide as being a good indication of
such a distinction?
On 02/01/2026 11:54, c186282 wrote:
On 1/2/26 06:27, Carlos E.R. wrote:How did it handle pointers...?
On 2026-01-02 11:59, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 01/01/2026 23:54, Waldek Hebisch wrote:
If you really needed 100 variant record in Turbo Pascal,
then you needed 100 unions in C.
No. You simply used *casting* .
k=*(int *)(buffer +4) etc etc.
Borland Pascal also had typecasting.
BYTE(MyChar)
ÿÿ Yep. TP was a slight 'super-set' of Wirth Pascal.
ÿÿ Cleaned up a few lackings. Wirth, though practical,
ÿÿ was still kind of an 'academic' and didn't always
ÿÿ address typical real-world problems. Easy type-casts
ÿÿ made things a LOT better.
On 02/01/2026 11:54, c186282 wrote:
On 1/2/26 06:27, Carlos E.R. wrote:How did it handle pointers...?
On 2026-01-02 11:59, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 01/01/2026 23:54, Waldek Hebisch wrote:
If you really needed 100 variant record in Turbo Pascal,
then you needed 100 unions in C.
No. You simply used *casting* .
k=*(int *)(buffer +4) etc etc.
Borland Pascal also had typecasting.
BYTE(MyChar)
ÿÿ Yep. TP was a slight 'super-set' of Wirth Pascal.
ÿÿ Cleaned up a few lackings. Wirth, though practical,
ÿÿ was still kind of an 'academic' and didn't always
ÿÿ address typical real-world problems. Easy type-casts
ÿÿ made things a LOT better.
On 2 Jan 2026 06:32:41 GMT
rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:
On Fri, 02 Jan 2026 02:18:42 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:May I be the first to welcome you back to the start of last year, I hope
Back when electronics became cheap, remember how clocks were
incorporated into just about everything? I had a ball-point pen with a
clock in it.
I used those little round stick-ons to keep track of project hours. When I >> couldn't find one I bought a $5 wrist watch at a flea market. The
department manager advised me I shouldn't leave a valuable watch by the
monitor. At least a blue stick-on didn't look lile much.
A friend bought a very early calculator for several hundred 1970s dollars. >> I must have pissed them all off but I have several calculators that were
in the begging letters from various organizations in lieu of mittens or
return address stickers. The must go for 10 cents in volume.
Damn! Nobody sent me a calendar! I'm going to have to buy one. Or not.
$ cal 1 2025
January 2025
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29 30 31
Still works!
you can bring peace to Ukraine & the Middle East (other projects to be announced after you've ticked those 2 off).
On 1/1/26 14:00, Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote:
On Thu, 1 Jan 2026 10:30:54 -0000 (UTC), Waldek Hebisch wrote:
But are 'expert systems' really AI?
What is really ?AI?? At one point, the argument was over whether
computers could ?think?. Then you had to define ?thinking?, and
somebody tried to settle the question by saing: ?thinking is what
computers cannot do?.
The only succinct definition of ?AI? I ever saw was: ?solving NP
problems in polynomial time?.
ÿ Kinda complex.
ÿ "AI" is generally understood as an "electronic human",
ÿ delivers very similar results. The exact MEANS is
ÿ irrelevant.
ÿ "Expert systems", kind of an 80's thing, were VERY
ÿ limited - basically lots of if/then/else constructs.
ÿ This WAS good enough for a lot of needs however,
ÿ still IS.
On 1/2/26 06:10, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 02/01/2026 02:18, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
Similarly, politicians dream of re-arranging laws (and adding more,
of course, never repealing) in pursuit of the dream that the right
combination of legislation will result in Paradise.
You really think that they do?
In reality they would prefer to take the salary and the perks and do
fuck all. The best ones.
The worst ones are those with Big Beautiful Ideas.
Most problems that haven't been solved already are not amenable to
political interference anyway: the best thing is to give people the
freedom to sort them, themselves.
ÿ Famous case - O.J.Simpson ... found NOT guilty by a
ÿ criminal court - but subsequently sued out of all
ÿ his assets by a civil jury. We also see biz cases
ÿ like for glyphosphate weed killer. STILL ads on
ÿ the TV by legal firms out to exploit THAT. "Did
ÿ you EVER use this ? Are you sick from ANYTHING ?
ÿ Then we'll score a MILLION for you ! Just call ..."
ÿ The only defense for biz is to delay, delay, delay.
ÿ The lawyers make big $$$ in any case.
On 1/2/26 00:44, c186282 wrote:
On 1/1/26 14:00, Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote:
On Thu, 1 Jan 2026 10:30:54 -0000 (UTC), Waldek Hebisch wrote:
But are 'expert systems' really AI?
What is really ?AI?? At one point, the argument was over whether
computers could ?think?. Then you had to define ?thinking?, and
somebody tried to settle the question by saing: ?thinking is what
computers cannot do?.
The only succinct definition of ?AI? I ever saw was: ?solving NP
problems in polynomial time?.
ÿÿ Kinda complex.
ÿÿ "AI" is generally understood as an "electronic human",
ÿÿ delivers very similar results. The exact MEANS is
ÿÿ irrelevant.
ÿÿ "Expert systems", kind of an 80's thing, were VERY
ÿÿ limited - basically lots of if/then/else constructs.
ÿÿ This WAS good enough for a lot of needs however,
ÿÿ still IS.
Where an Expert System shines is doing all the steps a human expert
does, but not missing any.
If you really needed 100 variant record in Turbo Pascal,
then you needed 100 unions in C.
No. You simply used *casting* .
k=*(int *)(buffer +4) etc etc.
On Thu, 1 Jan 2026 10:30:54 -0000 (UTC), Waldek Hebisch wrote:
But are 'expert systems' really AI?
What is really ?AI?? At one point, the argument was over whether
computers could ?think?. Then you had to define ?thinking?, and
somebody tried to settle the question by saing: ?thinking is what
computers cannot do?.
Considering early 'structured' langs like Algol/Pascal,
USUALLY you can structure things to cope with any prob.
However sometimes, well, 'perfect' structure for that
may take WAY longer than you can afford to invest, so
some 'cheats' may have to be introduced. CompSci people
won't understand that reality.
In alt.folklore.computers rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:
On Thu, 1 Jan 2026 10:30:54 -0000 (UTC), Waldek Hebisch wrote:
But are 'expert systems' really AI? Theoretically so called expert
system shells could do smart things, but examples I saw were essentially >>> a bunch of "if ... then ..." which could be written in almost any
programming language. One example of samewhat succesful 'expert system' >>> is supposed to guide a user trough installing Unix. Description
suggests that is is not smarter than modern Debian installer. And
nobody thinks that Debian installer is AI.
I never thought so. Like you I've looked at Lisp and Prolog and came away
with the thought 'you *could* use that approach but why would you? It adds >> nothing to C but obfuscation.'
You mean 'expert system' coded in Lisp or Prolog? Or just general
coding in Lisp or Prolog? Concerning general coding IMO Prolog
is great for backtracking search and a few similar problem, but
not good for most of programs. On the other hand Lisp is quite
capable general purpose language.
I don't think they call it an expert system but Arch Linux has a very
detailed description of installing the system. There is also a sketchily
maintained script that automates much of the process although the 'I use
Arch btw' crowd considers that cheating. Then there is EndeavourOS and a
couple of others that act like Debian, Ubuntu, or other installers and
install Arch, throwing in several useful tools.
Then there was 'fuzzy logic' that had its day although you don't hear much >> about it lately. Perhaps it was overtaken by neural networks.
I looked a bit at 'fuzzy logic'. But I did not see more in it than
principle "if you do not know better, then use crude approximation".
This principle is resonable, but I did not see any reason to prefer
specific crude approximations advocated in various texts (with
approximation varying depending on the text).
During
training of a NN in successive iterations you calculate the loss function
until you reach a point where it's 'good enough'. That technology is
interesting that while you can define and explain each mathematical
operation what's going on in the total sum is cloudy.
On Fri, 2 Jan 2026 10:59:55 +0000
The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
If you really needed 100 variant record in Turbo Pascal,
then you needed 100 unions in C.
No. You simply used *casting* .
k=*(int *)(buffer +4) etc etc.
You do have to be careful with this as it's not guaranteed that the
compiler won't take liberties in arranging members of a struct for optimization purposes, and any means to ensure that it doesn't are implementation-specific, so assumptions about casting a block of memory
to one struct/array or another can lead to portability issues...
...but boy, is it handy in a pinch!
On Fri, 2 Jan 2026 13:06:34 +0000, Kerr-Mudd, John wrote:
May I be the first to welcome you back to the start of last year, I hope
you can bring peace to Ukraine & the Middle East (other projects to be
announced after you've ticked those 2 off).
Well, at least I wasn't writing a check... My ideas for peace in the Ukraine and the Middle East would be very unpopular.
In article <10j7qap$6ptq$1@dont-email.me>,
Lawrence D˜Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
On 2 Jan 2026 06:01:53 GMT, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:
Turbo Pascal for CP/M-86 could access the graphics hardware on the
DEC Rainbow. A niche to be sure, but one my CSCI graphics class did
its projects in.
Did it have its own custom drivers for direct hardware access? Or did
it work through the ƒ??GSXƒ?? (GKS-superset) graphics library from Digital >> Research?
At this remove, I have no idea. And I never understood all the math,
so I was the guy in the team who wrote the CLI to interpret our
made up command language instead of doing the projections or whatever..
At least with a classifier it's easy to see a problem if it calls a Great Dane a horse but LLM fantasies tend to get accepted as facts.
On 2026-01-01, Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
On Thu, 1 Jan 2026 10:30:54 -0000 (UTC), Waldek Hebisch wrote:
But are 'expert systems' really AI?
What is really ?AI?? At one point, the argument was over whether
computers could ?think?. Then you had to define ?thinking?, and
somebody tried to settle the question by saing: ?thinking is what
computers cannot do?.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting
than the question of whether a submarine can swim." - Edsger Dijkstra
Mr. Dijkstra had his issues, but I'd say he hit the nail on the head
there.
According to c186282 <c186282@nnada.net>:
Considering early 'structured' langs like Algol/Pascal,
USUALLY you can structure things to cope with any prob.
However sometimes, well, 'perfect' structure for that
may take WAY longer than you can afford to invest, so
some 'cheats' may have to be introduced. CompSci people
won't understand that reality.
Hi, Comp Sci PhD here. We understand that just fine, although
some of us try harder than others to match theory to reality.
Algol60 had nice loops and nested scopes but it also had gotos.
Comp Sci like any other field can be very trendy. When I was
in school it was fashionable to say bad things about COBOL even
though hardly anyone actually knew what COBOL was like. I found
a compiler and wrote one small program to find out that yes it
is wordy but it also had better data structuring than a lot of
more fashionable languages.
On Fri, 2 Jan 2026 02:40:13 -0500, c186282 wrote:
Pascal was not a 'theoretical' lang ... Prof Nick actually meant it
to WORK in the real world.
I disagree with that. Wirth was mostly concerned with constructing
didactic languages. The joke about the original implementatino was it is a good language for telling itself secrets since there is no i/o.
Students learned it and extended it when they had to use it in the real world. Lisp has a similar history. Common Lisp and its descendants violate the purity of the Lisp concept but get things done.
On Fri, 2 Jan 2026 11:13:59 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 02/01/2026 04:35, c186282 wrote:
NNs are 'different'. Not 'expert', not 'fuzzy', not LLM.
ÿ A little closer to how biological brains work. The bitch has been
ÿ finding suitable elements that can be compactly put on chips.
ÿ They're getting better at that. Maybe 10 years and decently good
ÿ 'AI' will fit INSIDE a bot instead of a 20 acre gigawatt data
ÿ center.
Yes. They are ultimately pattern recognition engines.
Trouble with those is you have to get the gain right, I cant remember
what happened to that software you fed images too and it turned them
into eyes, and dogs where there used to be plants. Because it tried too
hard.
Great fun
The 'hello world' of image recognition is classify dogs and cats. There is
a very large dataset of cat and dog images to work with.
One of the early problems was the dogs tended to be photographed outside
and the cats inside. After training the model was very good in classifying furry animals in an outside setting versus those inside.
Speaking in an anthropomorphic way classifiers can have acceptable
behavior but you're never too sure exactly what they're 'thinking'. There
is a whole field of research trying to figure out what the hell goes on in the black box.
At least with a classifier it's easy to see a problem if it calls a Great Dane a horse but LLM fantasies tend to get accepted as facts.
I *like* to make 'perfect' structuring that will
handle anything, but at times there was time pressure
to "make it work" and I could not spend days/weeks
trying to get it 'just perfect'.
Sometimes coming BACK to it in a month or two will
yield sudden inspiration however ... I think the
annoying problem hides in the back of the mind
for a long time and gets at least some 'cpu cycles'
even if you don't realize.
On 2026-01-01, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:
On Thu, 01 Jan 2026 19:12:29 +0000, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:
Waldek Hebisch wrote:
But are 'expert systems' really AI?
What is really ?AI?? At one point, the argument was over whether
computers could ?think?. Then you had to define ?thinking?, and
somebody tried to settle the question by saing: ?thinking is what
computers cannot do?.
The only succinct definition of ?AI? I ever saw was: ?solving NP
problems in polynomial time?.
It was always rather flexible. Currently it?s a label you put on things
to attract venture capital or other forms of finance.
Best definition yet. It's already started with the 'smart' phone but I'm
waiting for the marketers of consumer goods to tack AI onto frying pans
and everything else.
"If it can done, it should be done." That's one of a collection of sayings that someday I'll compile into an essay titled "Memes that Will Destroy the World".
Back when electronics became cheap, remember how clocks were incorporated into just about everything? I had a ball-point pen with a clock in it.
It wasn't very smart but it was sad to see Roomba go under. If nothing
else it was good for terrorizing cats.
I won't ever have a smart speaker, and I'll be damned if I'm going
to have a vacuum cleaner that cases the joint and reports back to
the mother ship. Besides, I have better ways to entertain the cats.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting
than the question of whether a submarine can swim." - Edsger Dijkstra
Mr. Dijkstra had his issues, but I'd say he hit the nail on the head
there.
... it's not guaranteed that the compiler won't take liberties in
arranging members of a struct for optimization purposes ...
On 1/2/26 14:29, rbowman wrote:
On Fri, 2 Jan 2026 02:40:13 -0500, c186282 wrote:
ÿÿÿ Pascal was not a 'theoretical' lang ... Prof Nick actually meant it
ÿÿÿ to WORK in the real world.
I disagree with that. Wirth was mostly concerned with constructing
didactic languages. The joke about the original implementatino was it
is a
good language for telling itself secrets since there is no i/o.
ÿ Must have been a damned early version.
ÿ Old ALGOL had no I/O however. Didn't show up
ÿ until what, '68 ?
On Fri, 2 Jan 2026 08:49:25 -0800, John Ames wrote:
... it's not guaranteed that the compiler won't take liberties in
arranging members of a struct for optimization purposes ...
The C23 spec (section 6.2.5, ?Types?) does say the member objects of a
struct type need to be ?sequentially allocated?. The only freedom the compiler has (section 6.2.6) is to add ?padding bytes?.
On 1/2/26 13:18, c186282 wrote:
ÿ Old ALGOL had no I/O however. Didn't show up
ÿ until what, '68 ?
58 if you count Burroughs.
On 1/2/26 13:18, c186282 wrote:
ÿ Old ALGOL had no I/O however. Didn't show up
ÿ until what, '68 ?
On 2026-01-02, Peter Flass <Peter@Iron-Spring.com> wrote:
58 if you count Burroughs.
For me, "old Algol" means Algol-60 as opposed to Algol-68.
So how could Burroughs have it in '58?
On Fri, 2 Jan 2026 15:00:07 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:
On 1/2/26 14:33, Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote:
On Fri, 2 Jan 2026 08:49:25 -0800, John Ames wrote:
... it's not guaranteed that the compiler won't take liberties in
arranging members of a struct for optimization purposes ...
The C23 spec (section 6.2.5, ?Types?) does say the member objects of a
struct type need to be ?sequentially allocated?. The only freedom the
compiler has (section 6.2.6) is to add ?padding bytes?.
It defeats the purpose of a structure if the compiler is free to
rearrange it. Local variables (PL/I AUTOMATIC) can, in most languages,
be stored however the compiler wants.
That can lead to interesting bugs. The root cause is overflowing a local variable, say writing 6 characters to a char[4]. Which adjacent local variable gets whacked depends on the compiler's ordering. Whether it manifests as a bug depends on how the corrupt variable is used in the function and where it is initialized.
Lisp has garbage collection, so no need to manualy free memory.
Which means that you can build new things at any time without risk
of leaking memory.
But it was noticed that Lisp sources can be transformed under
program control and such transformations are easy because the Lisp
source has the same form as Lisp data. Anyway, this capability is
frequently used and support for it is main reason to keep
parenthesised notation.
On 1/2/26 17:52, rbowman wrote:
On Fri, 2 Jan 2026 15:00:07 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:
On 1/2/26 14:33, Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote:
On Fri, 2 Jan 2026 08:49:25 -0800, John Ames wrote:
... it's not guaranteed that the compiler won't take liberties in
arranging members of a struct for optimization purposes ...
The C23 spec (section 6.2.5, ?Types?) does say the member objects of a >>>> struct type need to be ?sequentially allocated?. The only freedom the
compiler has (section 6.2.6) is to add ?padding bytes?.
It defeats the purpose of a structure if the compiler is free to
rearrange it. Local variables (PL/I AUTOMATIC) can, in most languages,
be stored however the compiler wants.
That can lead to interesting bugs. The root cause is overflowing a local
variable, say writing 6 characters to a char[4]. Which adjacent local
variable gets whacked depends on the compiler's ordering. Whether it
manifests as a bug depends on how the corrupt variable is used in the
function and where it is initialized.
Indeed. A few times I suspected this I put a character string before and after where I suspected the problem was, and did lots of checking to
find out where it was being clobbered.
Ummm ... not so sure anymore. LLMs *are* showing
signs of "self" (and self-preservation) already.
On Fri, 2 Jan 2026 19:58:48 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 02/01/2026 19:46, rbowman wrote:
At least with a classifier it's easy to see a problem if it calls a
Great Dane a horse but LLM fantasies tend to get accepted as facts.
To a young child, if its got 4 legs and fur, its a 'doggie'.
To an even younger child it's close to a Ding an sich. 'Doggie' already is
a departure from immediate reality. Mommy intrudes and says 'No it is a
cat.' Later Mommy adds the concept of 'two cats' and we're off to the
races. Eventually the kid gets a PhD in math and lives in a completely abstract world unable to make a pot of coffee.
On Fri, 2 Jan 2026 19:57:06 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 02/01/2026 19:36, rbowman wrote:
On Fri, 2 Jan 2026 13:06:34 +0000, Kerr-Mudd, John wrote:
May I be the first to welcome you back to the start of last year, I
hope you can bring peace to Ukraine & the Middle East (other projects
to be announced after you've ticked those 2 off).
Well, at least I wasn't writing a check... My ideas for peace in the
Ukraine and the Middle East would be very unpopular.
Probably with its inhabitants, yes.
My real solution would be sort of a holmgang. Let them sort their shit out with no outside interference. May the best Slovak or Semite win.
Well, in case Ukraine part of it is deciding what is inside and what
is outside. And if you say that inside is within borders of
Ukraine, then essentialy you say that Russia should stop messing
in Ukrainian matters. Good luck convincing Russia to do so.
On Fri, 2 Jan 2026 15:15:53 -0500, c186282 wrote:
I *like* to make 'perfect' structuring that will handle anything, but
at times there was time pressure to "make it work" and I could not
spend days/weeks trying to get it 'just perfect'.
We had a couple of programmers who tried to handle all possible eventualities. Typically the eventualities never evidenced or whatever the theoretical future does, leaving a very complex piece of code to do the
task at hand.
Solve tomorrow's problems tomorrow.
On Fri, 2 Jan 2026 21:47:01 +0100, Carlos E.R. wrote:
I like the idea of a robot that actually cleans the house.
https://petkit.com/products/purobot-ultra
I wonder how many people buy one of these? I think the cat's response
would be "WTF? I ain't going in there."
In alt.folklore.computers rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:
On Fri, 2 Jan 2026 19:57:06 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 02/01/2026 19:36, rbowman wrote:
On Fri, 2 Jan 2026 13:06:34 +0000, Kerr-Mudd, John wrote:
May I be the first to welcome you back to the start of last year, I
hope you can bring peace to Ukraine & the Middle East (other projects >>>>> to be announced after you've ticked those 2 off).
Well, at least I wasn't writing a check... My ideas for peace in the >>>> Ukraine and the Middle East would be very unpopular.
Probably with its inhabitants, yes.
My real solution would be sort of a holmgang. Let them sort their shit out >> with no outside interference. May the best Slovak or Semite win.
Well, in case Ukraine part of it is deciding what is inside and what
is outside. And if you say that inside is within borders of
Ukraine, then essentialy you say that Russia should stop messing
in Ukrainian matters. Good luck convincing Russia to do so.
On Fri, 02 Jan 2026 02:18:42 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
Back when electronics became cheap, remember how clocks were
incorporated into just about everything? I had a ball-point pen with a
clock in it.
I used those little round stick-ons to keep track of project hours. When I >couldn't find one I bought a $5 wrist watch at a flea market. The
department manager advised me I shouldn't leave a valuable watch by the >monitor. At least a blue stick-on didn't look lile much.
A friend bought a very early calculator for several hundred 1970s dollars.
I must have pissed them all off but I have several calculators that were
in the begging letters from various organizations in lieu of mittens or >return address stickers. The must go for 10 cents in volume.
Damn! Nobody sent me a calendar! I'm going to have to buy one. Or not.
$ cal 1 2025
January 2025
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29 30 31
Still works!
On 2026-01-03 01:27, rbowman wrote:
On Fri, 2 Jan 2026 21:47:01 +0100, Carlos E.R. wrote:
I like the idea of a robot that actually cleans the house.
https://petkit.com/products/purobot-ultra
:-D
I wonder how many people buy one of these? I think the cat's response
would be "WTF? I ain't going in there."
On 1/3/26 01:50, Waldek Hebisch wrote:
In alt.folklore.computers rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:
On Fri, 2 Jan 2026 19:57:06 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 02/01/2026 19:36, rbowman wrote:
On Fri, 2 Jan 2026 13:06:34 +0000, Kerr-Mudd, John wrote:
May I be the first to welcome you back to the start of last year, I >>>>>> hope you can bring peace to Ukraine & the Middle East (other projects >>>>>> to be announced after you've ticked those 2 off).
Well, at least I wasn't writing a check...ÿÿ My ideas for peace in the >>>>> Ukraine and the Middle East would be very unpopular.
Probably with its inhabitants, yes.
My real solution would be sort of a holmgang. Let them sort their
shit out
with no outside interference. May the best Slovak or Semite win.
Well, in case Ukraine part of it is deciding what is inside and what
is outside.ÿ And if you say that inside is within borders of
Ukraine, then essentialy you say that Russia should stop messing
in Ukrainian matters.ÿ Good luck convincing Russia to do so.
We could have convinced them week one, except Biden was too spineless.
When the Russian invasion was pending we pulled all our people out. I
felt that we should have put more people in - not military forces per
se, but "advisors" and "trainers" imbedded with Ukrainian troops at the front lines. A Russian invasion would have had to push past our non- combatants to get anywhere, at which point we could have said "pull back
now or suffer the consequences. Make sure none of our people are harmed"
On Sat, 03 Jan 2026 06:09:32 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
And whether the variable is followed by some padding. If that char[4]
variable is followed by, say, 4 bytes of padding, you can write up to 8
bytes to it and not feel a thing. Then comes the day when you try to
write 9 bytes there and kaboom. I've lost a lot of hair with those
ones,
when a program that's run fine for a couple of years suddenly dies.
I have fixed bugs that were old enough to vote. Like the organisms in the permafrost in the plot lines of 'The Last ship' and 'Fortitude' they lay there in wait...
30 years ago programmers were very stingy with allocations.
On 03/01/2026 01:03, rbowman wrote:
To an even younger child it's close to a Ding an sich. 'Doggie' already
is a departure from immediate reality. Mommy intrudes and says 'No it
is a cat.' Later Mommy adds the concept of 'two cats' and we're off to
the races. Eventually the kid gets a PhD in math and lives in a
completely abstract world unable to make a pot of coffee.
On Sat, 3 Jan 2026 08:34:22 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Oh, you met him?
Several times. A PhD friend of mine was in a minor car accident. He
admitted he was thinking of something rather than staying on his side of
the road. Despite the degree being in electronics I watched him short out
a car battery with a piece of 14 gauge wire. I'm sure he could have done a complete circuit analysis of why it vaporized.
On Sat, 3 Jan 2026 07:11:19 -0500, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:
3 Thou shalt cast all function arguments to the expected type if
they are not of that type already, even when thou art convinced
that this is unnecessary, lest they take cruel vengeance upon thee
when thou least expect it.
Corollary: thou shalt be sparing in thy use of const lest future
generations curse thy name.
On Sat, 03 Jan 2026 06:09:32 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
And whether the variable is followed by some padding. If that char[4]
variable is followed by, say, 4 bytes of padding, you can write up to 8
bytes to it and not feel a thing. Then comes the day when you try to
write 9 bytes there and kaboom. I've lost a lot of hair with those
ones,
when a program that's run fine for a couple of years suddenly dies.
I have fixed bugs that were old enough to vote. Like the organisms in the permafrost in the plot lines of 'The Last ship' and 'Fortitude' they lay there in wait...
30 years ago programmers were very stingy with allocations.
On 2025-12-31, c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> wrote:
Can't wait to see what the AIs are cranking out in
a few years ... 29 levels all bunched together into
one gigantic line ? :-)
Shades of APL.
On Sat, 3 Jan 2026 08:34:22 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 03/01/2026 01:03, rbowman wrote:
On Fri, 2 Jan 2026 19:58:48 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 02/01/2026 19:46, rbowman wrote:
At least with a classifier it's easy to see a problem if it calls a
Great Dane a horse but LLM fantasies tend to get accepted as facts.
To a young child, if its got 4 legs and fur, its a 'doggie'.
To an even younger child it's close to a Ding an sich. 'Doggie' already
is a departure from immediate reality. Mommy intrudes and says 'No it
is a cat.' Later Mommy adds the concept of 'two cats' and we're off to
the races. Eventually the kid gets a PhD in math and lives in a
completely abstract world unable to make a pot of coffee.
Oh, you met him?
Several times. A PhD friend of mine was in a minor car accident. He
admitted he was thinking of something rather than staying on his side of
the road. Despite the degree being in electronics I watched him short out
a car battery with a piece of 14 gauge wire. I'm sure he could have done a complete circuit analysis of why it vaporized.
Le 31-12-2025, Lars Poulsen <lars@beagle-ears.com> a ‚critÿ:
On 2025-12-31, c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> wrote:
Can't wait to see what the AIs are cranking out in
a few years ... 29 levels all bunched together into
one gigantic line ? :-)
Shades of APL.
Except that, with APL, from what I can remember, the lines weren't
gigantic. We were able to do pretty impressive stuff with only short
lines. Well, I'm not speaking about the comments needed to explain the
short line...
On Sat, 3 Jan 2026 07:39:32 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:
We could have convinced them week one, except Biden was too spineless.
When the Russian invasion was pending we pulled all our people out. I
felt that we should have put more people in - not military forces per
se, but "advisors" and "trainers" imbedded with Ukrainian troops at the
front lines.
That worked so swell in Vietnam.
On Sat, 03 Jan 2026 06:09:32 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
And whether the variable is followed by some padding. If that char[4]
variable is followed by, say, 4 bytes of padding, you can write up to 8
bytes to it and not feel a thing. Then comes the day when you try to
write 9 bytes there and kaboom. I've lost a lot of hair with those
ones,
when a program that's run fine for a couple of years suddenly dies.
I have fixed bugs that were old enough to vote. Like the organisms in the permafrost in the plot lines of 'The Last ship' and 'Fortitude' they lay there in wait...
30 years ago programmers were very stingy with allocations.
On 1/3/26 15:38, rbowman wrote:
On Sat, 03 Jan 2026 06:09:32 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
And whether the variable is followed by some padding.ÿ If that char[4]
variable is followed by, say, 4 bytes of padding, you can write up to 8
bytes to it and not feel a thing.ÿ Then comes the day when you try to
write 9 bytes there and kaboom.ÿ I've lost a lot of hair with those
ones,
when a program that's run fine for a couple of years suddenly dies.
I have fixed bugs that were old enough to vote. Like the organisms in the
permafrost in the plot lines of 'The Last ship' and 'Fortitude' they lay
there in wait...
30 years ago programmers were very stingy with allocations.
ÿ Wasn't much to allocate ....ÿ :-)
I look at some code and wonder "how the heck has this ever worked?", but
the answer is that no one ever hit that combination of things before, or used that option.
On 2026-01-04, Peter Flass <Peter@Iron-Spring.com> wrote:
I look at some code and wonder "how the heck has this ever worked?", but
the answer is that no one ever hit that combination of things before, or
used that option.
That's certainly the sensible explanation, but I've had scenarios like
that, even with my own code from the past, where I could swear up and
down that I myself had successfully used that code in the exact scenario
that would obviously break.
On 2026-01-04, Niklas Karlsson <nikke.karlsson@gmail.com> wrote:
On 2026-01-04, Peter Flass <Peter@Iron-Spring.com> wrote:
I look at some code and wonder "how the heck has this ever worked?", but >>> the answer is that no one ever hit that combination of things before, or >>> used that option.
That's certainly the sensible explanation, but I've had scenarios like
that, even with my own code from the past, where I could swear up and
down that I myself had successfully used that code in the exact scenario
that would obviously break.
Yup. Sounds like a Schrodinbug. It should have never worked,
but it does until you look at it - and then it never works again.
rbowman wrote this post by blinking in Morse code:
On Sat, 03 Jan 2026 06:09:32 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
And whether the variable is followed by some padding. If that char[4]
variable is followed by, say, 4 bytes of padding, you can write up to 8
bytes to it and not feel a thing. Then comes the day when you try to
write 9 bytes there and kaboom. I've lost a lot of hair with those
ones,
when a program that's run fine for a couple of years suddenly dies.
I have fixed bugs that were old enough to vote. Like the organisms in the
permafrost in the plot lines of 'The Last ship' and 'Fortitude' they lay
there in wait...
30 years ago programmers were very stingy with allocations.
I've found bugs in my own code that went unnoticed for years.
That's one good thing about refactoring or revisiting old code for
no reason.
Except that, with APL, from what I can remember, the lines weren't
gigantic. We were able to do pretty impressive stuff with only short
lines. Well, I'm not speaking about the comments needed to explain
the short line...
On 1/3/26 14:58, c186282 wrote:
On 1/3/26 15:38, rbowman wrote:
On Sat, 03 Jan 2026 06:09:32 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
And whether the variable is followed by some padding.ÿ If that char[4] >>>> variable is followed by, say, 4 bytes of padding, you can write up to 8 >>>> bytes to it and not feel a thing.ÿ Then comes the day when you try to
write 9 bytes there and kaboom.ÿ I've lost a lot of hair with those
ones,
when a program that's run fine for a couple of years suddenly dies.
I have fixed bugs that were old enough to vote. Like the organisms in
the
permafrost in the plot lines of 'The Last ship' and 'Fortitude' they lay >>> there in wait...
30 years ago programmers were very stingy with allocations.
ÿÿ Wasn't much to allocate ....ÿ :-)
What is this "allocate" thing. When I started the major languages were
COBOL and FORTRAN, and both used only static memory allocation.
On Sun, 04 Jan 2026 19:41:12 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
On 2026-01-04, Niklas Karlsson <nikke.karlsson@gmail.com> wrote:
On 2026-01-04, Peter Flass <Peter@Iron-Spring.com> wrote:
I look at some code and wonder "how the heck has this ever worked?",
but the answer is that no one ever hit that combination of things
before, or used that option.
That's certainly the sensible explanation, but I've had scenarios like
that, even with my own code from the past, where I could swear up and
down that I myself had successfully used that code in the exact
scenario that would obviously break.
Yup. Sounds like a Schrodinbug. It should have never worked, but it
does until you look at it - and then it never works again.
Conversely, it fails until you log a debug statement to see what's going
on and it works. I'd never, never just leave the debug in place, no
siree.
On Mon, 05 Jan 2026 05:57:23 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
<snip>
It's been a day or three but I think I did. iirc it also had the charming feature of only manifesting in the Windows build, not in Linux where I had valgrind and electric fence.
Another mystery is why memory debuggers on Windows are expensive and
barely usable. We had a Purify license but configuring the instrumentation was such a hassle it was rarely used. When the license came up for renewal nobody spoke up to keep it. BoundsChecker reportedly is even worse.
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