Announcing a new online book: Eloquent JavaScipt

[Dr J R Stockton]

[sorry for the double post further back, I was being stupid]

Your "last edited on 3/8/2007" will mislead Americans, and also anyone
who thinks you are more or less American (your name indicates only
ancestry). Use the ISO form, 2007-08-03; no reasonable person can
misunderstand that (some USG agencies might - Google YYYYDDMM).

Hah, I should probably just make it "August 3rd 2007" or something,
and be done with it.

03 Aug 2007 (don't need comma etc. This one is advocated by Strunk and
White in Elements of Style.

That does not refer to the true English language, though; only to the US
dialect. ICBW, but Marijn writes like an educated European; and so
should eschew non-European standards.

As programmers, we are part of the IT world; and the IT world should be
encouraged to use ISO dates throughout, so that the advantages are there
whenever beneficial.

 

[David Mark]

In comp.lang.javascript message <[email protected]
oglegroups.com>, Fri, 3 Aug 2007 13:07:07, David Mark


You are fairly new here. What you observe was thoroughly established
here last year, as can be established no doubt through Google.

Yes. From searching through some older posts, I have identified a
couple of nutcases in this group. I won't even mention the other one,
though I am sure you know who I mean. He seems to have faded away.

And come to think of it, there was a third one who made the other two
look relatively sane, but he was apparently just a short-lived troll.

TL reminds me of the joke about the BAOR carollers that got put on a
fizzer one Xmas.

LOL. That IS a good one. But seriously, I don't follow that at all.

 

[Dr J R Stockton]

In comp.lang.javascript message <[email protected]
glegroups.com>, Thu, 2 Aug 2007 07:12:56, (e-mail address removed) posted:

A freely-available online book about JavaScript has just been
launched:
http://eloquentjavascript.net

Chap. 4.

The wording "milliseconds it is away from January 1st 1970" really means
a count starting with 0 at the very beginning of January 2nd. Commonly
one sees problems with "between" and "from". Actually, as the standards
say, the zero of the count is at the beginning of 1970-01-01 00:00:00
UTC. The UTC is important, though GMT might be more accurate as
javascript has no Leap Seconds.


You say "In addition to a date and time, Date objects also contain
information about a timezone." That is wrong. The only data in a Date
Object is an IEEE Double representing the milliseconds. A Date Object
also has a method getTimezoneOffset, but that makes an O.S. call giving
the aforesaid Double and returning the difference between local time and
UTC for that particular UTC. If it were stored in the Object, there
should be a setTimezoneOffset.

When it is one o'clock in Amsterdam it is ALWAYS either noon or midnight
in London - exactly in practice, but NL legal time is probably UTC-based
whereas UK legal time is probably still GMT-based. The time in NY will
generally be 7:00 but sometimes 8:00.

"Some functions can take any number of arguments" - I rather think any
function can take any number of arguments. There, "can use any" would
be better.

"inside Math. All the trigonometric functions are there" - not all, only
those JS knows. Omit the word "All".

In unpolluted proper British English, "cannot" implies impossible but
"can not" implies not compulsory. You cannot feed your cat tinned cat-
food (cats cannot open tins); you can not feed your cat anything but it
will get annoyed and go elsewhere.

Chap 10 : a list of the standard methods that accept RegExp arguments
could be useful. I know of six. There's a missing full stop.

In Appendix 2, "Next Chapter" is not a link. Because you have
overridden default text and link styles, I cannot tell that by looking
at it. I prefer default decoration; your colours are too close.