svat

56 ms·

601.
by svat 4y ago
For example, in Devanagari, the sequence • U+0915: DEVANAGARI LETTER KA (क) • U+093F: DEVANAGARI VOWEL SIGN I (ि) gives कि where the vowel sign not only attaches to the letter, but (in this case) happens to be to the left of i
602.
by svat 4y ago
Thanks. In fact, I did consider the guidelines: my impulse was to write "Think about what you're suggesting […] Consider whether this really seems plausible", but I thought that's too confrontational/focuses too muc
603.
by svat 4y ago
No, this does not match history. Speaking for Indic scripts, which I know best: the first Devanagari books were printed in the 1700s. While this is a few centuries later than Gutenberg's printing press c. 1450, by the time Unicode (or
604.
by svat 4y ago
Wow, this is a talk from June 1976. After this talk he published it as “The early development of programming languages” with Luis Trabb Pardo as a Stanford report in August 1976 (available online e.g. https://archive.org/det
605.
by svat 4y ago
The podcast was very listenable/entertaining, and they have a book based on it: https://www.amazon.com/dp/019285674X ISBN 019285674X Other books by Jonardon Ganeri seem to be good too. And here's an insightfu
606.
by svat 4y ago
The linked paper quotes "2.96 lakhs manuscripts (2.61 Crore Pages)" which works out to an average of about 88 pages per manuscript. I imagine one "page" (folio) of a (usually) palm-leaf manuscript is probably about half
607.
by svat 4y ago
The number is indeed millions, not thousands! Note that it's the number of manuscripts, not the number of distinct works. Many of the manuscripts would be copies of the same popular works (people preserve whatever's most useful),
608.
by svat 4y ago
Wishlist: an interactive tool like this that lets you work with your own arbitrary unstyled-HTML webpage, allowing you tweak the important things one by one until you were satisfied, then save the CSS.
609.
by svat 4y ago
The best typeset books I've seen in Devanagari (a non-Roman script, used for Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, Nepali) have been typeset with XeTeX (XeLaTeX). Of course this involves other system libraries like Harfbuzz to handle the kerning a
610.
by svat 4y ago
TeX can do something like this, namely typeset paragraphs according to an arbitrary \parshape (a fixed one: it's designed for print after all). There was a question on the TeX StackExchange a while ago about making a "poster"
611.
by svat 4y ago
I guess this was posted after someone saw this come up on HN yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31295427 I've been planning (for 2+ years now so it probably won't happen) writing a large blog post abo
612.
by svat 4y ago
The task Knuth was given was to illustrate his literate programming system (WEB) on the task given to him by Bentley, which meant writing a Pascal program "from the ground up", and (ideally) the program containing something of int
613.
by svat 4y ago
> six lines of McIlroy’s shell pipeline accomplished the same thing as Common misconception. See https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/donald-knuth-wa... ("Donald Knuth Was Framed") and discu
614.
by svat 4y ago
It's plausible that "agile gibbon" is a single term in that dictionary; cf. the Wikipedia article for "agile gibbon": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_gibbon Note also the other transformati
615.
by svat 4y ago
> it's a toolkit for creating text-oriented applications Good examples IMO are Magit and Org-mode. They are basically large applications created in Emacs, and each so good that they are worth learning/using Emacs just for usi
616.
by svat 5y ago
Donald Knuth prefers "email" without the hyphen [1], according to his webpage which dates back to 1997 or earlier [2]: > A note on email versus e-mail > Newly coined nonce words of English are often spelled with a hyphen,
617.
by svat 5y ago
Great article. As it says, it's a translation into Javascript of the Java code from the Android calculator, and the article it references ("Small-data computing: correct calculator arithmetic" by Hans-J. Boehm) is really an a
618.
by svat 5y ago
The Wikipedia article is (or was) quite good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0.999 ...
619.
by svat 5y ago
(1988) > This article was first published as "‘PostScript’ prints anything: a case history." It appeared in the May 1988 issue of IEEE Spectrum. […] The diagrams and photographs appeared in the original print version. So the
620.
by svat 5y ago
A couple of days ago, Per Vognsen said this document "rewired how I thought about programming forever" ( https://twitter.com/pervognsen/status/1514872995956756484 ): > I did math at university, but eve
621.
by svat 5y ago
> Yogurt was virtually unknown in the world outside of the Ottoman empire. You mean the word “yogurt”, I guess, because this is not true otherwise. Some quotes from the Wikipedia article on yogurt ( https://en.wikipedia.org
622.
by svat 5y ago
Apart from the PDF32000_2008.pdf (the ISO version), Adobe used to have a pdf_reference_1-7.pdf at https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/pdf_ref... which is the version before it
623.
by svat 5y ago
Great stuff. The incredible identity at the end checks out: import sympy def divisor_power_sum(n, k): return sum(d**k for d in sympy.divisors(n)) n = 0 while True: n += 1 lhs = divisor_power_sum(n
624.
by svat 5y ago
Yes I agree (and share the hope). In fact, earlier today I was thinking about Peter Norvig's "pytudes" ( https://github.com/norvig/pytudes ) as good examples of literate programming — and they are notebook
625.
by svat 5y ago
This is a surprising comment, and especially this part: > it's kind of evident that writing clearly wasn't in Knuth's DNA just by reading his famous books — my experience, from reading (parts of) several of Knuth's
626.
by svat 5y ago
I would go further: literate programming is not just "much more than" commenting code, because you can do LP without commenting much. The main thing in LP is the idea/orientation of writing as if you're writing something
627.
by svat 5y ago
When Knuth came up with the term/idea of "literate programming" and the idea of programs as works of literature, in the paper ( http://literateprogramming.com/knuthweb.pdf ) he joked (I think?) that he hoped th
628.
by svat 5y ago
Note that only a very small part of the TAOCP books is in assembly language. My count from a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14520230 Another way of counting is that the book "The MMIX supplement&qu
629.
by svat 5y ago
It's the "or something similar" that's the catch. For another example, search the post for `scriptLoadingTimeout` — to know how to indent the code after a break immediately after that position, you need to know the inden
630.
by svat 5y ago
As someone very familiar with the Knuth–Plass line-breaking algorithm ( https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/423578/48 ), an important difference I see here is that for paragraphs (the domain of TeX), there is no "s

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