palordrolap

Technically, if you ignore the inherent contradiction in the name, some languages treat NaN as a falsy number and the IEEE standards admit trillions of possible NaNs.

Ada is a language that leaves a lot of things “implementation dependent” as it’s not supposed to grant easy access to underlying data types like those you’ll find in C, or literally on the silicon. You’re supposed to be able to declare your own integer type of any size and the compiler is supposed to figure it out. If it chooses to use a native data type, then so be it.

This doesn’t guarantee the correctness of the compiler nor the programmer who absolutely has to work with native types because it’s an embedded system though.

This has ended in disaster at least once: https://itsfoss.com/a-floating-point-error-that-caused-a-damage-worth-half-a-billion/

In this instance, I think there was some suggestion to write code in mostly lower case, including all user variables, or at least inCamelCaseLikeThis with a leading lower case letter, and so to make True and False stand out, they’ve got to be capitalised.

I mean. They could have been TRUE and FALSE. Would that have been preferable? Or how about a slightly more Pythonic style: __true__ and __false__

You can put chicken, on pizza.

(That comma has no business being there, but it doesn’t read right without it.)

It’s an even-numbered Star Trek movie. They followed a pattern for a while where they were the good ones and if you were going to skip one, you skipped the odd numbered ones, even the first. Especially the first.

As for recommend, it depends how much you love / know the characters. I grew up on re-runs of the 60s TV show and am pretty sure I saw it for the first time at the cinema. That would have been a couple of years before TNG was even a thing, so my opinion might not mean much even then.

But yeah, sure. Watch it on a grey rainy afternoon with friends or family when you’ve nothing else to do. Trust me when I say that specific weather outside will definitely add to the experience.

Somewhere around here I have a “Learn C++ in 24 hours” book that was published in 1999. I have a feeling that a modern C++ expert would react the same way 22nd century McCoy reacted to 20th century medicine in Star Trek IV.

(For you youngsters, I’ll-get-around-to-its and nope-not-for-mes who haven’t seen it, he mutters things about “dark ages” and “Spanish Inquisition”. The whole movie is goofy, including the otherwise terrifying main plot point.)

Clearly a cousin of The Strid. Except the Strid is usually full to the brim and you can’t see the literal death walls that lie beneath the surface.

Tom Scott made a video about it during his many adventures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCSUmwP02T8

That \\. part doesn’t look right, but what do I know. Apparently control codes are valid elsewhere, so a literal backslash followed by any character, even a space or a newline, might actually be valid there.

“Yeah, my e-mail address is abc, carriage return, three backspaces and a terminal bell at example dot com. … What do you mean your mail program doesn’t support it?”

Sometimes, when something won’t even compile, I have try to compile it a second time - and get the exact same error message(s) - before my brain will accept there is a problem and perhaps begin to see the cause.

Somewhere in my head must be a gremlin who says, “No! It is the compiler that is wrong!”

The same can apply to semantic errors (the code is valid but does not do what it was intended to do) but those take longer to track down. To make the trick work, the debugging output has to be in just the right place in order to print proof of the wrong logic and then do the same on the next run, preferably in under a minute, so that I can begin to see the error.

Front end versus back end. The people who make programming languages are back-end developers. Their strengths lie with making something that works, not something that looks pretty.

It’s kind of easy to forget about or ignore any experience they might have if they’re asking questions like that. Sure, maybe it was a brain fart from a panicked intern who’s having orders barked at them from a powerful individual that they want to impress, but that doesn’t make it any better, does it?

There used to be an undocumented setting in early versions of MS-DOS that would allow the setting of the command option character to something other than the slash, and if you did that, the slash automatically became the path separator. All you needed was SWITCHAR=- in your CONFIG.SYS and DOS was suddenly very Unix-y.

It was taken out after a while because, with the feature being undocumented, too many people didn’t know about it and bits of software - especially batch files, would have been reliant on things being “wrong”. The modern support for regular slash in API calls probably doesn’t use any of the old SWITCHAR code, but it is, in some way, the spiritual descendant of that secret feature.

Here’s an old blog that talks about it: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/archive/blogs/larryosterman/why-is-the-dos-path-character

Given the engineer’s amendment to “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” is usually “If it ain’t broke, it doesn’t have enough features yet.”, I can only surmise that COBOL must be one of those languages that are so terrible that they deter their programmers from wanting to do that.

Urge to analyse… rising…

My first guess would be to take out that semicolon on line 264. JavaScript will often happily take a new line as end of statement if it makes sense to do that, so in theory, that semicolon is not needed. And it might be a Greek question mark your prankster colleague put in your code when you weren’t looking.

And then I’d be tracing parentheses, curlies, quotes and so on, because that error could be the point the parser gave up trying to make sense of the code rather than where the error actually is.

And if that didn’t find it, I’d put in a deliberate error at an earlier, known line to see where the parser thinks that error is. If it’s offset by 20 lines, then I know the original error is probably offset by a similar amount.

Ah, misleading use of terminology that indicates one thing, but will win in court even if it actually means, or can later be said to mean, another.

I hope those involved in helping companies win these lawsuits choke on bones from food sold as boneless. Because that won a court case after “boneless” was redefined as a cooking method.

I don’t want them to choke to death. Just a little lesson, you know?

That one xkcd about tautologies sure is that one xkcd about tautologies.

Sometimes, programs that need to start up an editor will honour the $EDITOR environment variable, which should contain the name of, or full path to, a user’s preferred editor.

It’s not set by default though, and a lot of things will naturally default to vi or even ed. Something to be set in a .profile, .bashrc or similar.

$VISUAL is another variable that is used for similar purposes.

The resemblance to certain two letter commands is not entirely a coincidence.

You could, and I’m just spitballing here, start sending your compiled executables to the anti-virus provider and only continuing work once they’ve been added to the upstream exceptions. Bonus points for compiling hundreds and sending them all. Do that for a day or two and there is sure to be a number of communications many levels above you.

If executed perfectly and all goes well, you’ll get your exceptions access.

Worst case… uh. Maybe this isn’t such a good idea after all.

This is actually the correct way to do it in JavaScript, especially if the right hand side is more than 1.

If JavaScript thinks i contains a string, and let’s say its value is 27, i += 1 will result in i containing 271.

Subtraction doesn’t have any weird string-versus-number semantics and neither does unary minus, so i -=- 1 guarantees 28 in this case.

For the increment case, ++ works properly whether JavaScript thinks i is a string or not, but since the joke is to avoid it, here we are.

There is no problem if both of these people are sane and are getting sane, non conflicting direction from those interested parties who are not involved in the software design.

Ha! Hahaha.

Hahahahahaha.

Oh, I made myself sad.