>     And he killed GOTO.

Then he did a great service to the world at large.

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>> Well, THAT explains why the hell I can't even say his name out loud, 
>> never mind spell it. :-P
> 
> as for pronunciation try dike-strah.

Interesting. DJ seemed to think the K was silent.

>> Apparently he was quite clever though. I only know about him because 
>> he apparently invented an algorithm for turning a series of expression 
>> tokens into an actual expression tree...
> 
> You should also know him because I mentioned him a few times here. He 
> did a lot of work in concurrent programming (e.g. the P and V 
> operation). IIRC he (or his team) implemented the first interrupt 
> routines. He did a lot on designing programs from specification. Many of 
> the algorithms he is most commonly known for were originally just 
> examples of how to derive a program from a specification. You need more 
> proof that thinking about your algorithm and documenting it might lead 
> to new insights?

Actually, now I think about it, I do vaguely recall looking him up on 
Wikipedia. Wasn't he one of those Ivory Tower theorists who thought that 
you can actually specify what a program is supposed to do 
mathematically, and then formally prove that the program you wrote does it?

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andrel schrieb:

> Nowadays with unicode we have a choice, well sort of at least. There 
> were times that most displays physically only supported ASCII and many 
> programming languages also only supported ASCII.
> The problem for the 'IJ' is on the one hand worse than for e.g. the 
> eszett because everybody knows it is an 'i' and a 'j' together, and we 
> have always used that on typewriters. Now it is easy to add ligatures to 
> a font set the 'IJ' ligature is still not often used. Partly because 
> many look ugly and don't seem to fit into the font and partly because 
> not many people mourn the loss of Dutch culture.
> The problem of the eszett (and umlaut) is OTOH perhaps a bit worse 
> because the Germans seem to have yielded to American imperialism by 
> changing their spelling rules so that German can now be spelled using 
> ASCII only.

UR doin' it wrong.

In the good old times of 7-bit ASCII, we Germans had our own version, 
the "GSCII", where we'd replace some rarely-used characters with the 
German umlauts, sz-ligature and even the paragraph sign. Some computers 
would have switches to toggle between different character ROMs for ASCII 
and GSCII, while printers would have control sequences to activate GSCII.

In the times of 8-bit character sets, we Germans had our own 8-bit 
codepage on the IBM computers (well, not exactly our own - we shared it 
with other Western Eurpoean languages), and our own keyboard layouts.

And no, German spelling has /not/ been changed to "yield to American 
imperialism". We still have the umlauts (with which we didn't change a 
thing), and despite some people believing the contrary, we didn't do 
away with the sz ligature either; we just changed the rules to make it 
easier to know when to use the sz ligature and when not to, and while 
this has effectively reduced the cases in which it is used, there are 
still plenty of words in which it still constitutes the only proper 
spelling.

We have a long tradition though how to deal with cases where the umlauts 
and/or the sz ligature are not available (the sz ligature, in 
particular, has never been available in all-uppercase spelling). /And/, 
as mentioned before, we insisted on /not/ using ASCII, /not/ using 
American keyboard layouts, etc.; so the Dutch "ij" issue seems to me not 
so much a problem of "American imperialism", but laziness on the Dutch 
side to /maintain/ their culture.

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Stephen schrieb:
> On Tue, 06 Oct 2009 13:38:02 -0700, Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> 
>> andrel wrote:
>>> another example of how the Americans have destroyed a culture.
>> Hey, you want to be able to spell properly, *you* invent computers. ;-)
> 
> Now here's me thinking that it was the Brits who invented the first modern
> (programmable) computer. With the Bombe being built at Bletchley Park.

Ahem...

- The "Turing-Bombe" was a primarily /mechanical/ device.
- It was, despite its name, not Turing-complete.
- It was not even programmable; rather, it was designed /exclusively/ to 
break the Enigma cipher.
- Even its 1943 successor, "Colossus", was not Turing-complete, and 
programmable only by re-wiring.


Konrad Zuse, anyone?

- Filed two important patents in 1937, already describing all elements 
of the Von-Neumann architecture.
- Built a mechanical computer prototype (Zuse Z1) in 1938
- Finished an electric binary computer in May 1941, which was 
programmable via punch tape, and Turing-complete.

The only thing about "modern" computers Zuse cannot claim to have 
invented is the /electronic/ computer, as his Zuse Z3 used relays and is 
therefore consodered electromechanic. And multiple of his inventions 
appear to have been made independently(?) by others - but still the Z3 
was the only one to have them /all/.


Programmable computers? A German invention.

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Stephen schrieb:

> I remember seeing a machine in Paisley museum that used recognisable punch cards
> (IIRC about 18" X 24") from the 19th Century. Its output was woven cloth. So (as
> usual) we Scots were there first (if you don't count the Chinese, who did
> everything first). :P

Well, granted, you Scots were no doubt the first to do graphics 
programming... :-P

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smc### [at] csccom schrieb:
> When we introduced English to the world we did it at the point of a gun 
> and with gunboat diplomacy. The American method was more economic, 
> supplying cheap(ish) computer products and English language films. 
> Somehow that seems more acceptable to people at large.

Interestingly, the USA /almost/ went for German as their national 
language (because they had difficulties agreeing on either English or 
French, AFAIK :-P)

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clipka wrote:

> Programmable computers? A German invention.

Programmable *electronic* computers? Maybe.

Perhaps you're forgetting a certain Charles Babbage, who designed a 
Turing-complete mechanical computer _several hundred_ years earlier. (I 
will admit, however, that it was never actually *built*.)

As I originally asserted: The modern computer really cannot be 
attributed to any one single individual. It was a team effort, over a 
period of several centuries...

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On Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:11:09 +0200, clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:

>so the Dutch "ij" issue seems to me not 
>so much a problem of "American imperialism", but laziness on the Dutch 
>side to /maintain/ their culture.

When I was working Croatia getting a UK keyboard was a problem as the standard
one was designed Slovak languages.
-- 

Regards
     Stephen

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On Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:54:01 +0200, clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:

>Stephen schrieb:
>
>> I remember seeing a machine in Paisley museum that used recognisable punch cards
>> (IIRC about 18" X 24") from the 19th Century. Its output was woven cloth. So (as
>> usual) we Scots were there first (if you don't count the Chinese, who did
>> everything first). :P
>
>Well, granted, you Scots were no doubt the first to do graphics 
>programming... :-P


-- 

Regards
     Stephen

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On Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:58:11 +0200, clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:

>smc### [at] csccom schrieb:
>> When we introduced English to the world we did it at the point of a gun 
>> and with gunboat diplomacy. The American method was more economic, 
>> supplying cheap(ish) computer products and English language films. 
>> Somehow that seems more acceptable to people at large.
>
>Interestingly, the USA /almost/ went for German as their national 
>language (because they had difficulties agreeing on either English or 
>French, AFAIK :-P)

I believe there was only one vote in it.
-- 

Regards
     Stephen

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