>> when people do write out numbers 
>> they are *right justified* 
> 
> Not really.
> 
>  3.44444
>      4.5
>    34424

OK smartass :-) You line up the decimal point if not dealing with integers.

Anyway, you still work from the LSB first when doing anything with them.

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scott wrote:

> Anyway, you still work from the LSB first when doing anything with them.

When was the last time *you* did long-division? :-P

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>> Anyway, you still work from the LSB first when doing anything with them.
>
> When was the last time *you* did long-division? :-P

Hehe, not since doing it with polynomials at university.

But since then I was messing about with writing an unlimited precision 
integer program, implementing the +,- and * by hand.  I dunno, it just 
seemed the obvious thing to do to put the LSB of the number in array 
position zero, putting the MSB in position zero would have made things quite 
awkward.

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>>> Anyway, you still work from the LSB first when doing anything with them.
>>
>> When was the last time *you* did long-division? :-P
> 
> Hehe, not since doing it with polynomials at university.
> 
> But since then I was messing about with writing an unlimited precision 
> integer program, implementing the +,- and * by hand.  I dunno, it just 
> seemed the obvious thing to do to put the LSB of the number in array 
> position zero, putting the MSB in position zero would have made things 
> quite awkward.

Well, clearly I'm not going to win this one because I am apparently the 
*only* person here who thinks this is a very, very bad idea. But I 
reserve the right to continue to be irked when I have to take my 
beautiful code and litter it with statements to turn the numbers 
backwards at the start, and then turn them back round the right way 
again afterwards, just because somebody somewhere decided to design 
their cryptosystem to follow Intel's broken design. :-P

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> But I reserve the right to continue to be irked when I have to take my 
> beautiful code and litter it with statements to turn the numbers backwards 
> at the start,

If you had them round the right way to start with you wouldn't need to 
litter your code with anything :-P

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scott wrote:
>> But I reserve the right to continue to be irked when I have to take my 
>> beautiful code and litter it with statements to turn the numbers 
>> backwards at the start,
> 
> If you had them round the right way to start with you wouldn't need to 
> litter your code with anything :-P

Take the MD5 hash kernel, for example. Essentially you're supposed to 
load a word of data from the current block and mix it into the hash state.

Except for the minor detail that you can't just *load* it, you have to 
turn it backwards first, or you'll get the "wrong" answer (i.e., not the 
answer listed in the MD5 spec). It's not that the data you're trying to 
hash is backwards, it's just that MD5 is defined to operate backwards. 
Except, of course, that working completely backwards would be 
comparatively simple; no, MD5 is defined to work on words forwards, but 
each word must be written backwards. *sigh*

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"Darren New" <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote in message 
news:4ae76041$1@news.povray.org...
> Captain Jack wrote:
>> Technically, in T-SQL, that would be a CROSS JOIN. JOIN all by itself 
>> defaults to a LEFT INNER JOIN, for which the results could vary.
>
> Actually, I thought you couldn't do JOIN all by itself at all. Every JOIN 
> has to be part of a SELECT, right?

Sorry... I meant to say "JOIN without a qualifier" rather than "JOIN all by 
itself". A JOIN clause always follows a FROM clause (essentially acting as a 
binary operator on two tables, creating a complex FROM) and the FROM has to 
follow a query directive like SELECT.

I always think of SQL as a weird language, but I guess English is a tad 
weirder. :D

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Captain Jack wrote:

> I always think of SQL as a weird language, but I guess English is a tad 
> weirder. :D

Just a tad, yeah...

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Captain Jack schrieb:

> SELECT C.Name, U.UserName
> FROM tblClients AS C
> OUTER JOIN tblUsers AS U ON U.UserId = C.LastEditUserID
> 
> In that case, the column LastEditUserID is zero (another way of logically 
> saying Null, I s'pose) when the client row is new and has never been edited. 
> I do that so that in that query I always get the client data, with the user 
> name being optional.

In theory, you'd solve this by adding another entry to tblUsers with 
default values to use for new clients.

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"clipka" <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote in message 
news:4ae9b09e$1@news.povray.org...
> Captain Jack schrieb:
>
>> SELECT C.Name, U.UserName
>> FROM tblClients AS C
>> OUTER JOIN tblUsers AS U ON U.UserId = C.LastEditUserID
>>
>> In that case, the column LastEditUserID is zero (another way of logically 
>> saying Null, I s'pose) when the client row is new and has never been 
>> edited. I do that so that in that query I always get the client data, 
>> with the user name being optional.
>
> In theory, you'd solve this by adding another entry to tblUsers with 
> default values to use for new clients.

Which hikes up my filtering costs later... When I show a list of users to 
select for, say, a report, I have to filter out the "special cases" that 
aren't actually users. I'm effectively making the User table track two 
different kinds of data, and I have to take that into account in all my 
future use of the table. Probably by adding a column to the table to flag 
how it's used. Then I have extra documentation tasks, more maintenance 
problems...

Okay, now I'm whining. Sorry about that... I just got out of a three hour 
design meeting where we ran out of coffee, and my head hurts. :D

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