When I was at University 30 years ago, I used a programming language called APL. I believe the acronym stood for "A Programming Language", This language was interpretive and was especially useful for array and matrix operations with powerful operators and library functions to help with that. Did you use APL? Is this language still i...
I've read about a really beautiful langauge called "Ada", which seems very powerful to me, with a lot of what we call these days "safety features". What was wrong with Ada not to make it a first-class language in industry? I know that it has been used in mission-critical software. What I am asking about is what does not make it a good ...
I've been working with Python for a while and I find the syntax for declaring methods as static to be peculiar. A regular method would be declared: def mymethod(self, params) ... return A static method is declared: def mystaticethod(params) ... return mystaticmethod = staticmethod(mystaticmethod) If you don't add the s...
It has been 22 years between the initial public release of Perl 1.0 (December 18, 1987) and the current stable release 5.10.1 (2009). During those 22 years the following notable releases have been made: Perl 1.0 (1987 - initial release) Perl 2 (1988 - better regular expressions) Perl 3 (1989 - support for binary data streams) Perl 4 (...
When looking at the history of C#, I found out that C# was seen as an update to C and/or C++. This came a bit as a surprise to me, as on the surface, I see much more common ideas between C# and Java (Garbage collection comes to mind). I don't write code in Java, but I have usually no problem following Java code, and routinely read books ...
Why was it decided to ship javascript programs in plain text? Was it to achieve performance enhancement or the authors never imagined that javascript will be used in much more complex applications and developers may want to protect the source code? ...
When I was learning PHP, I read somewhere that you should always use the upper case versions of booleans, TRUE and FALSE, because the "normal" lowercase versions, true and false, weren't "safe" to use. It's now been many years, and every PHP script I've written uses the uppercase version. Now, though, I am questioning that, as I have se...
For instance, I know that basically all languages that are object oriented based are basically derivatives of C# or C++ correct? Does anyone know the order they came in? Like C -> C++ -> C# -> PHP, etc. ...
Java's unary plus operator appears to have come over from C, via C++. As near as I can tell, it has the following effects: unboxes its operand, if it's a wrapper object promotes its operand to int, if it's not already an int or wider complicates slightly the parsing of evil expressions containing large numbers of consecutive plus signs...
I've been working in C for so long that the fact that compilers typically add an underscore to the start of an extern is just understood... However, another SO question today got me wondering about the real reason why the underscore is added. A wikipedia article claims that a reason is: It was common practice for C compilers to prep...
Erlang Shen or Erlang is a Chinese deity who supposedly regulates floods, Erlang a computer language ideal for large volume applications. Is this just some kind of weird coincidence? ...
Until the recent Bond movies James preferred British made gadgets. The classic for me is from "You Only Live Twice", as there is real British gyro-copter nicknamed Little Nellie which (in the movie) shipped in 4 suitcases. In the action scenes Little Nellie took on several helicopters. This nifty British made gadget got me wondering ...