On 12-Sep-08 17:08, andrel wrote:

>>> That you can use a word processor and have a plot in mind does not 
>>> necessary imply that you can write a good story. Especially if the 
>>> story has to be written in a language that doesn't fit your 
>>> preferences. Exercise: rewrite your reply in Dutch. Hint: we use for 
>>> all practical purposes the same alphabet.
>>
>> Sure, teach me all the words you use and any grammar rules and it 
>> shouldn't be too hard.
>>
> For fun I tried babelfish:
> Ik werkelijk begrijp niet waarom u het zo vindt hard om C. te leren. Er 
> is slechts een uiterst klein aantal kernverklaringen (als als, terwijl, 
> terugkeer enz.) en de syntaxis van hen allen is zeer gelijkaardig. Hoe 
> te om functies te schrijven moet u enkel leren, maar dat is het zelfde 
> voor om het even welke taal. Schrijven van wiskundige formules is ook 
> zeer gemakkelijk en gelijkaardig aan bijna elke andere taal die (+ -/* 
> enz. gebruikt). Als u geavanceerder wilt worden, dan leer om series te 
> behandelen en welke & en * (vrij gemakkelijke dingen zich te herinneren, 
> niet bij allen complex), en u bent vrij veel plaatst om 99.999% van de 
> code van C - met inbegrip van dingen als daar te begrijpen terwijl (*v++ 
> = *s++); Wat is het probleem?
> 

After correcting the grammar and minor adjustments to restore the 
meaning this is the back translation in english:
I do not understand really why you find it this way difficult for C. to 
learn. There is only an extremely small number of core declarations 
(such as if, while, return etc.) and the syntax of them all is very 
similar. How functions must write you to learn, but that is it same for 
any language. Letters of mathematical formulas are also very easy and 
similar to almost each other language which (+ -/* etc. use). If you 
want become more sophisticated, leathers then to treat arrays and which 
& and * (to rather easy things remember, not at all complex), and you 
are rather able understand 99,999% of the code of C - including things 
as while (*v++ = *s++); What is the problem?

Good luck on applying grammar rules to correct 'How functions must write 
you to learn, but that is it same for any language.' Not to mention the 
first sentence that is (after exchanging understand and really) probably 
   grammatically correct English, but may not exactly express what you 
intended.

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On 12-Sep-08 17:20, Invisible wrote:
> andrel wrote:
> 
>> Yes indeed, and if you look at what he writes about C it is not that 
>> he has problems with imperative languages in general but with this one 
>> for particular reasons.
> 
> I can write you programs in BASIC, Pascal, SDL, Tcl, Java, JavaScript, 
> PostScript, or even assembly if I have to. (Depends which processor. 
> Obviously.) But C and a few other highly complex and messy languages are 
> more than even I can cope with.
I find the 'even I' amusing.
> 
>> For fun I tried babelfish:
>> Ik werkelijk begrijp niet waarom u het zo vindt hard om C. te leren. 
[snip]
>> dingen als daar te begrijpen terwijl (*v++ = *s++); Wat is het probleem?
> 
> My God... It's... It's like... [I'm searching for the HGTTG quote]... 
> It's like a psuedo-random assortment of letters!

Is that the quote? From which book?

> Mind you, I would think _every_ language looks like that until you 
> understand the rules. ;-)
even more so if the language uses a foreign alphabet or worse.
> 
>> Even after adjusting the grammar (Ik begrijp werkelijk niet waarom u 
>> het zo hard/moeilijk vindt om C. te leren...) it will still be on the 
>> edge of comprehensible and not something any Dutchman would write.
> 
> For fun, I tried translating from and then to English with various 
> phrases on Google Translate.
Didn't know google had also a translator. Well, not better than 
babelfish. Different, but not better.

> This yielded such gems as
> 
>   "Leave the impact price-increase your body."
> 
> I cannot even begin to imagine how the hell it arrived at that... ;-)
> 
> With experimentation, it seems that the translation FROM English to 
> German significantly breaks sentences, 

how would you know?

> while the translation the other way is moderately reliable.

I can not imagine that it will translate the archetypal German sentences 
with the verb that closes the sentence 5 lines below the subject in a 
readable way.

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Warp wrote:
>   The difference is that it will use a hash table rather than a binary tree.

	I mistakenly thought the current map already did that...

> In most cases it considerably reduces memory usage and can potentially be
> much faster. (On the downside you have to be able to come up with a
> high-quality hash function for your elements. A poorly designed function
> can make the hash map very slow.)

	So the onus of coming up with a function will be on the user? Will it 
provide some defaults?

-- 
Lisa: Oedipus killed his father and married his mother.
Homer: Who payed for THAT wedding?


                     /\  /\               /\  /
                    /  \/  \ u e e n     /  \/  a w a z
                        >>>>>>mue### [at] nawazorg<<<<<<
                                    anl

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>> I can write you programs in BASIC, Pascal, SDL, Tcl, Java, JavaScript, 
>> PostScript, or even assembly if I have to. (Depends which processor. 
>> Obviously.) But C and a few other highly complex and messy languages 
>> are more than even I can cope with.

> I find the 'even I' amusing.

Do you know how many people can code directly in PostScript? (Small 
hint: not many.)

Do you know how many people can code in assembly? (Hint: even fewer.)

>> My God... It's... It's like... [I'm searching for the HGTTG quote]... 
>> It's like a psuedo-random assortment of letters!
> 
> Is that the quote?

Er, no.

>> With experimentation, it seems that the translation FROM English to 
>> German significantly breaks sentences, 
> 
> how would you know?

Some of the Germans in this forum said so.

>> while the translation the other way is moderately reliable.
> 
> I can not imagine that it will translate the archetypal German sentences 
> with the verb that closes the sentence 5 lines below the subject in a 
> readable way.

Search me.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On 12-Sep-08 19:15, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>> I can write you programs in BASIC, Pascal, SDL, Tcl, Java, 
>>> JavaScript, PostScript, or even assembly if I have to. (Depends which 
>>> processor. Obviously.) But C and a few other highly complex and messy 
>>> languages are more than even I can cope with.
> 
>> I find the 'even I' amusing.
> 
> Do you know how many people can code directly in PostScript? (Small 
> hint: not many.)
been there, done that
> 
> Do you know how many people can code in assembly? (Hint: even fewer.)
been there, done that (for at least 3-5 processors and the one I built 
myself ;) )
I think less people coded postscript than assembly, at least when I was 
young (it was part of our university course)

> 
>>> My God... It's... It's like... [I'm searching for the HGTTG quote]... 
>>> It's like a psuedo-random assortment of letters!
>>
>> Is that the quote?
> 
> Er, no.

Ok, what were you looking for, what scene. I don't know which you mean 
and I though I knew his material rather well.

> 
>>> With experimentation, it seems that the translation FROM English to 
>>> German significantly breaks sentences, 
>>
>> how would you know?
> 
> Some of the Germans in this forum said so.

Ah, ok. So you trust non-native speakers to judge how broken english is. 
Makes sense.

> 
>>> while the translation the other way is moderately reliable.
>>
>> I can not imagine that it will translate the archetypal German 
>> sentences with the verb that closes the sentence 5 lines below the 
>> subject in a readable way.
> 
> Search me.
> 
... Milton Keynes , am I close?

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"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:48ca7536$1@news.povray.org...
>
> I guess it depends what you're trying to do. SQL certainly has a few known 
> flaws (default column orderings, anyone?), but in general it makes it 
> quite simple and easy to do most things.

What column orderings?

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Gail wrote:
> 
> "Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
> news:48ca7536$1@news.povray.org...
>>
>> I guess it depends what you're trying to do. SQL certainly has a few 
>> known flaws (default column orderings, anyone?), but in general it 
>> makes it quite simple and easy to do most things.
> 
> What column orderings?

Apparently some people consider it a bug that you can write queries that 
depend on the order in which columns are returned (rather than by 
explicit column names). Since relations are supposed to be sets, that 
shouldn't be the case.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:48ca7de8@news.povray.org...
>
> I spent about 3 days trying to figure out the syntax for making function 
> pointers work. After endless segfaults, I just gave up. It was too hard.

How often does a C/C++ programmer really need a function pointer? It's one 
of those advanced features that 99% of the time isn't needed at all.

> Which one is FALSE? Is that 0 or 1? I know it's one or the other, but I 
> can never ever remember which - and it's kind of important!

0. Any other value is true.

> What insane nutcase thought that making assignment an expression as a good 
> idea? Seriously, WTF? That's excellent. So if I say "if (x = 5)..." then 
> my program will silently fail to work correctly, and I'll probably spend 
> hours if not days trying to figure out why.

Most compilers will warn about that these days.
It's the same in Java, the same in C#

> Pointers in general usually result in disaster. I constantly get the 
> syntax wrong for pointer types, pointer dereferencing, and pointer 
> creation.

So don't use them. As Warp and others have shown, it's not necessary in any 
way to use pointers.

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"andrel" <a_l### [at] hotmailcom> wrote in message 
news:48C### [at] hotmailcom...


> At times like this I wish for a time machine and go back and shoot the 
> moron that first used the 'short-circuit Boolean operators' expression. 
> Mind you I am normally not an aggressive person.

I'll help you.
I'm currently having a 'discussion' with an 'enlightened individual' who's 
trying to tell me that T-SQL (as in the implementation in MS SQL Server) 
does the same short-circuit evaluation that C++ and C# (and probably others) 
do.

Please note the deliberate sarcasm in the above statement.

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Gail wrote:

> How often does a C/C++ programmer really need a function pointer?

Hopefully very rarely...

>> Which one is FALSE? Is that 0 or 1? I know it's one or the other, but 
>> I can never ever remember which - and it's kind of important!
> 
> 0. Any other value is true.

I remember that 0 is one thing and everything else is the opposite. But 
I can never remember which is which.

>> What insane nutcase thought that making assignment an expression as a 
>> good idea? Seriously, WTF? That's excellent. So if I say "if (x = 
>> 5)..." then my program will silently fail to work correctly, and I'll 
>> probably spend hours if not days trying to figure out why.
> 
> Most compilers will warn about that these days.
> It's the same in Java, the same in C#

In Java, unless x happens to be a bool, you'll get a compile-time error. 
In C it's a perfectly valid construct.

>> Pointers in general usually result in disaster. I constantly get the 
>> syntax wrong for pointer types, pointer dereferencing, and pointer 
>> creation.
> 
> So don't use them. As Warp and others have shown, it's not necessary in 
> any way to use pointers.

It is in C. If you want printf() to print a string for you, you must 
pass a pointer to a string.

Maybe this is one of the things they actually fixed in C++...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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