WalterBright

I learned how to program on a PDP-10. Lots of great memories.

We also went through fiat money in the Confederacy, with the usual result - massive inflation.

FWIW, I was not aware of Ritchie's proposal until after my article was published, and after the variable sized arrays were in D for many, many years.

> how to generalize it to, e.g., struct members. (Maybe you can speak to that.)

I don't know what you mean by that?

We could return to a sound money system, which is what the US had before 1914. (The Federal Reserve Act in 1914 switched us to a fiat money system.)

I've been very disappointed in the various screen adaptations of Verne's books. The Nautilus series is unwatchable. The Mysterious Island shows are hideously bad. And so on.

Calcium buildup is not reversible. But it is preventable.

I meant flaws in terms of negative personality traits.

An excellent list. My general rule is to stay at least 20 feet back from the precipice. If I may add a couple:

1. never walk behind a car with its backup lights on

2. when climbing a ladder, only move one limb at a time

3. never walk in front of a car that has its engine running

4. wait for traffic to stop before setting a foot in the crosswalk

5. floss every day

6. keep your shoes on when taking off or landing in an airplane (can't run barefoot over burning, torn metal)

7. if you smell smoke in a building, exit immediately. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200

8. take the stairs once in a while in your workplace, as then you'll know where they are when the building fills with smoke

9. wear a life jacket on a small boat, even if you look like a dork. The water ski vests are less klunky

Do they have shelter? Yes. There are homeless on the streets, but they generally refuse offers of shelter because a requirement for the shelter is they lay off the drugs.

Standard of living and quality of live are different things.

Looking back at my family tree, before 1900 a third of the babies would die. My great grandmother and great great grandmother died in childbirth. A great great aunt also died in childbirth, and her brother went after the father with a shotgun.

Kings tended to not have long lives. Disease routinely felled them, along with endless plots to murder them.

The king's "doctors" in medieval times were little more than witch doctors.

> Clean water depends on how you define "clean"

Always, back to arguing about the definitions of words. Let's put it simply. People before 1800 had little idea about clean water. They didn't know what bacteria was. They didn't know about contaminants. They had very poor sanitation practices. They died of cholera regularly.

Probably the greatest advance in health care in history was the introduction of a clean water supply.

So if you want to quibble about what "clean" means, I'll take municipal water, water filters, and boiling any day over what anybody in medieval times drank. If you don't think your water is clean enough, get a water filter from Amazon. They're cheap, and they work.

In the US, emergency rooms cannot turn away anyone. The care delivered there is light years ahead of anything any king got in medieval times.

So, fruits and vegetables cost more than processed ready meals? Yesterday I bought a banana for $.22.

The government provides food to the poor with SNAP.

The only starving people in America are drug addicts or very ill people. Obesity is the usual problem for poor people.

America's poor do have food, shelter, and health care.