pdw

19 ms·

211.
by pdw 5y ago
For pretty much the same reason that "1+2" is not parsed as an invalid integer.
212.
by pdw 6y ago
The shell uses "-" to enable an option and "+" to disable it. I don't know who's to blame for this, but it's part of the POSIX standard.
213.
by pdw 6y ago
PostgreSQL used to be called Postgres. They renamed it when they added SQL support.
214.
by pdw 6y ago
In case anybody wants a taste of mainframe, here's the manual for the DFSORT utility: https://www-01.ibm.com/servers/resourcelink/svc00100.nsf/pag...
215.
by pdw 6y ago
That confused me as well. The Mode 13h graphics framebuffer is at address A000:0000. How does this program get that value? The key is the LES AX,[BX] opcode. BX is initialized to 0 by DOS, and the "Set video mode" BIOS call preser
216.
by pdw 6y ago
I've heard that Unicode doesn't encode many rare Chinese/Japanese characters that only occur in personal names. In practice these people are forced to change their names. Here's an example: https://www.reuters
217.
by pdw 6y ago
> How much could life be improved if these implementations exported the way to set up these nonce FILE structures from a string That's fmemopen. Not widespread, but at least part of POSIX these days.
218.
by pdw 6y ago
Compared to Windows SIDs, Linux's 32-bit uid is a "smallish integer"
219.
by pdw 6y ago
That's more likely copied from the functional programming world (ML / Miranda / Haskell). And they got it from Lisp's "let" form. Wirth's languages always had a very strict separation between variable decl
220.
by pdw 6y ago
Thanks, I didn't realize that. That makes their choice really baffling.
221.
by pdw 6y ago
"Introducing a new scope" is not a concept that exists in Python, you only have function scope and module scope.
222.
by pdw 6y ago
darcs is still actively developed and it has a niche in the Haskell community. Ubuntu might still use Bazaar.
223.
by pdw 6y ago
No, even at the time of GitHub's founding Git was already the clear winner. Think about it, why did GitHub feel safe launching with only Git support, while its competitors (Google Code, Bitbucket, SourceForge) had support for multiple
224.
by pdw 6y ago
I've recently spent some time experimenting with Tcl, and I've developed some affection for it, but what tripped me up is that "everything is a string" means that Tcl is one of the few truly weakly typed languages. This
225.
by pdw 6y ago
They follow St Benedict's rule, the rule that OP linked to, but they understand "wine" to refer to alcoholic drinks in general.
226.
by pdw 6y ago
Best viewed in 800x600 resolution.
227.
by pdw 6y ago
I feel like Python is losing its way, its maintainers seem to feel the need to "compete" by implementing poor copies of other languages' syntax. The "walrus" assignment operators, the proposed pattern matching, now
228.
by pdw 6y ago
Well yeah. If you make normal, idiomatic use of include guards, compilers will be able to apply this optimization. If you do weird stuff, they'll be forced to re-read the file. https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/cppin
229.
by pdw 6y ago
Most modern C compilers are aware of include guards: if they notice that the _entire_ file is enclosed in include guards, they won't read it a second time.
230.
by pdw 6y ago
Now I'm wondering how closely the old Windows APIs resemble OS/2.
231.
by pdw 6y ago
Funny, usually musl's policy is to explicitly crash on invalid inputs, while glibc tries to handle them 'gracefully'. Here it's the other way around.
232.
by pdw 6y ago
That's about the start of the Ruby on Rails hype.
233.
by pdw 6y ago
He's not accused of paying off the hackers. Rather he's accused of hiding the incident from an ongoing FTC investigation. They list various ways in which he supposedly concealed the hack from the FTC, e.g. they claim he set up up
234.
by pdw 6y ago
It's unix philosophy alright, but it's the other unix philosophy -- worse is better. tar has a poorly designed base format with lots of incompatible extensions, but for most people most of the time it works fine. So why change?
235.
by pdw 6y ago
The diaeresis is unrelated to the umlaut though, it's a notation borrowed from old Greek. It never quite caught on in English, but it's part of the standard orthography of many other languages.
236.
by pdw 6y ago
He mentions only Nintendo, I must have been mistaken about the GBA. Given the year, this must have been for the Virtual Boy. Not a surprise that they don't tell the story much. In the end the Virtual Boy shipped with a 32-bit NEC CPU.
237.
by pdw 6y ago
And supposedly Thumb mode was designed at the request of Nintendo, for use in the Game Boy Advance. (I think I read this in one of the Acorn oral histories, maddeningly I can't find a source now.)
238.
by pdw 6y ago
between $20 and $30 million, according to this https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/26/tech/video-game-streaming...
239.
by pdw 6y ago
To be honest, it's a bit weird to judge a man on the basis of a joke he made over 40 years ago.
240.
by pdw 6y ago
Unfortunately, this technique is a bit problematic with modern C compilers. Because the `start` and `end` symbols are unrelated objects, as far as the compiler is concerned, the subtraction `&end - &start` to get the length of the d

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