Invisible wrote:
>>>>> (Actually, the history of science and mathematics seems to involve 
>>>>> quite a lot of things being discovered, forgotten and then 
>>>>> rediscovered, often after a seriously large length of time.)
>>>>
>>>> That happens a lot when fanatics burn down libraries. Hasn't really 
>>>> happened much since the invention of the printing press.
>>>
>>> Which, AFAIK, is "fairly recent".
>>
>> Yep. The first "modern" press was the mid-1400's.  There were some in 
>> China that didn't work out all that well due to the lack of an alphabet.
> 
> Hahaha! Isn't China that country that *has* an alphabet, but it's 22,000 
> characters or something absurd?
> 

An alphabet is where you combine individual symbols, which have no 
meaning themselves, to form words. What they have are glyphs, each with 
a specific meaning, and which only combine when you want to express an 
idea that is a combination of those two meanings. This is rather 
different, and why both China and Japan tend to use English when dealing 
with technologies (well, that and the French didn't invent computers). 
Its literally the only "language" where you can write something like 
dog, and have everyone in the country know what it means, yet where the 
*spoken* form can differ between 10+ versions, some of which are so 
radically different that two people, trying to talk to each other, 
wouldn't understand a single word of each others sentences. And, that 
can come close to being true even with the two "major" dialects.

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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