Where to find 'Real' programmers online?

lgrant said:
When I was growing up in the sixties, it was common to see a diaeresis in words like coördinate, coöperate, and reëntrant. These days The New Yorker is about the only mainstream publication that still uses them. I think they perform a useful service, so I continue to use them. (I am pretty sure that were it not for the diaeresis, I would have grown up pronouncing reëntrant as reen-trant.)
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The New Yorker also puts the ô in rôle. English is a weird language.
 
Interesting. I was not aware of that. According to Wikipedia:

In English, the circumflex, like other diacritics, is sometimes retained on loanwords that used it in the original language (for example entrepôt, crème brûlée).

So I guess it is accepted enough to not be a foreign word (in which case it would be in italics), but not yet completely Anglicized.

Now that I think of it, the same holds true of "résumé", which keeps the accents but is not put in italics.
 
I didn't even know diaeresis exists in English. The term is Greek (it actually means "division"), where it is used to indicate that this is not a digraph, so the two vowels normally pronounced as one phoneme should be treated as separate vowels. Makes perfect sense for words like coördinate, coöperate, reëntrant, etc (but originally the two adjoining vowels constructing a digraph aren't necessarily the same). Nowadays I don't think there is an easy way to even type those words properly in English...
 
Pap said:
I didn't even know diaeresis exists in English. The term is Greek (it actually means "division"), where it is used to indicate that this is not a digraph, so the two vowels normally pronounced as one phoneme should be treated as separate vowels. Makes perfect sense for words like coördinate, coöperate, reëntrant, etc (but originally the two adjoining vowels constructing a digraph aren't necessarily the same). Nowadays I don't think there is an easy way to even type those words properly in English...
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MacOS has the dead keys, and on UNIX we use a .XCompose filled to the brim with easy ways to type → and ħ and such
 
kent_dorfman766 said:
Ha! You caught that, did you. LOL yeah, otherwise called extended ASCII, which as you point out was not standardized, but that's why I specifically referenced IBM PC.
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the problem with saying "extended ASCII" is that you could be meaning any of Code Page 437, MacRoman, Windows-1251, or rarely some other wacky extension, so we prefer to be specific ;)
 
atax1a said:
the problem with saying "extended ASCII" is that you could be meaning any of Code Page 437, MacRoman, Windows-1251, or rarely some other wacky extension, so we prefer to be specific ;)
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Afaik, it's charachters 128 to 255. 219 is a full vertical rectangle. 196 is a horitzontal line from start to end. You can make primitive text-interfaces with this. In MS-DOS times this even worked on the CLI using alt-### combinations. I think it's PC-AT standard. C64 and MSX had totally different charsets.
 
MG said:
Afaik, it's charachters 128 to 255. 219 is a full vertical rectangle. 196 is a horitzontal line from start to end. You can make primitive text-interfaces with this. In MS-DOS times this even worked on the CLI using alt-### combinations. I think it's PC-AT standard. C64 and MSX had totally different charsets.
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was there anything about what we said that gave you the impression that we didn't already know all of this?
 
lgrant said:
It felt really slimy, not only doing a GOTO, but a GOTO to a global label, two sins at once. (Glenford J. Myers would have been so disappointed in
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Many years ago I got asked to fix a bug in some code written by someone else who had left. The thing was a DSL interpreter, and it had crashed while running one of the tokenised DSL programs. I traced back from where it had crashed... and discovered the interpreter itself had segfaulted at an earlier point. I found the core file and then trawled through to find out where it had segfaulted... and discovered an immortal bit of code in the interpreter's segfault handler that did a longjmp to main() and restarted the interpreter in the event that it segfaulted, with a comment that said "this is the really clever bit"... 😄😄 Well, we had a few laughs about that...
 
blackbird9 said:
Many years ago I got asked to fix a bug in some code written by someone else who had left. The thing was a DSL interpreter, and it had crashed while running one of the tokenised DSL programs. I traced back from where it had crashed... and discovered the interpreter itself had segfaulted at an earlier point. I found the core file and then trawled through to find out where it had segfaulted... and discovered an immortal bit of code in the interpreter's segfault handler that did a longjmp to main() and restarted the interpreter in the event that it segfaulted, with a comment that said "this is the really clever bit"... 😄😄 Well, we had a few laughs about that...
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Technically it is allowed to use longjmp from a signal handler. But in practice you leak all kinds of resources.

Doing it from a segfault handler (when you don't use segfaults on purpose) is a bit adventurous.
 
blackbird9 said:
a comment that said "this is the really clever bit"... 😄😄 Well, we had a few laughs about that...
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Such "clever bits" are usually like a double edged sword. Some time they are just right but you really have to know your stuff.... Incidentally siglongjmp() is preferable to longjmp().

I remember struggling hard to make this work correctly when I was doing a 4.3BSD port to AMD29000. What made it painful was that it had two stacks - a register stack (but variable length, unlike on a SPARC), which needed an associated memory stack when you had to spill/fill it + the usual memory stack.
 
Well of course the guy who wrote it should have isolated the bug and fixed the cause of the segfault instead of just restarting the interpreter and start running the script again and hoping for the best. So in that particular case it wasn't really a very clever thing to do, contradicting the comment! As in:- "Oh it's crashed"... "its ok, just power it off and on again and maybe it will work this time..." 😁
 
blackbird9 said:
Many years ago I got asked to fix a bug in some code written by someone else who had left. The thing was a DSL interpreter, and it had crashed while running one of the tokenised DSL programs. I traced back from where it had crashed... and discovered the interpreter itself had segfaulted at an earlier point. I found the core file and then trawled through to find out where it had segfaulted... and discovered an immortal bit of code in the interpreter's segfault handler that did a longjmp to main() and restarted the interpreter in the event that it segfaulted, with a comment that said "this is the really clever bit"... 😄😄 Well, we had a few laughs about that...
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It was "self-healing"! That guy was way ahead of his time! Yes, tongue firmly in cheek.

By the way atax1a thanks for the link! That's an awesome repo and blog post.
 
Although not FORTRAN 77 programmers doing operational research, I just ran into an interesting list of Fortran links in the book Modern Fortran: Building efficient parallel applications, by Milan Curcic:

Enjoy!
 
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