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Re: EE or CS?

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"BGB" <cr88192@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:kcll2j$6vs$1@news.albasani.net...
> On 1/9/2013 6:51 AM, BartC wrote:

> influence is often a sign of being a successful design...

I did say they were successful. That doesn't mean they are now the best.

>> on what is meant by a 'quirk'. Here's just one of C's: if you write 12 in
>> the language, it's the constant twelve as you might expect. But if you
>> write
>> 012, with a leading zero, it means ten!

> early on, octal was considered much less arcane.

Even so, why choose a designation that is generally regarded as a valid 
decimal number in most other contexts?

Then no-one will ever be able to use leading zero if they so wish. (With the 
quirky but harmless side-effect that, anytime someone writes a zero, they 
are actually writing octal!)

>> And the problem, in case you haven't got it, is that you have to get the
>> case of a command or filename or option (or URL etc) *just right*,
>> otherwise the OS has absolutely no idea what you're on about. Or it
>> might be
>> mistaken for something entirely different and unexpected.
>>
>
> not a big issue...
> the alphabet has 52 alphabetic characters...
>
> it is almost too bad we don't have more, for example, we could have 208 if
> bold and italic were significant (and could stretch ASCII to around 380
> unique printable characters...).

These are just attributes, which are best used for appearance and style
rather than completely changing the meaning of something. What next, colour?

But having said that, I wouldn't particularly object to bold, for example,
being used distinguish keywords from identifiers in a programming language.
(I've seen that done with underlining.)

However, that attribute should apply to the whole word. Without that
restriction, you would have identifiers where every character could be lower
or upper case; bold, italic, bold/italic, or normal; and you can probably
throw in underline and colour into the mix. Every combination would be a 
unique name.

Then you would never need identifiers longer than two or three characters!

-- 
Bartc 

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Thread

EE or CS? bob <bob@coolfone.comze.com> - 2013-01-08 09:28 -0800
  Re: EE or CS? Daniel Pitts <newsgroup.nospam@virtualinfinity.net> - 2013-01-08 10:41 -0800
  Re: EE or CS? "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> - 2013-01-08 21:41 +0100
    Re: EE or CS? Rui Maciel <rui.maciel@gmail.com> - 2013-01-08 20:50 +0000
      Re: EE or CS? "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> - 2013-01-08 22:25 +0100
        Re: EE or CS? Rui Maciel <rui.maciel@gmail.com> - 2013-01-08 21:35 +0000
          Re: EE or CS? "BartC" <bc@freeuk.com> - 2013-01-08 22:51 +0000
            Re: EE or CS? Rui Maciel <rui.maciel@gmail.com> - 2013-01-08 23:23 +0000
              Re: EE or CS? "BartC" <bc@freeuk.com> - 2013-01-08 23:31 +0000
                Re: EE or CS? Ian Collins <ian-news@hotmail.com> - 2013-01-09 12:58 +1300
                Re: EE or CS? Rui Maciel <rui.maciel@gmail.com> - 2013-01-09 01:35 +0000
                Re: EE or CS? "BartC" <bc@freeuk.com> - 2013-01-09 02:13 +0000
                Re: EE or CS? Rui Maciel <rui.maciel@gmail.com> - 2013-01-09 11:28 +0000
                Re: EE or CS? "BartC" <bc@freeuk.com> - 2013-01-09 12:51 +0000
                Re: EE or CS? BGB <cr88192@hotmail.com> - 2013-01-09 23:52 -0600
                Re: EE or CS? "BartC" <bc@freeuk.com> - 2013-01-10 12:04 +0000
                Re: EE or CS? BGB <cr88192@hotmail.com> - 2013-01-10 14:28 -0600
                Re: EE or CS? "BartC" <bc@freeuk.com> - 2013-01-10 21:58 +0000
                Re: EE or CS? BGB <cr88192@hotmail.com> - 2013-01-10 18:25 -0600
                Re: EE or CS? Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org> - 2013-01-09 05:35 -0800
                Re: EE or CS? BGB <cr88192@hotmail.com> - 2013-01-09 22:43 -0600
                Re: EE or CS? "BartC" <bc@freeuk.com> - 2013-01-10 12:22 +0000
                Re: EE or CS? BGB <cr88192@hotmail.com> - 2013-01-10 14:20 -0600
    Re: EE or CS? BGB <cr88192@hotmail.com> - 2013-01-09 22:15 -0600
  Re: EE or CS? Ian Collins <ian-news@hotmail.com> - 2013-01-09 10:19 +1300
  Re: EE or CS? "BartC" <bc@freeuk.com> - 2013-01-08 22:54 +0000
  Re: EE or CS? Robert Miles <robertmilesxyz@gmail.com> - 2013-01-12 16:26 -0800
  Re: EE or CS? Dan <dantex1@aol.com> - 2013-02-19 19:12 -0800
    Re: EE or CS? Rui Maciel <rui.maciel@gmail.com> - 2013-02-20 09:16 +0000
      Re: EE or CS? Dan <dantex1@aol.com> - 2013-02-20 18:59 -0800
        Re: EE or CS? Ian Collins <ian-news@hotmail.com> - 2013-02-21 16:40 +1300
          Re: EE or CS? "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> - 2013-02-21 11:45 +0100
          Re: EE or CS? Rui Maciel <rui.maciel@gmail.com> - 2013-02-21 11:45 +0000
        Re: EE or CS? Rui Maciel <rui.maciel@gmail.com> - 2013-02-21 07:36 +0000

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