skissane

41 ms·

631.
by skissane 1y ago
Is it internally uncountable in the strong sense that the system can actually prove the theorem “this set is uncountable”, or only in the weaker sense that it can’t prove the theorem “this set is countable”, but can’t prove its negation eit
632.
by skissane 1y ago
> FoxPro(dBase family) was a much better take on the idea xBase is arguably a very different idea - it is based on flat-file/key-indexed databases, akin to VSAM on IBM mainframes, but wrapped in a 4GL. The experience of xBase is ver
633.
by skissane 1y ago
> So to conclude that there are more reals than naturals, the classical mathematical argument is: > a) There are more functions N to Bool than naturals. > b) There are as many reals as functions from N to Bool. > Now, we of cour
634.
by skissane 1y ago
> My city has sunk almost a billion dollars into a dysfunctional Epic pile of MUMPS. I don’t know if the alternatives - e.g. Oracle Health/Cerner - are really that much better - and if Epic is as bad as you say, I suspect that says
635.
by skissane 1y ago
To be charitable to its original designers, information was much less easily accessible in the 1960s than today-although the shunting yard algorithm had been published in the research literature in 1961, practitioners working 5-6 years late
636.
by skissane 1y ago
Not just simplicity-the original implementation was for a very resource-constrained 1960s minicomputer, where a more complex implementation would have slowed the system down even more and left less memory for running the actual business app
637.
by skissane 1y ago
The core idea-a language with a built-in persistent key-value store-is actually pretty cool. The classic implementation is filled with horrible warts, although arguably many of them were helpful in squeezing a production multiuser system in
638.
by skissane 1y ago
> "Cantor's diagonalization argument" is best understood as a mere special case of Lawvere's fixed-point theorem. Lawvere's theorem is really the meat of the argument, and it's also the part that is very eas
639.
by skissane 1y ago
> What fraction of people who "know" that there are more reals than natural numbers, do you think really understand that this is not an eternal verity of mathematics, but only a conclusion that follows from a particular set of
640.
by skissane 1y ago
Where are you getting this stuff from: > TOP SECRET//SCI//NOFORN//SOCCENT-32 POTENTIAL TARGET SITES (TS//TKI/RSEN//REL TO USA, FVEY) A leak? Which one? Unless one knows the provenanc
641.
by skissane 1y ago
> There are no indications that Iran intends to use nuclear weapons against Israel. The Iranian government are rather extreme theocrats, but they aren’t a suicide cult. They know that a nuclear first strike against Israel would result in
642.
by skissane 1y ago
It has a State/Province dropdown with entries for US states and Canadian provinces, so that suggests it only handles the US and Canada It is an annoying habit of many North American websites to fail to clearly and explicitly label thei
643.
by skissane 1y ago
The reason why I doubt it for the FAA, is I know in the 1990s the core ATC system ran on IBM mainframes and the specialised equipment was directly or indirectly connected to the mainframes. Hence, I expect the Windows PCs were used to run t
644.
by skissane 1y ago
There's a difference between "we are choosing to phrase it this way" versus "our lawyers told us we have to say this". "Spin" is generally seen as a voluntary action, which makes the former a clearcut case
645.
by skissane 1y ago
> For retrofit purposes, it's probably attainable to use solid state (no moving parts) floppy disk emulators that use USB thumb drives or CF/SD cards instead of error-prone, real floppy disks. Yes, but if it is just a PC runnin
646.
by skissane 1y ago
> But are they implemented as reading files backwards? Reading datasets in any direction is very normal because all our media is, for all practical purposes, random-access. Stepping through data backwards is just a special case of random
647.
by skissane 1y ago
I don’t know who uses the COBOL feature or the z/OS stdio feature But relational databases do it all the time… it is very common for certain queries (especially those involving ORDER BY DESC) to be compiled into query plans which do re
648.
by skissane 1y ago
Those are ways of emulating reading files backward using other language features, not explicit language features for reverse-reading of files. Actually now I realise z/OS stdio has support for backwards-reading of VSAM files: you can f
649.
by skissane 1y ago
The Gregorian calendar is essentially non-Christian in origin. Yes, it is named for Pope Gregory, but he just tinkered with the leap year rule, other than that it is essentially the same as the Julian calendar, named for Julius Caesar Now,
650.
by skissane 1y ago
If humans were to colonise Mars, I suspect they might adopt a hybrid calendar, combining the Martian day with the Earth year I think for humans on Mars, the local day-night cycle would likely be much more important than local seasonal cycle
651.
by skissane 1y ago
It is only in the last century or two that humanity has reached the technological and economic level that a single standard global year numbering made any sense-before that, year numbering systems were highly culture-specific. And it just h
652.
by skissane 1y ago
You seem to be using the word “computability” to mean “computable by an abstract machine of Turing degree 0”, whereas I am using it in the broader sense of “computable by an abstract machine of specified type”. As I said, in that broader se
653.
by skissane 1y ago
> Formally defined 'computability' (with the usual definition) is a silly notion for these finite machines, because it captures nothing of the subtlety. It's trivial for finite machines. Computability is relative to the de
654.
by skissane 1y ago
Another way of potentially addressing this problem: add some kind of macro facility to Go – maybe take inspiration from Rust This could be used to solve both "syntactic support for error handling", and also various other common co
655.
by skissane 1y ago
> Computability also becomes trivial, if you only have a finite amount of memory I disagree. Computability isn't trivial if you have a finite amount of memory. In the real world, we have machines with finite space and time. It is fa
656.
by skissane 1y ago
Right, but the “finite setting” is the real world. Yes, if we talk about C++ as a mathematical abstraction, maybe a C++ program containing a googolplex tokens could be in a theoretical sense syntactically and semantically valid. But such a
657.
by skissane 1y ago
> When stuff slips through code review, even if it is a mistake you might have made, you would remember that you made it. I don’t know. Ever had the experience of looking at 5+ year old code and thinking “what idiot wrote this crap” and
658.
by skissane 1y ago
Is it silly? Well, if a person feels drawn to an ultrafinist philosophy of mathematics, they may feel it is important to emphasise the inherent finitude of all creations of inherently finite human minds, formalisms such as programming langu
659.
by skissane 1y ago
Historically, COBOL has had some rather fascinatingly unusual features-my favourite is OPEN INPUT REVERSED, which opens files for reading backwards-not sure if this was ever in any of the COBOL standards, but it exists in IBM mainframe COBO
660.
by skissane 1y ago
> But if you require your parens to be balanced, that's no longer a regular language From a certain pedantic perspective, it still is a regular language, since there is a finite (implementation dependent) upper bound on nesting dept

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