Zickzack

> It showed an area totaling just 20 square kilometers, a tiny place. The map was divided into 400 individual grid squares, outlined in light blue — a single square kilometer each.

He means 20 kms squared, as opposed to 20 square kilometers. The map should be 80cm x 80cm then.

I shall raise my glass to this fine gentleman.

Flavius Josephus writes in the History of the Jewish War against the Romans - an important source for the Roman army - that the first cohort of every legion was twice the size of other cohorts, because it included the veterans, i.e. those who had served 16 years at least.

The following calculation is either simplistic or robust, depending on your view. And I am aware that there are simplifying assumptions, like the one that the rate of attrition did not depend on the service age of the soldier. There are reasons for that even. Younger soldiers might have fallen prey to infections because they encountered them the first time. Older soldiers were possibly tougher in that respect. Young soldiers took two years to learn to fight like a legionary. Old soldiers may have balanced their ageing bodies (a decade or more of gruelling service) with their experience. And yes, not all veterans would be incorporated into the first cohort, because they had higher echelon jobs in their respective cohort. But then, the good ones (long lasting ones?) would have been members of the first cohort in the first place because it was supposed to be elite. So bear with me.

Josephus gives us that a Roman legion could be divided in eleven roughly even sized parts, with the veterans forming one of these eleven parts. Assuming a constant rate of attrition (see above), this means that about 8% of a legion were lost each year for a variety of reasons other than retirement, 92% made it. If we assume twenty years of service, 0.92^20 gives ~ 0.188, so roughly one fifth of the legionaries made it to retirement.

If the same attrition rate applied to auxiliaries - twenty five years of service -, then about one in eight auxiliaries made it. And finally, the Pretorian guard, where the assumption of the same rate may be a stretch: sixteen years of service mean that one in four enjoyed the fruits of his post-military life.

Let us assume there were no reasonable explanation for the origin of life. Yet, "there is no reasonable explanation of life, hence god exists" would still be a non sequitur. You have to brush up your Logic, and it is not meant as a 'take that'.

If you want to do yourself a favor, try your skills on "there is no reasonable explanation of life, hence Zeus exists". Or Allah, if it helps.

Worse yet, you are peddling the god of the gaps: the god that is supposed to explain things where science cannot. This is exactly the god that is fleeing from science ever since science reared its head. And it is the view of god which the original article tries to refute. As your existence shows, it cannot be entirely right.

> Personally I find it very sad that the agnostic approach of Pascal did not prevail. Let the programmer decide what they think fits the situation best and let the compiler deal with the technicalities. This, and I also miss range types... for like 40 years now...

I am with you there. However, Pascal, a toy Algol, was designed to be a language for a compiler course. It took its ideas like "where does an array start" from other Algol implementations and added a broken type system. Pascal gets the love now, as witnessed by the Lua designers referring to Pascal and not to Algol.

> 1-based indexing causes you to have to throw in a bunch of +/-1 compensation factors to prevent you from double-counting or scaling past an edge.

Way back then, I started with Algol 68, moved on to Turbo Pascal, and finally Fortran (I was young and needed the money). My vectors and arrays started at 1, as was the default, and I do not even know what you allude to. The first element has the index 1. Since there is no zeroth element - neither in language nor in thinking -, starting at 0 is what causes problems. You always have to use a corrective term in your head - the element five elements after the third one has index 7.

Yes, whatever.

>[] I'd say 90%+ Poles say "królowa" (literally queen).

I thought "królowa" is reserved for Mary, Queen of Poles.

> William Fairbairn, was a portly pensioner with an unusual passion: he was the world’s leading expert in silent killing

This reads like a sentence straight from a bad 70s action movie. Who had decided he was the world's leading expert? And how in the world would one know?

The "narrative history" seems to use a lot of name dropping, as witnessed by the reference to Churchill in the title. Special Operations Executive, the ministry of ecomomic warfare as well as the build up of a large air force go back to the much maligned Neville Chamberlain.

> Arguing continuity of national borders over centuries in the Balkans is a fools game anyway.

Hear, hear.

Yet, the knowledge of the so called historical regions will get you far in Eastern and Southern Europe. The maps of voting behavior pop up here every now and then. And this is only one aspect.

When I read this:

> But everything ALGOL-68 did, PL/I did earlier and better.

I just wanted to write "Not so". As much as I appreciate the OP in general, his knowledge of Algol 68 is limited. Algol 68 was more than the introduction of first class datatypes. Parallel programming comes to mind. In comparison to PL/I, there were other features such as automatic memory management. It helped to have had John McCarthy in the commitee.