Xah Programing Blog Archive 2018-10
Google auto log you into the Google Chrome
much update
Understand ASCII Control Characters
here's ASCII Characters
as scientific programer, I wasn't too familiar with it for the first 10 years coding with Mathematica, in 1990s. Then from 1998 to ~2007, i did java, perl, python, php. Still don't know ascii control sequence much, except line feed (aka newline), form feed, horizontal tab, carriage return.
But as you code more or touch low level issues, you have to know it well. e.g. even in JavaScript golang
why is ascii important? because when you do networking, protocols, terminal, IO, file encoding, or even syntax detail of programing languages, understanding ASCII control sequences becomes critical.
here's some issues related to ASCII.
note, ASCII is part of Unicode. In utf8 encoding, any file in ASCII encoding is 100% same with utf8, if the file does not contain non-ascii chars such as ∑ α → 😂
note that, the need to understand ASCII is one thing, meanwhile, there are lots programers, typically mono-lang American, who have phobia towards any non-ascii character. They insist, that programing language source code should not contain ANY char that keyboard cannot type directly.
[see Problems of Symbol Congestion in Computer Languages; ASCII Jam vs Unicode]
emacs dev Alan Mackenzie is one such person, and many others in emacs dev list. They, resulted a damage to emacs around 2016. So that now emacs function doc string has the complexity of going thru transformation, instead of “curly quote” directly.
it is Alan Mackenzie, who did the deed. after hundreds of flamewar messages, then, it is Richard Stallman, sealed the damage. rms was not a emacs maintainer at the time, and supposedly he does not have the authority for final decision on anything none political. Maintainer was Stefan Monnier
what's the problem of using some form of encoding for none ascii chars?
Using encoded form is unreadable when you have lots of them. And it adds complexity of a transformation step.
e.g. in math, → ∑ α etc.
not
→
∑
α
etc in html.
or worse in TeX escape or
\xhhhh
\xhhhhhh
in many langs.
or consider euro lang. é and other. Basically, when you have several of that in a sentence, using encoded form is not practical. you have unreadability, and complexity of conversion, which easily go wrong, e.g. encoded/decoded twice.
imagine, if Spanish people had to write niña by ni＆ntilde;a or ni\x00f1a. Or French has to read télé from t＆eacute;l＆eacute; or t\x00e9l\x00e9. That is what programers who insist on ascii-only source code r asking.
just wrote a profile on my patreon https://www.patreon.com/xahlee thank you all for putting $ there
Great Software for Windows ancient list.
as you blog and time marches on, pages become a record of history.
best thing for a nerd fanny pack
when coding JavaScript, do you prefer 'single' or "double" quote for string by default?
vote on twitter
https://twitter.com/xah_lee/status/1054883448437977088
to read. erlang tutorial https://learnyousomeerlang.com/starting-out-for-real
support my work. buy yourself a 512GB SSD Buy at amazon
or Put $5 in my patreon. https://www.patreon.com/xahlee
book
[Best Ever Paper Airplanes By Norman Schmidt. At Best Ever Paper Airplanes]
Programing Language Idiocy: Bit Operators (on its own page)
Necessity of Operator Overload in Computer Languages (on its own page)
w3c dead link
dead links record trail:
when you learn a programing language, do you watch video lecture/presentation?
and, programers, eat walnuts, live forever. Buy at amazon you buy, you eat, i live. Yes it's an ad. out of my own volition.
ML stands for?
when i see the abbreviation ML, i think of Meta Language, the grand daddy of SML, CaML, OCaML, FSharp, Clean, Miranda, Haskell. ML were invented for automated theorem proving. Machine learning?? you mean like smart guessing?
brave browser still have the bug, where sometimes the url field shows the url from a different tab
What is Function, What is Operator? (repost)
new book. The Little Typer
new book. The Little Typer Buy at amazon 2018, By Daniel Friedman et al.
Friedman is one of the top lang researcher. He's 74 now. So am not sure he's actually the main author.
Friedman wrote a series of books titled “Little Schemer”, “Little Java”, “Little Prover”, “Little MLer” etc. Daniel P Friedman Books I read Little Java back in 2000. Wasn't comprehensible to me. I never liked these story-telling style books.
why not perl6?
you can buy a slingshot, to shoot down drones slingshot
typed vs untyped lang
now am of the opinion that programing languages should be typed. (modern system, eg golang. not C, C++, Java). When younger, i thought it should not, cuz i considered typing as by-product of compiler.
in some sense, typing is a unwanted by-product of computer engineering aka compiler. and, it was so, up to 2000. However, with different perspective, a proper type system, is like a good property of logic system. For programing language, it improves correctness, bring clarity.
there are exceptions. e.g. Mathematica (aka wolfram lang), where the computation model mostly is a symbolic term rewriting system. So, typing system does not apply. (btw, lisp is almost the same, except lispers since 1990 are extreme idiots. they r C coders in paren clothing.)
Chinese abacus. they have 2 beads on top, 5 below. i never learned their exact function of the “extra” beads. In Taiwan, we grew up with Japanese style, 1 on top, 4 at bottom.
more pic https://twitter.com/Echinanews/status/1050284413504774144
but apparently, the 2 5 setup allows computation with hexadecimal, which is a traditional chinese weight system.
interesting that D lang is still going. “Alexandrescu (i think he's 2nd in D language dev) worked as a research scientist at Facebook, before departing the company in August 2015 in order to focus on developing the D programming language.”
google shutting down google plus
google shutting down google plus, over the next 10 months.
since google began Google Plus in 2011, i'd say it marks the year google goes evil. then, its worse and worse, starting with greed, to now heavy censorship and explicit and blatant political gaming.
a great sadness to witness google over the decades. we helped google succeed back in 2000, since it was the company that does no evil, different from all others.
added a realistic survey by jetbrains
old writing, new page. work in progress
to read https://getstream.io/blog/how-a-go-program-compiles-down-to-machine-code/
Programing Language and Its Machine (to be expanded)
Chinese spy chip found in Apple Amazon server motherboards, said.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/10/04/supermicro_bloomberg/
https://twitter.com/htommy998/status/1047928532100210688
Apple's response https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/10/what-businessweek-got-wrong-about-apple/
Amazon's response https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/setting-the-record-straight-on-bloomberg-businessweeks-erroneous-article/
stupid ipad. i have a old ipad. when viewing some page , requiring 100+ pushes to scroll down. Is there a way to drag the scroll bar?
on android, when u swipe fast, the page flies like on wheels. On iPad iOS, it's like stuck in some viscous shet. i think iOS UI is idiotic.