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Have you had your thyroid levels tested? My problem was mostly hypothyroidism.

The C Programming Language for pointers, which didn't make any sense to me in Pascal.

Thank you!

I was laid off from Eazel when their funding fell through in the 2001 dot-com crash. The founders were ex-Apple people and they arranged for Apple to interview those of us who had been laid off. I wasn't hired, but the people who did get jobs there made Safari. I spent the next few months at the library and watching my bank balance dwindle away, until some of my other former coworkers were hired at Danger and got me an interview there.

In my case it was hypothyroidism. See a doctor.

"3990 Old Town Avenue, San Diego" is permanently burned into my brain. I was finally in that neighborhood about 10 years ago and visited the shrine myself, even though any evidence of the company there is long gone now.

If only these sorts of workarounds really worked when your brain doesn't have enough of the right chemicals. "Can't make myself do the thing" turns out to be called ADHD, and T3+T4 thyroid treatment and Adderall have helped me.

Semicolons came in with Algol 58 too, which used them in what now seems like a really excessive way.

That was a common convention at the time and you can also see it in early BASIC manuals.

For is also from Algol, replacing "do" from Fortran. I agree it would be interesting to know why the word was chosen, but I think it comes from the mathematical "for all x in Y, x > 5" or whatever other assertion is being made.

Thanks. It has been cited as confusing in sources like The Elements of Programming Style, but I can appreciate that it may feel natural to some people, and there are certainly cases like strcmp() where a three-way distinction is necessary, and current languages lack a good way to talk about it.

I was a linguistics major in college and therefore am a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist about language. When I say I cannot say this, I mean that this construct does not exist in the ordinary dialect that I speak, in the same way that I can say "that doesn't need washed" even though speakers of many other dialects have to say "washing" instead. If it is in someone else's dialect, they can feel free to say it, but my experience is that it is rare.

Actually, no, you are right: I seem to have received one email message that begins a sentence with "else" in 1996 and another in 2003. So it is not unknown to me, but it is quite rare.