1amzave

But isn't that kind of at odds with how shifting works? (i.e. that a left shift moves towards the "bigger" bits and a right shift moves toward the "smaller" ones.) Perhaps for a Hebrew or Arabic speaker this all works out nicely, but for those of us accustomed to progressing from left to right it seems a bit backwards...

Comment · 10 years ago

According to their documented "Current Limitations" (https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/content/docum...):

> Case Sensitivity: Filenames are currently case-sensitive only.

First thought: they have seen the light!

A moment later: wait...they consider this a "limitation", and it's only "currently" the case. So maybe they're going to perpetuate the brain-damage anyway.

Sigh.

Comment · 10 years ago

Fails to mention what is in my opinion the most devious, subtle potential pitfall with `set -e`: assigning (or even just a bare evaluation of) an arithmetic zero. `foo=0` won't do anything surprising, but `let foo=0` will return 1, and thus abort your script if you're not careful.

Also, as an alternative to the proposed `set +e; ...; set -e` wrapper for retrieving the exit status of something expected to exit non-zero (generally cleaner in my opinion, if slightly "clever"):

    retval=0
    count=$(grep -c some-string some-file) || retval=$?

Comment · 10 years ago

While this is a legitimate complaint, it also applies (though in fewer ways) to C. How do you parse this?

  (x)(y);

Is that a call of function (or function pointer) `x` with argument `y`? Or is it a cast of `y` to type `x`? You need to have kept track of of all the typedefs in the code prior to that point to know.

Comment · 10 years ago

I don't think the problems with that advice are singular. Perhaps the most ultimately-relevant is that looping exactly N times without a "ceremonial" counter is really only very rarely useful. Truly, how often do you see the canonical `for (i = 0; i < N; i++)` pattern in C with no references to `i` anywhere in the loop body? (Hint: if there are any, it's not "ceremonial".) Blindly repeating the exact same sequence of code just isn't something you want to do very often.

To address the issue of "okay, in what languages could we do this anyway?": taken in full mathematical generality, such a capability would necessarily require bignum support, which cuts down your options significantly. I'm not sure if that was actually the intent, but if we instead accept the limitation of "up to some largeish power of two", constructing a macro to do this "directly" in C would also be quite easy. So...(shrug)

Comment · 10 years ago

Perhaps I should clarify -- I am (happily) not involved in web development, and from the developer's side browsers may very well be in pretty good shape these days (I wouldn't really know).

But speaking purely as a user, I think the statement "browsers suck, like really bad" still holds very true.

Comment · 10 years ago

> For example, "back in the day" browsers sucked, like really bad.

I'm reminded of Mitch Hedberg: "I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to too."

Comment · 10 years ago

If I'm reading N1256 right (not sure how far back it actually dates, but that's a C standard draft dated 2007), section 6.7.2.3 also explicitly allows a trailing comma in that context as well, so if such a compiler exists its makers should get with the program, so to speak.

Comment · 11 years ago

> So why the quad i7, 32GB RAM, and 480GB SSD?

It's right there in your quote:

> ...a web browser...

Comment · 11 years ago

I'm reminded of an excellent quote from Bertrand Russell:

"Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise."