subroutine stack and C machine model

[Colonel Harlan Sanders]

Don't even try this style of argument without studying philosophy,

I've studied logic. I find it more useful in understanding and
communicating than rhetoric, abuse and prolix obfuscation.

because it shows that you don't understand the difference between
"use" and "mention". Neither (A) nor (B) is performed as a speech act
so it's moot whether either is "clear" (is said clearly). Whereas
Seebach conceded that Herb's statements, which were performed as
speech acts, were clear (conducive to understanding and knowledge or
justified true belief).

He said that interpretation was possible, not that he believed it.

This is because Seebach believes there is, or should be, a Higher form
of Unclear Knowledge which will never be Clear except to the autistic
twerp adept. The hope that such knowledge exists, and that it would
make a paraprofession into a closed profession without legal and
political work such as only grownups can do, has long existed.

So, you're enjoying the new Dan Brown novel, I see.

 

[spinoza1111]

There are two separate flaws with the argument.

The first is that it's heavily based on equivocation and cherry-picking
of terms.  The second, though, which is much more important:

The understanding is of *the statement*.  Not of the world the statement
may or may not describe.  When a sentence is clear, you can readily form

Your basic error. You believe that the world can be fully described in
spoken or written language and this is the only way of understanding
the world, quite possibly because you would like to have no body. If
the world is not fully describable as a text in the manner of logical
positivism, this causes you anxiety.

justified true belief *about the meaning of the sentence*.  That doesn't
mean that the sentence's meaning can't be false.  It is hard to form

This is nonsense. On the one hand, you're saying that from Herb's
clear sentences a justified true belief can be formed. On the other
hand you say they are false. Unless the reader simply assumes that
"everything Herb says is false", how can he get jtb from CTCR?

a justified true belief of a poorly-worded or misconstructed sentence,
because it is hard to have justification of your interpretation; it
could mean something else, or it could be too hard to even form a coherent
interpretation.

The problem is that Spinny is mistaking the understanding that the sentence
in question has a particular meaning for understanding that the meaning is
true.  "Understanding" the text "all elephants are green" does not lead to

If actually printed in a book,or said in a context such as A Lecture
on Elephants, the elephants-are-green text is not clear and not
understandable since we do not listen as tabula rasa any more than
programmers (other than perhaps autistic twerps) believe that "all
code in a computer book will work without my testing it". This is
because greyness, or at least non-greenness, is understood to be part
of the referent of "elephant".

the belief that elephants are green, it leads to the belief that that sequence
of words makes a statement about the color of a particular kind of land
mammal.  Which belief is justified and true -- but it turns out that the
statement made is false.  You can have a true belief that a statement is
false...

Completely absurd, for "all elephants are green" cannot lead to the
belief that they are grey.

Your concession that Herb was "clear" MEANT that he was getting across
to an audience able to use his advice in practice whereas you struggle
to be "clear", and yet find yourself not being at all clear. For
example, you believe that unverifiable negative claims and references
to a rarely-implemented standard are "clear" but these statements fail
as we see in the constant arguments in this newsgroup about technical
points to create justifiable true belief. Instead, your statements
cause confusion and bad feeling.

 

[Seebs]

Rubbish. It is perfectly obvious to anyone with even a passing
familiarity with mathematics or logic that the world cannot be fully
(and accurately) described in spoken or written language.

Uh, yeah.

But I do believe that language can be unambigous in its meaning -- and
wrong. (Or right, but that seems a lot less common.)

[Spinny Wrote]

On the one hand, you're saying that from Herb's
clear sentences a justified true belief can be formed.

Right - the justified true belief that (some of) Herbert Schildt's
statements are clear but incorrect.

Let's be even more picky.

You cannot, from the statements alone, form the justified belief that
they are incorrect. (Actually, you can when he contradicts himself,
but that's a harder case.)

But you can form a justified true belief as to what his statements mean.

For example, the claim on p58
(2e) that "Coded as shown, put_rec() compiles and runs correctly on
any computer, no matter how many bytes are in an integer" is clear
but incorrect.

Yes. From that, you can form the justified true belief that the sentence
in question describes a function called put_rec(), and that it claims
that this function's behavior is correct, and independant of the number
of bytes in an integer. In fact, the first statement is nearly always
wrong (I cannot name a counterexample), and the second is definitely
wrong.

Here's another one, this time from p176 (2e): "Notice
that the definition is terminated by a semicolon. This is because a
structure definition is a statement." That's clear enough - but it's
wrong; structure definitions are not statements. The latter is one of
the many that CTCN did not report.

Oooh, good catch. I've mail-ordered 4e used, I'll see what it does.

Rubbish.

So, Spinny thinks my claim was false, and you think his claim was false.
Looks to me like I win -- at least one of those must be true.

No, you find yourself being unable to understand his clear writing.

Arguably, this means my writing is not yet sufficiently clear, but I
appeal to the "reasonable man" standard here.

BTW, I think at this point we've derived most of the lulz we're going
to from this -- I'd suggest just plonking the guy. We're getting the same
old lulz again. We'll never beat the Danish Non-Sequitur.

-s

 

[spinoza1111]

Uh, yeah.

But I do believe that language can be unambigous in its meaning -- and
wrong.  (Or right, but that seems a lot less common.)

This is false unless you supplement language with pragmatics. Herb
didn't intend, pragmatically, to teach computer science...or to write
a standard. He instead did a good job in explaining C, a defective
language, part of its defectiveness being the fact that it cannot be
properly described. As a formal and unambiguous language, C fails and
rarely have reputable computer scientists wanted much to do with it.

[Spinny Wrote]

On the one hand, you're saying that from Herb's
clear sentences a justified true belief can be formed.

Right - the justified true belief that (some of) Herbert Schildt's
statements are clear but incorrect.

Let's be even more picky.

You cannot, from the statements alone, form the justified belief that
they are incorrect.  (Actually, you can when he contradicts himself,
but that's a harder case.)

But you can form a justified true belief as to what his statements mean.

Which makes them easy to generalize, just as I was able to generalize
Sherman's statements in his 7094-centric "Programming and Coding for
Digital Computers".

Yes.  From that, you can form the justified true belief that the sentence
in question describes a function called put_rec(), and that it claims
that this function's behavior is correct, and independant of the number
of bytes in an integer.  In fact, the first statement is nearly always
wrong (I cannot name a counterexample), and the second is definitely
wrong.

Yes, and it's easy to test the code snippet to discover the typo or
minor error. Herb happens to meet a criterion of significance which
the Standard fails: that of Karl Popper's "falsifiability". The
Standard fails to define what we need it to define: for example, the
Standard failed to legislate order of evaluation properly because it
was funded by greedy vendors. as I have said. Whereas Herb labored
hard to present code examples which can be tested. His reward was to
be attacked by a nonprogrammer, and that is you, in such a way to make
the typographical and minor errors in his books, artifacts in all
probability of the editorial process, seem far more serious than they
actually were.

Oooh, good catch.  I've mail-ordered 4e used, I'll see what it does.

You falsely, and libelously, claimed that there were "hundreds" or
"lots" of errors in Schildt's book in "C: The Complete Nonsense" and
now are desparately trying to find them, for in the document you
presented wer only about twenty trivial errors.

So, Spinny thinks my claim was false, and you think his claim was false.
Looks to me like I win -- at least one of those must be true.  


Arguably, this means my writing is not yet sufficiently clear, but I
appeal to the "reasonable man" standard here.

BTW, I think at this point we've derived most of the lulz we're going
to from this -- I'd suggest just plonking the guy.  We're getting the same
old lulz again.  We'll never beat the Danish Non-Sequitur.

That was my linkage of Bjarne Stroustrup's knowledge of object
oriented approaches to labor union demands in Denmark, where
Stroustrup worked with Simula, a language developed in response to
Danish law, which mandates worker participation in managerial
decisions including factory automation, because Object Oriented
language provably make processes easier to document. I have provided
the reference from the New York Times on this linkage.

Stroustrup has been mostly silent on this connection because in
corporate America, where now he works, you can get fired for even
using the phrase "labor union", and Stroustrup, like many other
prestige employees of the old Bell Labs, sat on his ass and did
nothing to support the many good but non-prestigious engineers whose
careers were destroyed at Lucent, the elite's scheme for destroying
the distributed wealth (including job tenure) created at Bell Labs.

You're sitting in a little job which does not, apparently, even let
you program apart from trivial tools, and in this sort of corporate-
drone position, the pseudo-learned argument that "x is unrelated to y"
is used to keep you in line and in fact to deskill you over time,
making you dependent on a technical job that constitutes a form of
welfare for middle class white males. Nonetheless, object oriented
development was created for embedded systems and factory automation
but in Amerikkka, C is used for these tasks in part to mystify
decisions and to prevent workers from being aware of product designs
and factory processes that may harm them on the job.

You can stop calling me crazy and promising to stay away, and then
coming back, because this behavior on your part seems in fact mentally
unbalanced, although you're not mentally unbalanced, just Clueless and
a nasty piece of work as far as I can tell.

 

[Dann Corbit]

Then by definition, Schildt's books are not "clear".

This is clear, but wrong:

In order to allocate memory to hold a copy of a string named s, you
should allocate strlen(s) bytes like so:

/* Allocate memory for string copy: */
char *scopy = malloc(strlen(s));

/* Move a copy of the data into the allocated area: */
strcpy(scopy, s);

But this is a really pointless cul de sac. The same people who said
Schildt was clear also said he was incorrect. The meaning they
intended is "clear", and it's not Spinoza's.

Herbert Schildt is a talented writer. His explanations are lucid, but
sometimes wrong. His explanations are easy to understand, but often
incorrect.

So in this context, clear means easy to understand.

Unfortunately, he does not focus on correctness the way a writer for a
technical subject should. If he could write in a correct manner, he
would be a terrific author.

 

[Colonel Harlan Sanders]

That was my linkage of Bjarne Stroustrup's knowledge of object
oriented approaches to labor union demands in Denmark, where
Stroustrup worked with Simula, a language developed in response to
Danish law, which mandates worker participation in managerial
decisions including factory automation, because Object Oriented
language provably make processes easier to document. I have provided
the reference from the New York Times on this linkage.

Stroustrup has been mostly silent on this connection because in
corporate America, where now he works, you can get fired for even
using the phrase "labor union", and Stroustrup, like many other
prestige employees of the old Bell Labs, sat on his ass and did
nothing to support the many good but non-prestigious engineers whose
careers were destroyed at Lucent, the elite's scheme for destroying
the distributed wealth (including job tenure) created at Bell Labs.

The article you linked (finally) was indeed interesting, but while
there is a "linkage" between Simula and factories, indeed Stroustrup
was silent on his motives.

For you to ascribe theses motives to him is you putting your words in
his mouth. Much as you keep claiming to have secret knowledge of what
Schiltz and his family think. Or any of the other famous names you
litter your posts with, all chiming in with your helpful paraphrasing,
to support you.

In this case it seems to me at east as likely that Stroustrup was
simply interested in the computer science, not the sociology, of the
problems he was invited to solve. He previously worked for the
military, but you ascribe no desire for efficient deathdealing to him
because of that.

 

[Nick]

Don't even try this style of argument without studying philosophy,
because it shows that you don't understand the difference between
"use" and "mention".

This example has got bugger-all to do with "use"/"mention".

 

[gwowen]

...film at 11.

So, no, you're not going to stop. Your former dedication to on-
topicness is clearly subservient to your desire to prove you're
smarter than Ed Nilges. (The fact that you continue to debate him
suggest that if that is true, there's not a lot in it).

What purpose do you think it serves, or are you just pleasuring
yourself?

 

[gwowen]

So, no, you're not going to stop.  Your former dedication to on-

Mu.

So, no, you're not going to stop then.
What purpose do you think its serving?
Do you think its on-topic for this newsgroup?

 

[Seebs]

In

Discussion about C is on-topic here.

Basically, this is why Spinny can post in clcm -- because, however ranting
and incoherent he may be, he does actually often seem to be talking either
about C or at least about something eerily similar to it. I've given up
on trying to communicate with him, because he just doesn't seem to have
the capacity to offer substantive answers to questions. However, I don't
think it's really off-topic per se, and it's easy to plonk the threads he
starts.

I imagine it will be fairly amusing again in a week or two, when my copy
of the 4th edition of C:TCR shows up.

-s

 

[gwowen]

The discussion is about C, and discussions about C form the core
purpose of this newsgroup.


Discussion about C is on-topic here.

Really. This is about C, is it?
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Don't even try this style of argument without studying philosophy,

Your posting history shows little evidence of your experience with any
kind of argument other than "proof by inane verbosity".

because it shows that you don't understand the difference between
"use" and "mention".

No, it doesn't show that.

Neither (A) nor (B) is performed as a speech
act so it's moot whether either is "clear" (is said clearly).

It is clear that both statements are clear.

Whereas Seebach conceded that Herb's statements, which were
performed as speech acts, were clear (conducive to understanding and
knowledge or justified true belief).

He didn't concede it. He claimed it.

This is because Seebach believes there is, or should be, a Higher
form of Unclear Knowledge which will never be Clear except to the
autistic twerp adept.

I find that very unlikely.

 

[Seebs]

Really. This is about C, is it?

It's a bit of a digression, but I think the question of whether I have
asserted that Schildt's books are accurate or not is probably of some
relevance to a discussion of C.

Trivia point: alt.usage.english is completely redundant because every
conversation you could possibly have there is topical in some other group
at one point or another.

-s

 

[gwowen]

The discussion to which you refer is centred on "C: The Complete
Reference", by Herbert Schildt, and the question of its reliability
as a reference work and tutorial guide.

It may have been once. It clearly isn't any more.

You have the usual recourse of a killfile. Why not use it?

Because closing the curtains is not the correct response to people
urinating in your garden.

 

[Nick Keighley]

We already pointed that out -- but you seem not to understand how [...]

Who's "we"? You're alone, I'd wot.

on the dictionary argument I'm with Mr Seebach. I've now quoted three
dictionaries that disagree with you. You really don't seem to
understand how dictionaries work (or you're pretending not to because
you won't admit you're wrong).

[...] a dictionary works.  That gives you that one of many meanings has a
particular word, one of the many meanings of which is the meaning
you were asserting.

The Compact OED highlights the important meanings, whereas this rube
was overwhelmed by the full OED:

the thunder of desparate back-pedalling. You claimed my dictionaries
were bad because they weren't the OED. Now when someone quotes the OED
*that's* wrong as well. I've quoted the Shorter Oxford English
Dictionary is that as good as the Compact OED or not?

<check Amazon>

You Are An Idiot. The Compact OED has the *same text* as the full OED!
presumably you consider the important bits are the highlighted bits.
So do tell, which bits were highlighted under the entry for "clarity"?

<snip snip>

 

[Nick Keighley]

No, it rather doesn't. You said Schildt was "clear". EVERYBODY says
this, including his enemies.

ah, but how do you know they were using your definition of clear?
Perhaps they were using Seebach's or Heathfield's or mine or... well
practically anyone but yours.

But the only way a text can be clear is
that it contributes to understanding, which is knowledge, the
justified belief in things that are true.

no.

<snip>

 

[Nick Keighley]

In <[email protected]>, Dann
Corbit wrote:




I couldn't find that one. While looking for it, however, I found this
(p452 2e):

if((p = malloc(sizeof(addr))==NULL) {

despite there being no type called addr and no object called addr in
scope. There's a struct addr, but that's all. The statement is of
course perfectly clear, but it's also perfectly wrong. This is
another one that Seebs missed in his cursory inspection.

so a side effect of spinoza's campaign might be that schildt's works
get an even more thourough going over and *more* errors are found.
Aren't there three new ones in this thread alone?

 

[Nick Keighley]

On Nov 13, 8:12 am, Richard Heathfield <[email protected]> wrote:

So, no, you're not going to stop [arguing with spinoza] then. [...]
What purpose do you think its serving?

The discussion is about C, and discussions about C form the core
purpose of this newsgroup.

I thought the discussion was about the meaning of clarity and if
Seebach comprehended basic logic.

Neither of which is actually about C...

Discussion about C is on-topic here.

and me? Oh I'm just a hypocrite, but I *know* I'm off-topic.

 

[gwowen]

That's a colourful non sequitur, but a non sequitur it remains.

Allow me to spell it out:

You and Seebs engaging in a dick waving contest with Nilges <=> Public
Urination, which contaminates everything it touches.
comp.lang.c, intended for discussion of "C" <=> A garden, intended for
the enjoyment of all
Killfiling the lot of you <=> Closing the curtains, and pretending
that if I ignore it the nuisance will cease to exist.
This thread <=> A great long stream of piss.

The first three are metaphors.

 

[gwowen]

I think it's time to add you to my killfile. Bye.

Bye. Enjoy teasing Ed Nilges. I hope it makes you feel good about
your life.

 

[Nick Keighley]

Allow me to spell it out:
1.
You and Seebs engaging in <rude term> contest with Nilges <=> Public
Urination, which contaminates everything it touches.
2.
comp.lang.c, intended for discussion of "C" <=> A garden, intended for
the enjoyment of all
3.
Killfiling the lot of you <=> Closing the curtains, and pretending
that if I ignore it the nuisance will cease to exist.
4.
This thread <=> A <rude term>>

The first three are metaphors.

I count four metaphors or poor analogies. haven't you become part of
the problem?