Efficency and the standard library

[blmblm]

(Maybe the change in subject line will be of some help in improving
the S/N ratio .... )


[ snip ]

No, because as I've said, I waste too much time already casting pearls
before swine, and de minimis non curat lex. Your ignorance of the
grammar of "to be" is de maximubbubimustcal,

What ignorance is that? The people in alt.usage.english -- and as
best I can tell they're pretty reliable -- seem to be agreeing with
me and not you.

whereas orthography (cf
Shakespeare or any of his contemporaries) is minimis, Miss.
Furthermore, I know more than the spelling checker, which has just
flagged my Latin (both correct and humorous), and flags "aliterate".

And? I also don't consider spelling checkers to be all-knowing,
but I find them pretty useful in catching typos and otherwise
drawing my attention to potential problems. What does the spelling
checker do when you type "occurence"? I'm guessing that it flags
it -- correctly. That you choose to ignore all warnings because
some of them are bogus -- ah well.

Well, you're getting it. It is inconvenient to go to another window,

Why do you have to go to another window? Didn't you say that your
newsreader flagged words it thinks are misspelled? I'm imagining
something that works in this respect like MS Word, but -- no?

and if I genuinely need a word, I prefer to use my compact OED. I have
been thinking about buying access to the full OED to support my
teaching, but it would still be in another window. However, point
taken: I need to check spelling a bit more often, because I am such a
literate person, and must, like Violet Bucket, Keep Up Appearances in
order to always do justice to the Reality.

Also you avoid the appearance of hypocrisy.

(I think there's something else wrong with the part of your sentence
above, but -- also "whatever". Skitt's Law [*] may apply.)

"I spend quite enough time here casting pearls before swine to check
spelling all the time when my newsreader underscores words in
red..."...no, just a complex sentence above the low lower bound of
complexity understood by most techs.

If you had said "I spend too much time ... to check spelling ...",
I would not have objected. But replacing "too much" with "quite
enough" produces something that to me reads wrong.

I spend quite enough time, here, casting pearls before swine, to check
spelling (all the time) when my newsreader underscores words in red.

This is how it would appear in my second draft of a formal article.

I don't find the revised version an improvement -- rather the reverse,
indeed, though I think that use of commas is often a matter of style,
and mine is to avoid them where possible.

Here it is as a sonnet.

[ snip ]

(Betcha didn't know I was a poet. Probably thought I was just a jag.)

I don't know what "jag" means in context. I am all too aware that
you think you are a poet. I don't agree with you on that point,
but as noted previously I make no claims about my standing to
attempt literary criticism.

[*] I was going to cite the Wikipedia article for it, but either
I only imagined that there was one, or it has disappeared.
Well, GIYF.

Gee why I eff?
I would not know, Jeff.

If you had done as BruceS did, you would have discovered the
meaning of GIYF. Is your point that I should not have used this
acronym ("initialism", to the pedantic) without explaining it?

[ snip ]

I don't really care what a bunch of vicious children have to say,

On what do you base this assessment of the participants of a.u.e.?
It's distinctly at odds with my experience of the group.

but
it might be fun to go over there and humiliate the lot of them.

It might indeed be quite entertaining to find out what you would
make of them, and they of you, not to mention that the standards
of topicality are quite relaxed over there.

Anyway, my sources are neither Google Groups nor Wikipedia. Try Modern
English Usage.

Without looking it up -- is that the book by Fowler? Can you provide
a page reference in support of your claim?

[ snip ]

[ snip ]

Actually I think you write the best of anyone here, save for myself.

Ah, was *that* your point.

Well, I don't agree with you on this point either, ungracious
though it is to argue with a compliment: I think there are a
number of participants here who write at least as well as I do.
I won't list names because I'd be sure to leave out someone I'd
have included if I'd thought of him/her, but several come to mind.

But I also know that the upper bound is set low because people able to
write above that level usually see corporate and academic life as a
death sentence.

[ snip ]

"Don't compete with me. I have more experience, and I choose the
weapons." - Dijkstra

Would you be willing to supply a source for this quotation? I'm
curious about the context.

 

[blmblm]

(Maybe the change in subject line will be of some help in improving
the S/N ratio .... )

[ snip ]

I don't think you know what "metrical" means.

Possibly not. My intended meaning was along the lines of "having a
recognizable regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables".
I just made an attempt to find out whether this is consistent with
dictionary definitions, and didn't find anything that clearly
supports my usage. So maybe I should have chosen another word.

I'm going to try to keep this short considering that it's totally
off-topic .... :

Some of Shakespeare is
completely metrical in the mechanical sense:

[ snip ]

But not all:

[ snip]

Pedants today insist on a beat that Shakespeare would find over-
regular.

Could be. Speaking only for myself, and not claiming that my
preferences should be universally shared:

I rather enjoy verse than rhymes and "scans" (generally has
a regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, with
occasional exceptions). Verse that rhymes but doesn't scan --
Ogden Nash can make it work, but generally I find it jarring.
Verse that does neither ("free verse" in my usage) is, in my mind,
another thing, and something I also can enjoy.

By the way -- I use the word "verse" because to me "poetry"
connotes something that succeeds, in some sense I don't want
to try to define here, and a lot of what is billed as "poetry"
doesn't, for me, meet this criterion.

[ snip ]

Agreed, but for something I considered possibly before you were born:

Probably not -- unless you were fairly precocious. I may come across
as being young, but -- eh, "trailing edge of the baby boom" is about
as specific as I want to get here, but maybe that's close enough.

that sometimes it's possible to be over-meaningful. You see, I might
wish to use the index for different, non-interfering purposes.

You might. People do that with those single-letter-name variables
traditionally used in loops (i, j, p, q). But if you're going to
take that approach -- eh, I prefer the shorter names. <shrug>

[ snip ]

I write, and think, much faster than that,

Much faster than what? I have no idea how many hours a week you
spend composing Usenet posts, but unless it's zero, well, you're
spending some of a finite resource ....

 

[Willem]

blmblm myrealbox.com wrote:
) In article <3c4b75e6-0c88-4f6a-ae9a-71365c7d2bfb@x12g2000yqx.googlegroups.com>,
)> that sometimes it's possible to be over-meaningful. You see, I might
)> wish to use the index for different, non-interfering purposes.
)
) You might. People do that with those single-letter-name variables
) traditionally used in loops (i, j, p, q). But if you're going to
) take that approach -- eh, I prefer the shorter names. <shrug>

It is much better to use a separate variable for each usage.

The only reason I can think of for re-using the same variable
for a different use is the (usually false) notion that it would
be more efficient.

Any half-decent compiler will recognize that a variable is used only
for certain parts of the code, and if those parts don't overlap it
will happily use the same register or memory for those variables.

Or, in other words, the compiler is smart enough to see that you
could have used the same variable for those two loops, and then
kindly does that for you.


SaSW, Willem
--
Disclaimer: I am in no way responsible for any of the statements
made in the above text. For all I know I might be
drugged or something..
No I'm not paranoid. You all think I'm paranoid, don't you !
#EOT

 

[Seebs]

(Maybe the change in subject line will be of some help in improving
the S/N ratio .... )

You'd be amazed.

I don't find the revised version an improvement -- rather the reverse,
indeed, though I think that use of commas is often a matter of style,
and mine is to avoid them where possible.

As someone who has a long history of watching editors mercilessly remove
about 30% of the commas I included in an article in the first place, I am
obliged to side with you on this one. First off, "quite enough time to
check" implies that one will check. Secondly, the commas are clearly
organizing with plans to stage a violent coup, and I would summarily execute
most of them.

Accounting for willful confusion, it seems the intended implication is
"I am too busy to go into a separate program to spell-check, when my
newsreader underscores words in red". I think. No clue.

(Me, I don't use spell-checkers outside of, say, a single pass near the
publication point of a document, just to sanity-check that we haven't
all missed something. I consider them to be a tool for detraining the
proofreading instinct.)

I don't know what "jag" means in context. I am all too aware that
you think you are a poet. I don't agree with you on that point,
but as noted previously I make no claims about my standing to
attempt literary criticism.

I won't either, but I will say that I have shown his doggerel to people
who have actually obtained some success as poets, and the comment I
got was "talking to your muse doesn't make you Ezra Pound, although before
WWI, it might have come close."

On what do you base this assessment of the participants of a.u.e.?
It's distinctly at odds with my experience of the group.

Have they praised him? No? Have they suggested that he might be wrong?
Yes? Then they are "vicious children".

It might indeed be quite entertaining to find out what you would
make of them, and they of you, not to mention that the standards
of topicality are quite relaxed over there.

It would be hilarious watching him try to "humiliate" people in any field,
really.

Well, I don't agree with you on this point either, ungracious
though it is to argue with a compliment: I think there are a
number of participants here who write at least as well as I do.
I won't list names because I'd be sure to leave out someone I'd
have included if I'd thought of him/her, but several come to mind.

FWIW, you're certainly a solid writer. You don't seem to be trying very
hard to show off, but that's more a good sign than a bad sign, IMHO.

-s

 

[Seebs]

It is much better to use a separate variable for each usage.

I almost agree.

I disagree in the specific case of loop variables like "i", or
in cases where the parallelism between two loops is intentional.
In a lot of loops, there is no reason to pick a less-obvious name
than "i".

That said, if you are going to give real names, then I generally
recommend against trying to "reuse" a complicated name, because unless
it really is the same thing both times, it's clearer to have each
loop use its own name.

.... And by saying this, I have doomed us to dozens of new Nilges programs
in which he gives a variable a particularly incoherent name and then
reuses it repeatedly, resulting in hilarious hijinx when it's in both
an outer and inner loop. I finally understand Cassandra's pain.

-s

 

[spinoza1111]

You'd be amazed.


As someone who has a long history of watching editors mercilessly remove
about 30% of the commas I included in an article in the first place, I am
obliged to side with you on this one.  First off, "quite enough time to
check" implies that one will check.  Secondly, the commas are clearly
organizing with plans to stage a violent coup, and I would summarily execute
most of them.

Accounting for willful confusion, it seems the intended implication is
"I am too busy to go into a separate program to spell-check, when my
newsreader underscores words in red".  I think.  No clue.

(Me, I don't use spell-checkers outside of, say, a single pass near the
publication point of a document, just to sanity-check that we haven't
all missed something.  I consider them to be a tool for detraining the
proofreading instinct.)


I won't either, but I will say that I have shown his doggerel to people
who have actually obtained some success as poets, and the comment I
got was "talking to your muse doesn't make you Ezra Pound, although before
WWI, it might have come close."

I rather doubt you know anyone who's obtained "success" other than a
plaque from one of those companies that makes money by giving a first
prize to any poem sent in. This is mere statistics. I don't think
you're a pleasant person to know what with your fugues and, even more,
your backstabbing, and in actuality decent poets are vanishingly rare.
They tend not to hang around crappy little software firms or Borders.

Have they praised him?  No?  Have they suggested that he might be wrong?
Yes?  Then they are "vicious children".

No, they don't know English. And they are in many cases vicious
children.

Look, asshole. Spinoza knew that it's a waste of time for anyone, at
any level of intellect, to try to "understand" and "relate-to" people
who, after careful consideration, that person realizes is less
intelligent and cultured than himself, save in narrow areas of
specialization which almost by definition are artisan.

If those people tell him that "part of the problem are people" is
incorrect, or that "the Labour party require" is incorrect, he
certainly does a double take. He checks Fowler-Burchfield.

If those people claim that ALL lines of a sonnet must be EXACTLY ten
syllables long with a completely regular beat, he certainly does a
double take. He rereads Shakespeare's sonnets and checks the Norton
Anthology.

He then posts and cites here on abusenet, but here, owing to the
growing Fascism of the Internet, by this time he's the Chosen One Who
Is Never Right.

For his amusement he demonstrates in amusing ways that the herd is
wrong and maddened with fear, but the shit don't stop. He then takes a
sabbatical to continue a more worthwhile search, which is for someone
wiser than he.

But as he gets older, he finds fewer and fewer wise men. Or women.

It would be hilarious watching him try to "humiliate" people in any field,
really.


FWIW, you're certainly a solid writer.  You don't seem to be trying very
hard to show off, but that's more a good sign than a bad sign, IMHO.

The herd calls to each other in the gathering gloom
Each hoping to avoid her own particular doom.

 

[spinoza1111]

blmblm  myrealbox.com wrote:

) In article <3c4b75e6-0c88-4f6a-ae9a-71365c7d2...@x12g2000yqx.googlegroups.com>,
)> that sometimes it's possible to be over-meaningful. You see, I might
)> wish to use the index for different, non-interfering purposes.
)
) You might.  People do that with those single-letter-name variables
) traditionally used in loops (i, j, p, q).  But if you're going to
) take that approach -- eh, I prefer the shorter names.  <shrug>

It is much better to use a separate variable for each usage.

The only reason I can think of for re-using the same variable
for a different use is the (usually false) notion that it would
be more efficient.

Any half-decent compiler will recognize that a variable is used only
for certain parts of the code, and if those parts don't overlap it
will happily use the same register or memory for those variables.

Or, in other words, the compiler is smart enough to see that you
could have used the same variable for those two loops, and then
kindly does that for you.

Point taken: part of the reason is that I started out in machine and
assembler language on a machine with only three registers.

It might be marginally better to expand the name, and I've had
problems in complex loops keeping the names separate.

But that would irritate the short names boys, I'm afraid. And an index
is an index.

 

[spinoza1111]

(Maybe the change in subject line will be of some help in improving
the S/N ratio .... )

[ snip ]

I don't think you know what "metrical" means.

Possibly not.  My intended meaning was along the lines of "having a
recognizable regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables".
I just made an attempt to find out whether this is consistent with
dictionary definitions, and didn't find anything that clearly
supports my usage.  So maybe I should have chosen another word.

I'm going to try to keep this short considering that it's totally
off-topic .... :

Some of Shakespeare is
completely metrical in the mechanical sense:

[ snip ]

But not all:

[ snip]

Pedants today insist on a beat that Shakespeare would find over-
regular.

Could be.  Speaking only for myself, and not claiming that my
preferences should be universally shared:

I rather enjoy verse than rhymes and "scans" (generally has
a regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, with
occasional exceptions).  Verse that rhymes but doesn't scan --
Ogden Nash can make it work, but generally I find it jarring.
Verse that does neither ("free verse" in my usage) is, in my mind,
another thing, and something I also can enjoy.

By the way -- I use the word "verse" because to me "poetry"
connotes something that succeeds, in some sense I don't want
to try to define here, and a lot of what is billed as "poetry"
doesn't, for me, meet this criterion.

[ snip ]

Agreed, but for something I considered possibly before you were born:

Probably not --  unless you were fairly precocious.  I may come across
as being young, but -- eh, "trailing edge of the baby boom" is about
as specific as I want to get here, but maybe that's close enough.  

that sometimes it's possible to be over-meaningful. You see, I might
wish to use the index for different, non-interfering purposes.

You might.  People do that with those single-letter-name variables
traditionally used in loops (i, j, p, q).  But if you're going to
take that approach -- eh, I prefer the shorter names.  <shrug>

[ snip ]

I write, and think, much faster than that,

Much faster than what?  I have no idea how many hours a week you
spend composing Usenet posts, but unless it's zero, well, you're
spending some of a finite resource ....

Jesus H. Jumping Christ in a sidecar, the corporation and its notions
of finite resources invade our dreams. Haven't you ever heard of
multitasking? I'm not only defending Schildt, I am defining a whole
way of destructive herd behavior for my own satisfaction, because at
Bell Northern Research, corporate fe-males (who happened to be ace
programmers) came to me in tears for guidance because they were being
bullied by the people under them with the cooperation of upper male
management.

Why did they come to me, apart from my good looks? Because I simply
refused to sign a performance review written by one of those managers
even though it was not a bad review, because it contained falsehoods,
that's why. And back in the day I got away with this gesture.

Indeed, I am planning a book proposal, "Online Bullying: What It Is
and How to End It", and this participant-observer experience is just
grist for the mill, sugar. Apress, by the way, has under my contract
the right of first refusal.

You've become a member of a Fascist mob, Ms. Dainty.

 

[spinoza1111]

(Maybe the change in subject line will be of some help in improving
the S/N ratio .... )

[ snip ]

No, because as I've said, I waste too much time already casting pearls
before swine, and de minimis non curat lex. Your ignorance of the
grammar of "to be" is de maximubbubimustcal,

What ignorance is that?  The people in alt.usage.english -- and as
best I can tell they're pretty reliable -- seem to be agreeing with
me and not you.  

You need to get out more. People on nearly all unmoderated groups and
groups moderated by the likes of Seebach are in fact posting, with
exceptions, such as yours truly, because they are unqualified to post
elsewhere. Furthermore, there is a basic paradox in a snap, culinary
judgement that a teacher is or is not reliable. Literally, how would
you know about the UK plural? You should start reading the Economist
(in which I noted syntax like "The Labour Party require" in 1979) and
the BBC today, which regularly uses the plural with the names of
soccer clubs.

But perhaps, you're not talking about this issue. As to "it's me", "it
is I" is seen to be correct as soon as you add a who-qualifier as you
normally would in formal writing: "it is me who sent that email" is
clearly incorrect!

There is at best only a special rule, in oral English when there is no
qualifying who clause, allowing "it's me" (even "it is me" sounds
incorrect).

Don't compete with me.

And?  I also don't consider spelling checkers to be all-knowing,
but I find them pretty useful in catching typos and otherwise
drawing my attention to potential problems.  What does the spelling
checker do when you type "occurence"?  I'm guessing that it flags
it -- correctly.  That you choose to ignore all warnings because
some of them are bogus -- ah well.

Who said I ignore all warnings?

Well, you're getting it. It is inconvenient to go to another window,

Why do you have to go to another window?  Didn't you say that your
newsreader flagged words it thinks are misspelled?  I'm imagining
something that works in this respect like MS Word, but -- no?

and if I genuinely need a word, I prefer to use my compact OED. I have
been thinking about buying access to the full OED to support my
teaching, but it would still be in another window. However, point
taken: I need to check spelling a bit more often, because I am such a
literate person, and must, like Violet Bucket, Keep Up Appearances in
order to always do justice to the Reality.

Also you avoid the appearance of hypocrisy.  

(I think there's something else wrong with the part of your sentence
above, but -- also "whatever".  Skitt's Law [*] may apply.)

"I spend quite enough time here casting pearls before swine to check
spelling all the time when my newsreader underscores words in
red..."...no, just a complex sentence above the low lower bound of
complexity understood by most techs.

If you had said "I spend too much time ... to check spelling ...",
I would not have objected.  But replacing "too much" with "quite
enough" produces something that to me reads wrong.

You need to get out more...to the library. The usage is just a bit
archaic and Brit in that it backs off from a positive statement, but
satisfactorily implies that I'm fed up with you lot. My usage and
pronunciation are evolving since I live in a community that speaks
something akin to British English and I teach UK curricula.

And if that makes me no end of a twit,
Well, shit
So be it.

I don't find the revised version an improvement -- rather the reverse,
indeed, though I think that use of commas is often a matter of style,
and mine is to avoid them where possible.

Wow, that sounds like a real, dumb, rule. Poor, innocent comma,
without which we, I'd wot, run out of breath, especially in the Asian
pollution in which I live, of oxygen starvation, or carbon dioxide
build up, or strangulation, or some shit, like that.

Seriously: to the corporate mind, any sort of pseudo-scientific
ascetic rule sounds good especially if it was something ya thunk up on
the spur of the moment as a way to keep canaille in line.

Here it is as a sonnet.

[ snip ]

(Betcha didn't know I was a poet. Probably thought I was just a jag.)

I don't know what "jag" means in context.  I am all too aware that

It means a jagoff, dear heart. A wanker. An onanist.

you think you are a poet.  I don't agree with you on that point,
but as noted previously I make no claims about my standing to
attempt literary criticism.

Good for you. But the reason I write responses in poetry is that I'm
quite confident that nobunny here is capable to replying with anything
approaching an adequate riposte in verse. Even on
rec.arts.shakespeare, some fe-males had to resort in fact to the
vilest sort of reverse-sexist abuse in order to get a rhyme, not to
mention a metre.

So, I am but a poet for the working day,
My gayness and my gilt is all besmirched
From rainy marching in the bloody field:
It's just another weapon that I like Dijsktra choose
From a well-stocked armory, to make you lose.

[*] I was going to cite the Wikipedia article for it, but either
I only imagined that there was one, or it has disappeared.
Well, GIYF.

Gee why I eff?
I would not know, Jeff.

If you had done as BruceS did, you would have discovered the
meaning of GIYF.  Is your point that I should not have used this
acronym ("initialism", to the pedantic) without explaining it?

[ snip ]

I don't really care what a bunch of vicious children have to say,

On what do you base this assessment of the participants of a.u.e.?
It's distinctly at odds with my experience of the group.

I dunno. Solecisms (GIYF is a problem only for the half-educated).
Pretense masquerading as democracy. Cybernetic mob formation.

It might indeed be quite entertaining to find out what you would
make of them, and they of you, not to mention that the standards
of topicality are quite relaxed over there.  

Gettin' down with the blood and glass, ain't we.

Without looking it up -- is that the book by Fowler?  Can you provide
a page reference in support of your claim?

It's by Burchfield. I also have the original 1920s Modern English
Usage by Fowler. However, the far more useful modern Burchfield is in
my office because I use it in teaching English; please remind me if
you can to reference it on Wednesday when I go back to work.

Burchfield confirms that UK usage is to use plural for associations of
people.

Oh, here's my copy of the Oxford English Grammar:

"Singular collective nouns refer to a group of people or animals or to
institutions. They are treated as plural (more commonly in British
English than in American English) when the focus is on the group as
individuals rather than as a single entity. They may then take a
plural verb, and plural pronouns may be co-referential with them:

"The Argentine team *are* in possession now inside *their* own half"

Howard Cosell or any American sportscaster would say "is" and "its" or
"their".

Neither usage is "correct", but daily listening to BBC world service
confirms this.

But what about the more difficult issue of the correctness of "part of
the problem are people"?

"To be" is a copula, according to both The Cambridge Grammar of
English and the Oxford English grammar and it has sharply different
grammar from an ordinary transitive verb; it can be followed by an
adjective, a noun or a pronoun. When it is followed by a pronoun,
elementary schooling has abusively beat it into the heads of the
putatively educated that the pronoun must be an object pronoun, but
this is not so because the pronoun can be followed by a wh-clause and
provides the subject for this clause. "It is her who bought that
scarf" is recognizably incorrect, a solecism usually found in
pretentious speakers who remember being beaten up in first grade about
pronouns.

Ah, but what about pronouns that are the direct object of active,
transitive verbs? Hmm:

"I shall beat him who tries to compete with me."
"I shall beat he who trieth to compete with me."

The first form is incorrect, the second is a nice Alexandrine:

I shall beat the he who tries to compete with me
I shall drive him into the deep blue sea
I shall burn his huts and ravish his women folk
Like Timur Leng, and it ain't no joke.

Lofty, but not grammatical.

No, who must be preceded with a subject pronoun. The trick of the
careful writer is to use whomsoever or whoever, both of which are
acceptable but irregular. The trick of the rilly good writer, who
tends not to overuse pronouns anyway because of the possibility of a
vague antecedent when a paragraph is chock-full of blokes or fe-males,
is to use a noun, where the subject and the object is the same:

I shall beat the fe-male who tries to compete with me
Unless she is prepared, and deeper than anger, hunger or the sea

I suggest that books are better sources than some pretentious loser on
aue. Hell, even Schildt. He's a clear writer, remember?

[ snip ]

[ snip ]

Actually I think you write the best of anyone here, save for myself.

Ah, was *that* your point.

Well, I don't agree with you on this point either, ungracious
though it is to argue with a compliment:  I think there are a
number of participants here who write at least as well as I do.
I won't list names because I'd be sure to leave out someone I'd
have included if I'd thought of him/her, but several come to mind.

Somehow, these grace notes don't change the fact that you've done your
part to enable a cybernetic mob. This thing of darkness you better
acknowledge yours, babe.

But I also know that the upper bound is set low because people able to
write above that level usually see corporate and academic life as a
death sentence.

[ snip ]

"Don't compete with me. I have more experience, and I choose the
weapons." - Dijkstra

Would you be willing to supply a source for this quotation?  I'm
curious about the context.

Unfortunately, so am I. In reading Dijsktra since 1973, I never saw
it, and it's on this cheesy page: http://www.nutquote.com/quote/Edsger_Dijkstra.

But it certainly sounds like the old mole.

 

[spinoza1111]

I almost agree.

I disagree in the specific case of loop variables like "i", or
in cases where the parallelism between two loops is intentional.
In a lot of loops, there is no reason to pick a less-obvious name
than "i".

That said, if you are going to give real names, then I generally
recommend against trying to "reuse" a complicated name, because unless
it really is the same thing both times, it's clearer to have each
loop use its own name.

... And by saying this, I have doomed us to dozens of new Nilges programs
in which he gives a variable a particularly incoherent name and then
reuses it repeatedly, resulting in hilarious hijinx when it's in both
an outer and inner loop.  I finally understand Cassandra's pain.

You're a liar, who makes this type of mistake, not me. You're actually
accusing me of a bug which I haven't coded, while each and every code
sample you have posted since the start of this year includes a bug.
You speculate about what I do in order to damage my reputation and
increase yours because you're a zero sum, dysfunctional person.

Do I have to send a letter to your employer, Peter?

Do I have to retain a "reputation management" firm in order to sue
you?

End this. Now.

 

[blmblm]

You'd be amazed.

[ snip ]

I won't either, but I will say that I have shown his doggerel to people
who have actually obtained some success as poets, and the comment I
got was "talking to your muse doesn't make you Ezra Pound, although before
WWI, it might have come close."

I recognize the name Ezra Pound but don't quite understand what this
comment means -- it rather *sounds* as if your poet acquaintances are
saying that spinoza1111's verse might have been publishable a century
or so ago. ?

[ snip ]

FWIW, you're certainly a solid writer. You don't seem to be trying very
hard to show off, but that's more a good sign than a bad sign, IMHO.

Thanks for the kind words. "I try"? though sometimes "I'm trying"
might be the better way to say it.

 

[blmblm]

(Maybe the change in subject line will be of some help in improving
the S/N ratio .... )

[ snip ]

Jesus H. Jumping Christ in a sidecar, the corporation and its notions
of finite resources invade our dreams. Haven't you ever heard of
multitasking?

Yes, but I don't believe that it removes all limitations on what
can be accomplished in those 168 hours a week.

I'm not only defending Schildt, I am defining a whole
way of destructive herd behavior for my own satisfaction, because at
Bell Northern Research, corporate fe-males (who happened to be ace
programmers) came to me in tears for guidance because they were being
bullied by the people under them with the cooperation of upper male
management.

[ snip ]

 

[blmblm]

(Maybe the change in subject line will be of some help in improving
the S/N ratio .... )

[ snip ]

You need to get out more.

Or you need to actually read some of the posts in the group.

People on nearly all unmoderated groups and
groups moderated by the likes of Seebach are in fact posting, with
exceptions, such as yours truly, because they are unqualified to post
elsewhere. Furthermore, there is a basic paradox in a snap, culinary
judgement that a teacher is or is not reliable.

Snap judgment? Oh no, I base my assessment on many years of
following the group, sometimes more carefully than others, and
on whether the regulars generally agree with what I know from
other sources.

Literally, how would
you know about the UK plural? You should start reading the Economist
(in which I noted syntax like "The Labour Party require" in 1979) and
the BBC today, which regularly uses the plural with the names of
soccer clubs.

I am aware that UK English usage differs from US English usage with
regard to whether certain words are singular or plural. I just don't
think "part" is such a word.

[ snip ]

Don't compete with me.

How to answer this rather remarkable directive ....

"Don't give me orders"?

"Why not -- don't you want to lose?"

Nah. If you want to continue this discussion in some venue where it's
more topical, that might be interesting, but I'm already way over quota
with regard to off-topic posts in comp.lang.c.

[ snip ]

Who said I ignore all warnings?

I inferred that from whatever you said upthread; if indeed you
pay attention to *some* warnings from a spelling checker, how do
you decide which ones .... Eh, it hardly matters.

[ snip ]

(There are some points here I'm tempted to pursue further, but --
not here.)

If you had done as BruceS did, you would have discovered the
meaning of GIYF. Is your point that I should not have used this
acronym ("initialism", to the pedantic) without explaining it?

[ snip ]

"part of the problem are people" is correct

It will be interesting to find out what the folks in alt.usage.english
have to say about that.

I don't really care what a bunch of vicious children have to say,

On what do you base this assessment of the participants of a.u.e.?
It's distinctly at odds with my experience of the group.

I dunno. Solecisms (GIYF is a problem only for the half-educated).
Pretense masquerading as democracy. Cybernetic mob formation.

And how do you know any of these things happen in a.u.e.?

Gettin' down with the blood and glass, ain't we.

I don't think so. For all I know they might welcome you and agree
with your assessment of your writing skills.

As of earlier today, there had been fewer than half a dozen
responses in a.u.e. to my crossposted article, all of them pretty
mild-mannered. No one seemed to agree with you, but one person
did write:

"C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas de l'anglais."

which I suppose might be admiration ....

[ snip ]

Lots more that would be interesting to pursue, but not here.

Unfortunately, so am I. In reading Dijsktra since 1973, I never saw
it, and it's on this cheesy page: http://www.nutquote.com/quote/Edsger_Dijkstra.

And you disparage *my* sources. Well, perhaps this one is more reliable
than the URL makes it sound.

 

[Seebs]

I recognize the name Ezra Pound but don't quite understand what this
comment means -- it rather *sounds* as if your poet acquaintances are
saying that spinoza1111's verse might have been publishable a century
or so ago. ?

No, rather that Ezra Pound apparently really SUCKED prior to WWI.

Thanks for the kind words. "I try"? though sometimes "I'm trying"
might be the better way to say it.

Heh.

-s

 

[blmblm]

[ snip ]

Or you need to actually read some of the posts in the group.

[ snip ]

And how do you know any of these things happen in a.u.e.?

It occurs to me that I should probably mention that petty squabbling
*does* sometimes break out in a.u.e. -- but mostly in threads that
apparently start in sci.lang and eventually get crossposted to the
alt.* group.

Once upon a time it may have been true that the "big eight" newsgroups
were pretty solid, while the alt.* hierarchy was inhabited by people
of dubious sanity, but even if it's still true in general, apparently
there are exceptions. (Cue chorus of "hear, hear"? or "here, here"?)

[ snip ]

 

[spinoza1111]

No, rather that Ezra Pound apparently really SUCKED prior to WWI.

Wow. Your ignorance knows no bounds: from Sanders, THE SHORT OXFORD
HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, 1994.

"Pound (1885-1972) had arrived in London from the United States in
April 1909 and made the metropolis the center of his energizing
activities for the following eleven years."

It was in World War II, not during World War I, that Pound became a
Fascist sympathizer and was diagnosed following the war, after the
intervention of his friend TS Eliot, with mental disease in order to
prevent him from being punished as a US citizen and traitor...although
it appears that the mental disease was genuine.

Sanders, the author of the short Oxford history, unfortunately spends
less time on Pound's output than he does on what Sanders, as a typical
academic, feels was Pound's self-promotion. Your idiot "poet" friends
probably attended some lecture in college in which the lecturer, a
dickless wonder like Sanders, inappropriately emphasized Pound as a
person, concealing his poetic talent because, in fact, genuine
writerly talent generally drives the dickless wonders of English
departments berserk...as you are so easily driven berserk by the fact
that I can code C better than you.

But there remains a curious fact. Whereas people who seem, as you
doubtless seem at work based on some of the comments on your blog, non
self promoting and "humble" so often turn out to be anything from Ted
Bundy to a garden variety creep such as you, Ezra Pound the loud, Ezra
Pound the offensive, turns out to have been the "miglior fabro" of TS
Eliot's The Waste Land, somebody who did something out of pure
altruism.

Pound make considerable cuts and other suggestions which made The
Waste Land one of the most important poems of the 20th century and won
Eliot the Nobel prize after WWII. He did so despite the fact that this
would benefit Eliot and not him.

Contrast your treatment of Schildt. You were offered a paid chance to
work with him, not snipe at him and incite and enable others by
deliberate request. You would have made more money if you'd been able
to make a case that some features of C need to be used carefully if
the program needs to port to Linux, such as return code discipline,
because there could have been chapters for this material and Windows
requirements.

But you did not because for the same reason you refused to take comp
sci, you flee actual exposure of your real and fancied limitations.

Anyway: you need to change the wikipedia entry as per my
specifications because the most important reference turns out to be a
LIE, and you need to do this by Monday.

 

[spinoza1111]

I am aware that UK English usage differs from US English usage with
regard to whether certain words are singular or plural.  I just don't
think "part" is such a word.

It is not. As I explained to you, the fact that the verb is copular,
and not active or passive, controls, making "it is I" technically
correct. The part about British use of the plural simply illustrates
something which non-expat Americans do not understand, which is that
they do not speak correct English in a world sense.

[ snip ]

Don't compete with me.

How to answer this rather remarkable directive ....

"Don't give me orders"?  

"Why not -- don't you want to lose?"  

Nah.  If you want to continue this discussion in some venue where it's
more topical, that might be interesting, but I'm already way over quota
with regard to off-topic posts in comp.lang.c.

No, in fact. I do not wish to cause you embarrassment by having to so
in detail expose your limitations to all. Don't compete with me: I
have more experience, and I choose the weapons, and (to continue the
Dijkstra thought) I have a real stockpile.

I inferred that from whatever you said upthread; if indeed you
pay attention to *some* warnings from a spelling checker, how do
you decide which ones ....  Eh, it hardly matters.

No, it does. I decide which ones because the people who assemble
online dictionaries are deliberately and brutally underpaid and for
this reason make thousands of mistakes.

And how do you know any of these things happen in a.u.e.?

Because I've been posting and reading a lot longer with you.

Don't compete with me, show some sense,
Do not even try,
I have more experience,
And gentlemen don't make ladies cry.

No, I am very serious:
Very very serious:
Do not miss the simple truth
Here in alien corn, as was Ruth.


 

I don't think so.  For all I know they might welcome you and agree
with your assessment of your writing skills.  

Perhaps I misunderstood your meaning here, then. If so, I apologize.

As of earlier today, there had been fewer than half a dozen
responses in a.u.e. to my crossposted article, all of them pretty
mild-mannered.  No one seemed to agree with you, but one person
did write:

"C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas de l'anglais."

which I suppose might be admiration ....

Ce n'est pas de l'anglais Americaine
Mais la langue du cette pays
N'est pas la norme du monde!
No, voici Georges Bush
Parlons-ils, Anglais? Shush.

Furthermore, saying that grammatically and orthographically correct
English is "not English" is in my experience a nasty habit of racists,
because unlike French (whose legislated canons I have possibly
violated in the above) there are no bounds fixed for English other
than usage, with preference given in fact to English rather strikingly
resembling mine. It is like those signs with those solecisms carried
at Glenn Beck's Sep 12 (2009) "march on Washington" that called for an
"Inglish onlie sosiety".

It is a Fascistic attempt to exclude a language user from a community:
as Fascistic as Seebach's attempts to exclude Schildt, as Jewish
attempts to redefine its Arab citizens as second class, and yes
indeed, German definitions of Jews, who could write and speak better
German than Nazi street thugs, as not German.

Most "language experts", "language mavens" and "language curmudgeons"
on the Internet are vicious and pretentious street thugs, whose
prototype was a German on a tram who attacked Theodore Adorno for
speaking pretentious High German in the 1920a. As a result of WWI, and
as here, the correct as redefined as "bad" and a sloppier and
mystified German was being readied for Hitler's lies: on this matter
cf. Victor Klemperer, THE LANGUAGE OF THE THIRD REICH, Continuum 2006.

But just as the Nazis were too stupid to actually construct a viable
cultural alternative to Wilhelmine *Kultur*, unlike the Communists who
did, they used the shattered *Kultur* as Klemperer shows, like shards
of glass with which to spill blood. In a piccolo register perhaps more
evil in that triviality scales up more deftly than the premature grand
gesture, Seebach savages Schildt for not realizing that, perhaps,
macro definitions of expressions should be parenthesized while himself
does not know or can't explain how to handle macro definitions of
statement lists, and, given the crap he posted in queue.c, probably
not following the rule he pushes in order to destroy Schildt.

The Nazis destroyed the teachers who taught the *Kultur* because the
teachers spoke in the compound and agglutinative old way, and because
the teachers were easy and fun to push around. The Tea Baggers tear up
the Constitution and assemble a cut and paste white racist
Constitution because minorities are easy and fun for the majority to
push around. And Seebach makes an absurdity and a farce out of C, one
in which the Gods will punish you if you don't int main() and in which
the semantics are undefined and unknowable, in the name of "good
code", because isolated targets are easy and fun to push around.

They have to destroy it in order to save it
If they can't get it, nobody will:
Like feral dogs they snarl in a deep deep pit
Circling their prey and closing for the kill.

**** Mike Godwin: this is a serious business.

I do not want admiration of fools. What I want is for you, as a person
here with real technical and academic authority, to try to persuade
Peter to withdraw or disclaim, in a highly visible way, CTCN, and to
correct wikipedia according to Biographies of Living Persons.

Quit fucking around.

And you disparage *my* sources.  Well, perhaps this one is more reliable
than the URL makes it sound.

Yes, because I've read his actual writings when they were first
published. Can you make this claim, darlin'?

 

[blmblm]

It is not.

I guess I was confused by the following remarks, which you made in
message ID

<[email protected]>

'Furthermore, UK English not only allows, it mandates the plural for
many associations of men and people which are not limited liability
corporations: the BBC consistently says "Manchester United win" and
"the Labour party require" where Americans, were they to talk about
either collection of lads and lasses, would say "Manchester United
wins" and "the Labour Party requires."

[ .... ]

'Therefore, if the plural entity "people" is a subset of the entity
"part", the cardinality of "part" must be greater than that of people,
and the use of "is" or "are" confirms this, and my usage is correct.'

As I explained to you, the fact that the verb is copular,
and not active or passive, controls, making "it is I" technically
correct.

I am well aware that "it is I" is technically (and logically)
correct though not idiomatic.

But .... Wait a minute. As I understand it, your argument
for "part of the problem is people" is that if you reverse the
two nouns being linked by the verb, you get "people is part of
the problem", which is wrong. Applying the same argument to
"it is I", you get "I is it", which is wrong, isn't it? So by
your reasoning the correct form is "it am I", no?

The part about British use of the plural simply illustrates
something which non-expat Americans do not understand, which is that
they do not speak correct English in a world sense.

I would argue that there is no "controlling authority" for
English usage, and it is probably best to regard the different
regional varieties as equally correct. As for the remark about
what non-expat Americans don't understand, it strikes me as a
generalization, with the usual flaws of such.

[ snip ]

No, in fact. I do not wish to cause you embarrassment by having to so
in detail expose your limitations to all.

Well, I would certainly be willing to risk whatever embarrassment
might result from continuing the discussion in the venue I proposed
(alt.usage.english). If you don't like that one, how about if you
propose an alternative and let me decide whether I accept the risk?
For you to make that decision (about what risks I accept) seems a
bit patronizing, no?

Don't compete with me: I
have more experience, and I choose the weapons, and (to continue the
Dijkstra thought) I have a real stockpile.

Is it a Dijkstra thought? at this point the supporting evidence for
that seems a bit weak.

No, it does. I decide which ones because the people who assemble
online dictionaries are deliberately and brutally underpaid and for
this reason make thousands of mistakes.

So, when the spelling checker tells you that "occurence" and
"embarass" are wrong ....

Well, that's interesting. I just went to the not-inconsiderable
trouble of looking them up in an online OED, and those are both
listed, though as best I can tell they're considered variant
spellings from earlier times.

The other possible spelling error I had noted but not mentioned,
"exagerrated" [*], didn't seem to be listed at all.

[*] message ID

<[email protected]>

You still haven't explained *how* you decide which warnings to
ignore, but whatever.

As for why I'm still on about this -- eh, whatever, but I do notice
that you made quite a fuss about Seebs's use of an apparently-invented
word "illucid".

Because I've been posting and reading a lot longer with you.

I don't understand your meaning here either -- either you meant
"than you" rather than "with you", or the "you" was meant to be
plural, or something.

My guess was that you were extrapolating from your experience with
other alt.* groups to alt.usage.english. If you're really basing
your comments on having read a lot of posts in a.u.e. itself, well,
all I can say is that your experience doesn't match mine.

Don't compete with me, show some sense,
Do not even try,
I have more experience,
And gentlemen don't make ladies cry.

I don't get the relevance of that fourth line.

No, I am very serious:
Very very serious:
Do not miss the simple truth
Here in alien corn, as was Ruth.

Does this mean something?

[ snip ]

Perhaps I misunderstood your meaning here, then. If so, I apologize.

Well, in all truth I do think it's more likely that you would
attract at least some negative attention, but I don't really know.

[ snip ]

I do not want admiration of fools. What I want is for you, as a person
here with real technical and academic authority,

"Real technical and academic authority"? This is frankly astonishing.
In previous posts you have said the following:

"You are nothing more than a low level computer instructor as I was,
but your literacy has the usual low upper bound. You are posting
dishonestly [ .... ]"

"Then you're not a very good programmer, for your code is not
connected with reality."

"Nothing in your writing conveys anything more than a middling
level of intelligence or literacy."

To me these add up to something well short of a ringing endorsement
of whatever technical and academic authority I might have.

(Quoted from message IDs

<[email protected]>

<b9f6b787-6364-4105-a3ab-67d8de11110e@h27g2000yqm.googlegroups.com>

)

Should I list the other possibly-insulting comments .... Nah.
"Corporate commodity fetishist" [*] has quite a ring to it, but
since I'm not sure what it means -- whatever.

[*] Message ID

to try to persuade
Peter to withdraw or disclaim, in a highly visible way, CTCN, and to
correct wikipedia according to Biographies of Living Persons.

Well, "never say never", but it's hard for me to imagine
circumstances in which I would make such an attempt.

I do think he could have added a disclaimer to his C:TCN page about
its being based on a not-current edition as soon as you started
making a fuss about it.

But he has added such a disclaimer now, and written up and posted
a new critique based on the fourth edition. I've skimmed it, and
assuming that when he quotes from Schildt he does so accurately,
I think pretty much all of his points are well taken. Some of them
are nitpicks, but some are not.

Further, I can't imagine why I would want to ally myself publicly
with someone who has behaved as you have recently -- in my opinion,
your treatment of Peter Seebach has been far worse than his of you,
and that would be enough to put me off even if you hadn't started
with the patronizing forms of address.

Quit fucking around.

Quite. See above.

Yes, because I've read his actual writings when they were first
published.

What does this have to do with whether the above URL -- which you
yourself call "cheesy" -- is an accurate source?

Can you make this claim, darlin'?

Jaw-dropping. You ask for my support, above, and then this.

For what it's worth, Dijkstra was already publishing (if his
famous letter about "go to" counts) at a time when I was not yet
in high school. I don't feel at all bad that I wasn't reading
his writings then.

I'm sure I can't claim to have read everything he ever wrote,
since that would presumably include all of the EWD notes, of
which there are many, but yes, I've certainly read some of it.

 

[Nick]

I don't think so. For all I know they [alt.usage.english] might
welcome you and agree with your assessment of your writing skills.

Argh. I'm just working through things having come back from a week away
and I take this to mean that you've taken this plague, that has pretty
well destroyed comp.lang.c and deliberately infected alt.usage.english.

In the name of all that is human, WHY? Did one of us eat your
grandmother or something?

Time to move a rule from the group kill file to the global one, anyway.

 

[blmblm]

I don't think so. For all I know they [alt.usage.english] might
welcome you and agree with your assessment of your writing skills.

Argh. I'm just working through things having come back from a week away
and I take this to mean that you've taken this plague, that has pretty
well destroyed comp.lang.c and deliberately infected alt.usage.english.

In the name of all that is human, WHY? Did one of us eat your
grandmother or something?

Well, I'd apologize, since you seem to feel strongly about it,
but I do think the point under discussion is very much on topic
in alt.usage.english, and the group gets so much traffic already
that I didn't think a bit more would be amiss. As it turns out,
I got only half a dozen or so replies.

Time to move a rule from the group kill file to the global one, anyway.

For your killfiling convenience, I gave the redirected post a new
subject line:

"a question for a.u.e. from c.l.c. (was Re: Edward Nilges' lie)"