And we're all telling you that "clear" is /used/ differently. So,
actually, bringing the dictionaries in is a red herring. Clear is
routinely used in English to refer to the comprehensibility, not the
correctness, of a statement. Statements can be clear and wrong or
At times, a statement might be clear but turn out to be wrong. But a
WRITER or a long TEXT that is clear is clear in the sense of
understandable, and understanding is knowledge, and knowledge is
justified true belief.
Seebach said that a large C book was clear, which meant that it
contributes to understanding, and justified true belief. Which Herb's
book in large measure did (with the usual number of errata in a
computer book that includes code). The problem is that C is
sufficiently low level such that Herb's code didn't "port" and wasn't
"standard" although in the case of CTCR there was no intent to be so.
Therefore the book did not meet Seebach's needs. But given his
apparent amateur standing (at least today) in programming (his job
seems to me demiclerical) and his known lack of academic
qualifications in computer science (he's admitted to never taking a
compsci class), he has no business telling other people that they will
get no value from Schildt. But this is not the only thing he did. He
also enabled a destructive rumor to start that Schildt contains "100s"
of errors.
I have asked him, repeatedly, to post the data base of 100s of known
errors and he has not done so.
unclear but right.
For the third time of asking - is English your native language? I'm
finding it difficult to believe it is.
Fleeing the programming field in disgust at programmer behavior
(including the replacement of skill by interpersonal trashing) and
management de-skilling I now teach English, and I'm a published
author. And as to "native" language, the low standard of American
"native" English was on display Sep 12 in Glen Beck's March on
Washington, where Troglodytes carried signs calling for English only
that were strikingly illiterate and full of English mistakes.
To be "clear" is to produce statements that can be verified to be
clear. In a FORMAL language, a manifest falsehood such as p & ~p can
be verified to be clear by a simple proof, and in the case of
contradictions in propositional logic, by an algorithm. Therefore
there are statements that are clearly wrong in formal languages.
However, to be "clear" in natural language is to correspond with an
acceptable amount of precision to reality. There are no other tests
unless the statement is not well-formed, in which case it is unclear.
Therefore Seebach saw and stated that Herb Schildt corresponded with
an acceptable amount of precision to reality; for example, the reality
is that many platforms use twos complement and Schildt was clear in
the correspondence sense when he said that negative numbers in C are
represented in twos complement.
Seebach admitted this. Herb knows as a practical matter that C to be
understood clearly has to be implemented in a certain way, but can be
implemented in other ways. A representation for negative numbers has
to be decided-upon, a mechanism is needed for handling variables that
are simple scalar values such as the stack mechanism, and a mechanism
is need for storing larger data structures such as the heap mechanism.
The ultimate sizes of the stack and the heap vary independently of
each other and are both unknown: the amount of storage available to
them is T-c where T is the total amount of storage and c is the fixed
compiled code size on the simple one-user computer or the slice of
storage received from the OS: there is no apriori way of knowing
whether s+h where s is the maximum size of the stack and h the max
size of the heap will exceed T-c, therefore the best way is to have s
and h compete for space.
Herb intuitionistically modeled this as sharing elements of a vector
with the stack growing one way and the heap growing down, and Seebach
charged Herb with implying that the specific directions were
essentials of C rather than accidents. The problem is that ANY model
of the requirements would contain accidents, and the ordinary sensible
person as opposed to the autistic twerp can be expected to sort this
out: for the same reason the geometry teacher never has to explain
that the Pythagorean theorem applies whether you consider the right
triangle to be outside (but tangent to) or inside (but tangent to) the
physical lines of nonzero width which display the triangle on the
board.
It would be one thing to not find Herb's instantiated, and
Aristotelean (as opposed to Platonic) method of teaching to one's
liking and still another to not recommend Herb.
But I teach book reviews, and in so doing I present an example of an
unacceptable review by "Evil Chuckie". In the review, which was taken
from Amazon, Evil Chuckie says "I had to read this book [Roll of
Thunder Hear My Cry] for school and it sucked!
I tell the class that you should never say that a book sucks or is bad
because this is an interference with the freedom of thought of other
readers. But Seebach is not only Evil Chuckie, he also enabled a
campaign of personal and professional destruction without really doing
his homework.
