Quote:
Originally Posted by kacir
"Multiplying magnification - 17 x 25 in my head"
"17 x 25 ?!? Your classmates are willing to use a calculator to multiply by 10."
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I just bought a slide rule of the internet to show to my kids. I'd just read this thread so I used your 17 x 25 as an example. My son looked on while I carefully adjusted the bars to show him how clever it all was. Sadly he'd worked out the answer in his head before I'd managed to get the result. He's 13 - I suppose there's some hope left
He was interested in the slide ruler for about 2 minutes though.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kacir
Holy $DEITY!
By the way, AutoLISP uses Reverse Polish Notation as its basic syntax. And *lots* or parenthesis.
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The idea of RPN is that you don't need parenthesis however LISP is famous for requiring thousands of the damn things - what gives?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Worldwalker
All I can say in my own defense is there are times when a 3-value IF is exactly what you need, and I'm sad that the languages I code in nowadays lack them.
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The database language SQL has a null value which makes all comparisons more difficult. Effectively it means that any test can be true, false or unknown. This little feature is probably responsible for more database bugs than anything else!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
All of them. They're so machine inefficient. I get so tired of the "throw some more hardware at it, hardware's cheap" attitude.
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Modern languages like Java are highly optimised and I find I can write board games like
Checkers,
Connect 4 or
Othello and performance is never a problem - hell you can even write
arcade programs in it. No doubt Fortran might be a little quicker but then I also have to factor in the time it takes me to write the programs. I'm not even sure if you can get assemblers these days for computers - I assume that C is the lowest language you could use.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
Which ones? I'm fond of some of the "write only" languages, like Brainf*ck and Whitespace.
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I thought whitespace was very clever. I've written a few small languages myself and just wish I had that idea
