madgar

Why do you say that? The NRA is one of the single most powerful special interest groups in the USA. The tech industry doesn't even come close to the NRA's lobbying results.

the judiciary is bound by precedent, and there are 5-4 conservative Supreme Court rulings from the 80s to the early 2000s that cemented the status quo into place.

With Trump/Pence as POTUS the judiciary will be hamstrung for years barring a truly massive public groundswell behind reversing some of those decisions - if that happened, you might see a single judge flip. Whether that's enough depends on who dies before 2021.

My source is in-person conversations with a real-life human being, and working on one of his codebases that employed the technique. If you want to look up his work, his name is Bill McKeeman. I personally have never felt compelled to find secondary sources when I had primary sources.

Edit: I'm personally not surprised that open-source codebases don't employ this technique. Lots of great PL work was done for private companies until the 90s and while lots of work was published in papers and books, precious few open-source PL communities historically drew from academia. I'm sure you know the counter-examples.

Technique as old as dirt. My thesis advisor used it in the 60s and 70s.

His favored approach had one artificial limitation, perhaps a remnant of the age: he limited the size of source files in bytes to some power of 2. This let him represent each token (incl. white space/new lines/comments) as a pair of fixed-size integers indexing into the file bytes. The tokenized file is an array of those pairs and the concrete syntax tree is a tree where leaf nodes are indices into the array of tokens.

Suitable for syntax-directed code generation, control-flow graph generation, static analysis, linting, pretty-printing. Super memory compact and even has an upper bound on memory footprint. The caveat is that the source language does need to support composing a "module" out of multiple files because of the limit on source file size.

Perhaps you shouldn't be asserting yourself as an authority on what did or did not happen if you are too young to have experienced it in the first place.

I'm very young, only 27, and know that I missed a full decade of early internet culture and can't speak to it. Even given that, I had a 14.4 and fondly remember downloading a music video for hours. (No porn on the modems personally, I think I was barely adolescent when we upgraded to cable)

Oh god I hope nobody ever ends up innovating with my drinking water. The last thing I need is companies racing to cut costs on fucking water.

Research won't be done because over 20 years ago, Republicans made it illegal for federal taxpayer money to be used to study gun control.

Very little cleanly private money exists to study the issue. Universities are tainted with public funds, NGOs are tainted as well, and so on.

So what studies we do get are NRA-funded.

> You're not supposed to buy infrastructure for these types of gigs.

Then why does Uber offer financing?

I didn't ignore your reasoning, I acknowledged it and said it was not insightful.

Unused CPU instructions are difficult (but not impossible!) to deprecate for completely different reasons than the critical functionality of line discipline that is used all day every day and for which nobody has proposed a viable alternative.