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Idiosyncratic use of punctuation - which of these annoys you the most?
| 6% | 9 votes |
| 11% | 17 votes |
| 64% | 91 votes |
| 6% | 9 votes |
| 3% | 5 votes |
| 0% | 1 votes |
| 2% | 3 votes |
| 4% | 7 votes |
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- Don't complain about lack of options. You've got to pick a few when you do multiple choice. Those are the breaks.
- Feel free to suggest poll ideas if you're feeling creative. I'd strongly suggest reading the past polls first.
- This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
Idiosyncratic use of punctuation - which of these annoys you the most?
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What no spouse of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working
when he's staring out the window.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by janrinok on Sunday October 13, @07:31AM (5 children)
Unlike many here, I do not mind syntactic white space. In fact, I actually prefer languages that insist that they are laid out in a specific way. The reason for this is that we read code far more often than we write it. Looking at somebody else's code (or even one's own code sometime after it was written) can often be difficult until you get used to their style, and if the code has been worked on by several people that style can (but shouldn't ever) change part way through reading the file.
Languages such as Python, Go and even .yml ensure that the style of the code changes as little as possible no matter who wrote it. Personally, that makes it much easier for me to get stuck in to groking someone else's code. Being able to pick up any Python or Go code and understand its structure is a great benefit to me. It saves me time.
One complaint that I have heard against an enforced layout is that different companies have different requirements. However, modern day IDEs can cater for this and you can, within certain limits, modify the output slightly. They can also reformat any code you throw at them into a consistent specification. I know that some will now argue that their preferred editor does not support this or is more versatile, or whatever. Fine, you can carry on. I will probably not be looking at your code anyway so it will not affect me.
YMMV.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 4, Touché) by DrkShadow on Sunday October 13, @06:49PM (2 children)
It's akin to "Dress for Success"
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday October 25, @01:41PM
"Dress for Success" sounds like wearing a suit and tie. A necktie cuts off circulation to the brain. Which is why only management and politicians dress this way. And it shows in their decision making "abilities".
Not offering onions is a stealth way to cut ingredient costs under cover of being concerned about food safety.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday October 25, @04:30PM
Not really.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 19, @12:54AM (1 child)
UGH. I hope I never have to work with a dumbass like you.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday October 19, @12:59AM
It's unlikely.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Sunday October 13, @04:08PM (14 children)
My main beef with syntactically significant whitespace is the annoyance when you inevitably experience bugs ranging from mere syntax errors up to serious control-flow issues because you hit the space bar only 7 times instead of 8 or you cut and pasted something with the "wrong" indentation and its just a PITA. Yeah yeah I heard it all about "use a better IDE" but its even MORE annoying when you're already using the better IDE and it epic fails anyway.
Another serious annoyance is loser-style-IDEs where they surround a very small code window with crap that isn't code, and the feel you get when forced to edit while viewing the code thru a postage-stamp, the algo or code would be much clearer if you could see it all at the same time but now, you have to follow some stupid rule that makes the code harder to understand because you can't see it all.
Finally some other languages can lint or format to highlight incorrect code. What I'm saying is you don't really gain anything by proper indentation of the wrong code. "Its the correct shape" isn't helpful if its the wrong thing. And I'm not sure "correct shape" is highlighting most important or most expensive to fix errors. I donno.. take your classic fencepost error; that can be beautifully indented, giving a false sense of security when the problem is you thought arrays start at index 0 instead of 1 or vice versa. "I got great news, I created a PITA to fix a problem you don't have via creating a problem you won't like"
(Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday October 13, @06:55PM (10 children)
Another serious annoyance is loser-style-IDEs where they surround a very small code window with crap that isn't code, and the feel you get when forced to edit while viewing the code thru a postage-stamp, the algo or code would be much clearer if you could see it all at the same time but now, you have to follow some stupid rule that makes the code harder to understand because you can't see it all.
Tell me about it.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Informative) by janrinok on Sunday October 13, @07:14PM (9 children)
I also agree.
However, you can get good and bad IDEs for any language. Mine provides help when I want it but shows me just code when I tell it to. Literally just the code, and it is a single key-press to change between the two.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday October 13, @07:39PM (3 children)
I have had to start using VSCode and Visual Studio recently and I find them very unfriendly. I need to invest some time in learning how to configure them properly. The program source is full of lines and dots showing the indentation which I find and real pain in the neck. Then there are the incessant pop-ups offering to complete what I'm typing for me, interrupting my train of thought. By default, they only show one window of source. I usually have a minimum of three side-by-side and I can't stand having to fight with the IDE to get the layout of the windows I want.
Finally, people who use these IDEs have some funny ideas about how to lay the source out on the disk. For example, having one directory ("folder") for the headers and another for the source regardless of what they're for.
I am reminded of the Two Ronnies sketch where the books in the library are arranged by colour, not by title, author or content.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday October 21, @02:20PM
When I first tried a bit of Java, getting my feet moist, as Londo Mollari would say, I was using CodeWarrior from MetroWerks in the 1990s. I had used this to learn both C and C++. What drove this decision was that CodeWarrior was cross platform on both classic Mac and Windows.
So, I had to learn Eclipse to work with Java. I found it had a huge learning curve. But it was well worth it. Like learning to dig a ditch with the noise and complexity of a backhoe instead of using a kitchen spoon to dig a ditch.
Not offering onions is a stealth way to cut ingredient costs under cover of being concerned about food safety.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday October 25, @04:32PM (1 child)
> Then there are the incessant pop-ups
Number of times the pop-up has pop-upped just as I hit enter to start a new line. What a pain.
I also hate text editors/IDEs that autofill the closing parenthesis, 99 % of the time incorrectly.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 26, @04:46AM
The number one rule drilled into my head for creating human interfaces is do not do things faster than a human's ability to react. If someone is typing a line without stopping, you should assume that any keyboard input in that chain is a part of that ongoing action. If someone clicks the mouse less than quarter or half a second after the layout of clickable elements moved, ignore it because they probably meant to click something else. Sometimes I wonder if people even test their user interfaces anymore; let alone test their interfaces in different situations like different resolutions, processing power, or network speeds.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Sunday October 13, @07:43PM (4 children)
Here it is. This is how people arrange source code nowadays [youtube.com]. I blame these IDEs.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Funny) by janrinok on Sunday October 13, @08:06PM (3 children)
I'll have to try writing my code in the style of the big blue book.....
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 13, @09:55PM (2 children)
I'm not quite sure how useful Bluebook style would be for you, but here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluebook [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2, Funny) by pTamok on Monday October 14, @04:02PM (1 child)
Hmm, and I thought it was a reference to Max Miller's Blue book [wikipedia.org].
Wrong Blue book. Might make a controversial style guide.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 15, @10:17AM
There's also this: https://the-blue-book.eu/ [the-blue-book.eu]
https://cybersec4europe.eu/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/The-Blue-Book.pdf [cybersec4europe.eu]
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday October 15, @10:12AM (1 child)
For what it's worth, back when I was wrangling a lot of Python professionally, I found that a properly configured vim worked just fine for editing it: You just needed to set your tabs to = 4 spaces, and potentially add a check to convert any stray tab characters to spaces, and you were well on your way. So no need for really fancy stuff.
Vote for Pedro
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Wednesday October 16, @09:24AM
It is what I used and still do for all my years of Python work. However I still voted "Syntactically-significant whitespace" because it bugs the living daylights out of me for reasons others have already mentioned here, plus the fact it kicked off the whole holy war of "tabs vs spaces" in the Python community. Vim solves that too with the ability to retab spaces to tabs and vice-versa, but it would have been better if the problem didn't exist in the first place.
The fact the answer given to a lot of complaints about syntactically-significant whitespace is "use a better IDE" just drives home that even its proponents admit that its a dumpster fire of an idea that needs additional technical crutches to be bearable.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Friday October 18, @07:49AM
I refuse to use IDEs for the lack of useful features they offer, that is, with the exception of C++, but that's C++'s fault. Otherwise tabs are fortunately acceptable in all languages/markups I use which eases readability a lot. I use an editor (kate) next to a terminal for regular coding. Kate allows to indent/unindent the selection which is the only IDE feature I need.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday October 13, @04:10PM (4 children)
I'll give these people credit, you have to be a brave man to edit LISP code using vi or vim.
If you use a real IDE like emacs or similar, there's parenthesis management modes to take care of it, if you're using an IDE and hitting shift-9 and shift-0 a lot you're probably using it wrong.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 13, @09:57PM (1 child)
And yet when people say the same thing about Python and other languages with syntactically-significant whitespace, all of a sudden those same arguments are just excuses.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 21, @03:33AM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RamiK on Tuesday October 15, @11:11AM
Like emacs, Vim has distributions with extensions that integrate LSP support and tree-sitter to parenthesis issues and navigate by syntax.
Regardless, new editors following tree-sitter* blur the lines between IDE and editors on this sorts of functionalities due to being able to understand the syntax trees and thus support navigation by tree elements (functions...) and open/close parenthesis automatically.
* Zed, Lapce, Helix, Kakoune... Helix's keybindings in particular illustrate how tight tree-sitter integration leaves makes previous distinctions between IDEs and editors unclear: https://docs.helix-editor.com/keymap.html#unimpaired [helix-editor.com]
compiling...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ChrisMaple on Monday October 21, @11:46PM
Vim does have matching parenthesis highlighting, and % jumps to matching parenthesis. On the downside, it does get confused sometimes by unbalanced parentheses in comments.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Opyros on Sunday October 13, @05:09PM (8 children)
Does Ruby have syntactically significant whitespace? I hadn’t thought so.
(Score: 3, Touché) by janrinok on Sunday October 13, @06:09PM (3 children)
Apparently not - but we cannot edit Polls unfortunately.
I will ask the submitter to stand in the corner for 10 minutes facing the wall.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 2) by Samantha Wright on Tuesday October 15, @03:23PM (1 child)
Guilty party here. I'm not sure why I thought Ruby had this. I have a vague inkling that I was thinking not just about indentation, but other forms of whitespace-sensitivity like whether or not you can put a space between a function name and its arguments list (e.g. function (arg), which is something some Java monkey might type intentionally).
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 16, @10:46PM
I feel like this used to work, maybe in ruby 1.8? Ruby 1.9 broke a lot of things. Lots of ruby versions break lots of things, it seems like a language requiring very high maintenance to keep applications running in a supported version of the runtime. If you like what happened with python 3 and want similar breakage more often, ruby is an excellent choice.
Larger pain points in ruby syntax IMO are things like, you don't need parens except when you do (then remember to not get bitten by the above when adding them), and the baffling difference in precedence between and/or and &&/|| operators.
(Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Sunday October 13, @06:15PM (1 child)
Although I also found this:
So it appears that there is a recommended spacing for the language.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 1) by Opyros on Monday October 14, @02:14AM
So, the Ruby equivalent of Python Enhancement Proposal 8 [python.org], which recommends 4 spaces per indent level.
(Score: 3, Informative) by stormwyrm on Monday October 14, @03:10AM (1 child)
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 15, @04:32AM
With that sort of definition, Haskell doesn't either. Haskell allows you to use indentation in lieu of other block syntax. In fact, many languages that use the off-side rule either do so optionally (opt in or opt out) or only for a subset of statements. Most of the ones that don't are influenced, directly or indirectly, by ABC or ISWIM.
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Sunday October 13, @09:15PM (14 children)
For me the annoyance with Perl isn't the sigils, it's Leaning Toothpick Syndrome (TM) [wikipedia.org]. Behold the regex for matching URLs containing a specific subdirectory:
m/ftp:\/\/[^\/]*\/pub\//
Of course, other languages [wikipedia.org] aren't immune, either; here's another example from C++:
std::regex re{ R"d(s/"\([^"]*\)"/'\1'/g)d" };
... so I guess my problem isn't with Perl so much as it is poorly written regular expressions.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 14, @02:38AM (1 child)
Most languages have a way around that problem. Perl and C++ both have ways to make it so the special characters aren't given special meaning. They can have other delimiters set, increase the "rawness" of strings, or use special operators or functions to get results.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Dr Spin on Monday October 14, @10:36AM
We have upped our standards, so UP YOURS!
Taken from an advert for the "London Evening Standard".
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday October 15, @03:16PM (2 children)
When using a nice language [wikipedia.org] that is more gooder than Java, I don't mind any of the idiosyncrasies this pole is complaining about.
[ This program prints "Hello World!" and a newline to the screen; its
length is 106 active command characters. [It is not the shortest.]
This loop is an "initial comment loop", a simple way of adding a comment
to a BF program such that you don't have to worry about any command
characters. Any ".", ",", "+", "-", "<" and ">" characters are simply
ignored, the "[" and "]" characters just have to be balanced. This
loop and the commands it contains are ignored because the current cell
defaults to a value of 0; the 0 value causes this loop to be skipped.
]
++++++++ Set Cell #0 to 8
[
>++++ Add 4 to Cell #1; this will always set Cell #1 to 4
[ as the cell will be cleared by the loop
>++ Add 2 to Cell #2
>+++ Add 3 to Cell #3
>+++ Add 3 to Cell #4
>+ Add 1 to Cell #5
<<<<- Decrement the loop counter in Cell #1
] Loop until Cell #1 is zero; number of iterations is 4
>+ Add 1 to Cell #2
>+ Add 1 to Cell #3
>- Subtract 1 from Cell #4
>>+ Add 1 to Cell #6
[<] Move back to the first zero cell you find; this will
be Cell #1 which was cleared by the previous loop
<- Decrement the loop Counter in Cell #0
] Loop until Cell #0 is zero; number of iterations is 8
The result of this is:
Cell no : 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
Contents: 0 0 72 104 88 32 8
Pointer : ^
>>. Cell #2 has value 72 which is 'H'
>---. Subtract 3 from Cell #3 to get 101 which is 'e'
+++++++..+++. Likewise for 'llo' from Cell #3
>>. Cell #5 is 32 for the space
<-. Subtract 1 from Cell #4 for 87 to give a 'W'
<. Cell #3 was set to 'o' from the end of 'Hello'
+++.------.--------. Cell #3 for 'rl' and 'd'
>>+. Add 1 to Cell #5 gives us an exclamation point
>++. And finally a newline from Cell #6
Not offering onions is a stealth way to cut ingredient costs under cover of being concerned about food safety.
(Score: 2) by Samantha Wright on Tuesday October 15, @03:26PM (1 child)
Straight to jail!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 16, @05:33AM
Then do yourself a favor and don't look up Malbolge. Another fun one is JSFuck, where people are teaching themselves that language because it has some interesting uses.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday October 16, @12:12AM (3 children)
While Perl "line noise" reg-exes are certainly a problem, the sigils changing regularly can also be a problem, because it means that you have an extra hurdle looking for all instances where something is accessed or modified, and don't make it any simpler to understand the data structure in use.
Vote for Pedro
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17, @03:21AM (2 children)
When have the sigils changed regularly? AFAIK for Perl 5 the meanings have stayed the same for more than a decade.
$ = var ( single item )
@ = array (multiple items, ref by position)
% = hash (multiple items, ref by key)
Seems simple enough to me.
English is even more confusing with the usage of s to differentiate between singular and plural. Because sometimes you need to change more than just one character to indicate a plural and sometimes it's not s.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 20, @07:00AM
Of course sigils are easy when you don't talk about 40% of the problem (since there are 5 sigils). /s
I think what they are referring to is how the sigils for the same variable change throughout your code depending on how it is used. That is what really bugs people. In most languages, along with the docs for both Perl and Raku, they tell you to think of it as part of the name of the variable. That makes sense because each sigil has its own namespace and every time you use the same variable you have to include the same sigil in front. Additionally, no one really complains about sigils in most other languages that use them. Which leads me back to the root cause of their point and to why people don't like them: sigils are simultaneously a part of and not a part of the variable name.
They change all over your code for the same name depending on how it is used. And you can even have the same name with different sigils! But then, you have operations on variables that use the different sort of sigil. In that case, the type of variable to use is determined by the operator not the sigil in front, which means sometimes you need to ignore the sigil. And then sometimes the sigil itself is the operator so it is both at the same time. It is unnecessary cognitive overhead that doesn't really help you understand what is going on, especially with complex data types, but can trip you up quite easily out of habit or during a refactor. Zero benefit provided but it can have big costs. How many other languages use these sorts of complex sigils? None because nobody misses them when they are gone.
An example where the $length here are different because arrays and lists are different things in perl:
Or name collision where this returns "a":
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday October 25, @02:12AM
What I was referring to was that the sigils associated with the same variable change depending on how you reference it, e.g. %foo, @foo['bar'], $foo['bar'][1]. This makes it harder to track down where %foo is referenced, because you also have to contend with the @foo and $foo variants.
Vote for Pedro
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Friday October 18, @08:02AM
I never thought this a problem. First, use the flexible open/close char, i.e.
becomes, for example,
Next, use character classes, instead of escaping, i.e. [.] instead of \.
Finally, use extended regular expressions (m{re}x) for complex REs so it becomes whitespace insignificant (hehe), break it across lines and add comments and it becomes readable like a grammar.
(Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 19, @12:58AM (3 children)
I'm sorry. You're blame languages for the syntax of regular expressions? Another dumbass.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by janrinok on Saturday October 19, @01:12AM (2 children)
The Poll asks what idiosyncratic punctuation irritates someone the most. One of the options is 'something worse'. It is a valid opinion that the punctuation that appears in regexes can be difficult to comprehend, The Poll does NOT specify that it has to be part of a specific language. As you appear to know, regexes appear in lots of different computer languages.
Of course, anyone reaching that conclusion would be a dumbass, so I must have misinterpreted what few constructive words you managed to add to the discussion.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 20, @12:48AM (1 child)
(Score: 1, Troll) by janrinok on Sunday October 20, @01:09AM
If you read all of what he wrote you will notice that he also referred to another example from C++. In fact he subsequently writes:
Of course, one would have to be a dumbass to isolate a specific phrase or sentence and then quote it out of context.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 2, Touché) by pTamok on Monday October 14, @03:52PM (5 children)
People who don't know how to use colons, semi-colons, and commas in written English, and anyone who eschews use of the Oxford comma.
Of course, anyone whose usage differs to mine is, without doubt, wrong.
There are also heathens who omit apostrophes where they should be present, and insert them where they should not.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17, @03:31AM (4 children)
The Oxford comma is overrated. It just swaps ambiguity in some cases for ambiguity in other cases.
Lastly, a certain mastery of the tongue makes one a cunning linguist.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Samantha Wright on Thursday October 17, @07:16PM (1 child)
As a reminder:
With Oxford comma: We invited the strippers, JFK, and Stalin. Without: We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin. (Are JFK and Stalin the strippers?)
With Oxford comma: Dedicated to my mother, Ayn Rand, and God. Without: Dedicated to my mother, Ayn Rand and God. (Is my mother Ayn Rand?)
Notably, both examples are fixed with a healthy colon, so really we're all stuck with this diarrhoea until we get some proper punctuation in our diets.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 20, @10:08PM
Or is it a typo, and your mothers are Ayn Rand and God.
Quelle surprise that God is a lesbian, but Ayn, that's novel.
(Score: 2) by Samantha Wright on Thursday October 17, @07:25PM (1 child)
Ultimate trivia: English doesn't have a native word for "rabbit," because they weren't native to the British isles. "Coney" (i.e., Coney Island) was used for centuries, derived from the Latin word cuniculus. We eventually stopped using it because it became a slang term for lady parts, much in the same way we've stopped talking about pussycats (although in this case it's almost a homophone.) The replacement word, rabbit (from French rabotte) originally meant a juvenile, i.e. a bunny.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Thursday October 17, @09:13PM
Yes, and the earlier pronunciation of coney rhymed with honey - showing the link with the Latin cuniculus - it was the Romans that imported rabbits to Britain, but there's no evidence that they were eaten, but kept as pets. It was the Normans that ate them [english-heritage.org.uk].
That said, the list of foods that the Romans introduced to Britain is extensive: Roman Foods Introduced to Britain [romansinscotland.com]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Mojibake Tengu on Monday October 14, @09:36PM (1 child)
Meaning of any code to a programmer is irrelevant, it's mere illusion.
In consistent reality, the only relevant meaning of any code is that one to the machine.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Tuesday October 15, @03:26PM
While it is true that the code must compile (or interpret) and run successfully; as a programmer your PRIMARY audience is not the computer, but rather it is another human being who will come along later, perhaps much later, who will need to be able to understand your code.
Not offering onions is a stealth way to cut ingredient costs under cover of being concerned about food safety.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Tuesday October 15, @12:09AM
Worse is to refuse to use any techniques to obviate these syntactic infundibula.
For example,parenthesis pileup is easily dealt with using a trick like Racket's parendown [racket-lang.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17, @05:01AM (8 children)
inancienttimeslanguagewaswrittenwithnopunctuationorspacingwhileapersonskilledinthelanguagecanreadthisitsdifficultandtimeconsumingandambiguousthatiswhatalanguagewithsignificantwhitespaceislike
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17, @07:19AM (7 children)
There is one I find even worse than that. Your ancient language could also be using an abjad. bcsthrrnvwlsrspcsllfthwrtnglkslkths whtcmpltpnnthsstrd thnkgdnssthrssftwrttrnscrbt (Because there are no vowels or spaces, all of the writing looks like this. What a complete pain in the ass to read. Thank goodness there is software to transcribe it)
(Score: 2) by Samantha Wright on Thursday October 17, @12:52PM (3 children)
The Intel iAPX 432 used instructions of variable bit length, assigned using Huffman encoding. That alone should keep us all up at night.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Thursday October 17, @09:20PM (2 children)
When you conquered that, try VLIW [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Samantha Wright on Friday October 18, @11:42AM (1 child)
I am familiar. The difference, of course, is that VLIW supposedly works (if it's not part of Itanium.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 19, @05:34AM
I could be mistaken but didn't VLIW fail to pan out as much as people had hoped? My understanding was they had moved to explicit parallelism through things like EPIC.
(Score: 2, Informative) by pTamok on Thursday October 17, @09:16PM (1 child)
It could be worse: it could be boustrophedonic [wikipedia.org] as well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17, @11:22PM
You are right that those are a nightmare with abjads. It didn't occur to me because I don't have problems with boustrophedon writing styles in the scripts I am used to reading. Thankfully, I can rely on others to deal with Arabian scripts. I wonder if the absolute pain to read those is why most languages that write boustrophedon use alphabets, abugidas, or syllabaries. Therefore allowing the pattern matching part of the brain to read those fluently with remarkably little difficulty. Maybe if I had more practice I wouldn't have the problems with it, but abjads alone have never really clicked with me even without the hurdle of having to reverse or rotate every line.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 18, @10:46PM
And then there's boustrophedon... (Alternate lines read right-to-left, then left-to-right.)
(Score: 2) by VanessaE on Thursday October 17, @02:33PM (1 child)
Whoever came up with the idea that whitespace should be significant should be pun... ahem... forced to rewrite say Firefox or the Linux kernel in Brainfuck. 😉
(of course I mean beyond just whether or not an instruction needs to be separated from its arguments - that has legit reasons on some platforms)
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 22, @01:24AM
White space left by deleted comments is enough for me to no longer read this site.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 26, @02:35AM (1 child)
For everyone's consideration:
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=61699&commentsort=0&mode=threadtos&threshold=-1&highlightthresh=-1&page=1&cid=1367252#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
Just to note the total weirdness, there are 78 children to this comment, yet when you click on it, none appear! 78 comments that have been deleted, because they said that Republicans are Weird. Not as weird as SN staff, evidently. This is very weird. Why would these comments have been deleted? Did they threaten the lack of meaningful discussion that we have of late? Possibly illegal? Would it hurt the feefees of Runaway or Khallow? Hard to tell, difficult to know, I call, Bullshit!!