printf("goodbye, Dennis"); • Hacker News Board

Re: printf("goodbye, Dennis");

#81

Post by speleding » Sat, Oct 22, 2011, 10:58 AM UTC

dextorious wrote: post #72

rwmj wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's wasn't clear at the time (pre-2003) that it was going to end up as a catastrophe. Furthermore the Economist always mentions now that they supported the invasion -- they've never sought to hide the fact.

Actually it was perfectly, perfectly clear, both that it would end up as a catastrophe as well as the motives for having it

At the time it was far from clear that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destructions. In fact, there was ample proof he had used those weapons previously on Kurds and American intelligence reports claimed he had more where those came from (which turned out to be false, of course, but who knew). There was no way to know that Bush would bungle the whole rebuilding phase and let Iraq slide into anarchy.

Hindsight is always 20/20. At least they owe up to the fact that they changed their opinion, I know lots of politicians who'd rather chose to rewrite history instead.

Re: printf("goodbye, Dennis");

#82

Post by nhaehnle » Sat, Oct 22, 2011, 11:51 AM UTC

nobody31415 wrote: post #58

bodyfour wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't argue that their ideological bent is pretty strong (and not one I altogether share, really) but the financial and international reporting is consistently superb. Even though I disagree with them often, I always learn something in the process.

it's not like they hide their ideology though - the paper is called the economist! Oddly enough they and The Telegraph (the most conservative UK daily) were the only places with decent science reporting, which is an interesting difference with 'conservative' in the USA

> it's not like they hide their ideology though - the paper is called the economist!

Economics as a field is in a sad state, isn't it? You basically stated outright that being an economist implies following an ideology, and nobody contradicted you.

Unless you water down the meaning of "ideology" to the point where you would call scientists' adherence to the scientific method "ideological", that's a pretty scathing indictment of the current state of economics as a science.

Just something to reflect on from time to time...

Re: printf("goodbye, Dennis");

#83

Post by 4ad » Sat, Oct 22, 2011, 12:39 PM UTC

crag wrote: post #56

shn wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We would all be living in Windows (DOS?) hell. :) Early in my career I was lucky to use Unix System V. I found those voluminous unix manuals so natural. I could find anything came to my mind less than a minute. Unix system was so coherent, so intuitive. I still enjoy unix prompt, shell to this day. His book "The C Programming Language" has been the best language book I have ever read. So succinct, but so rewarding fo…

Actually I'm not so sure about that. There was much debate at the time (when Windows 3.11 was everywhere) whether it was a subset of UNIX. At the very least, it was inspired by UNIX. Where would we be? Probably all running VMS (which by the way runs on PC's). Or maybe WangVS or something owned by CA now. //edited for typos

VMS was a a reaction to UNIX, I'm not sure how different DEC's operating systems would have looked if UNIX did not exist.

VMS runs on ALPHA and ITANIUM systems, it doesn't run on anything that vaguely qualifies as a PC, unless you think Windows NT is a VMS variant. It's certainly influenced by VMS, but I say it's a different product.

Re: printf("goodbye, Dennis");

#84

Post by pedrolll » Sat, Oct 22, 2011, 1:05 PM UTC

speleding wrote: post #81

dextorious wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it was perfectly, perfectly clear, both that it would end up as a catastrophe as well as the motives for having it

At the time it was far from clear that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destructions. In fact, there was ample proof he had used those weapons previously on Kurds and American intelligence reports claimed he had more where those came from (which turned out to be false, of course, but who knew). There was no way to know that Bush would bungle the whole rebuilding phase and let Iraq slide into anarchy. Hinds…

Please don't write anarchy when you mean chaos.

Re: printf("goodbye, Dennis");

#85

Post by fl3tch » Sat, Oct 22, 2011, 1:40 PM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #62

pradocchia wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not forget their stalwart support of war with Iraq in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion. Well-written obits and cultural pieces are one thing. Propaganda to turn the minds of Anglo-American movers and shakers is quite another.

It's wasn't clear at the time (pre-2003) that it was going to end up as a catastrophe. Furthermore the Economist always mentions now that they supported the invasion -- they've never sought to hide the fact.

If you are not aware of the many, loud critics during the lead up to the invasion, then you need a more diverse portfolio of news sources. Scott Ritter alone, remember him? He was an actual intelligence officer and weapons inspector who spent years in Iraq, and who went on TV numerous times during the lead up, strongly arguing that an invasion would be a disaster. So yeah, it was plenty clear to many people.

Re: printf("goodbye, Dennis");

#86

Post by dextorious » Sat, Oct 22, 2011, 2:10 PM UTC

speleding wrote: post #81

dextorious wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it was perfectly, perfectly clear, both that it would end up as a catastrophe as well as the motives for having it

At the time it was far from clear that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destructions. In fact, there was ample proof he had used those weapons previously on Kurds and American intelligence reports claimed he had more where those came from (which turned out to be false, of course, but who knew). There was no way to know that Bush would bungle the whole rebuilding phase and let Iraq slide into anarchy. Hinds…

"""At the time it was far from clear that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destructions. In fact, there was ample proof he had used those weapons previously on Kurds and American intelligence reports claimed he had more where those came from (which turned out to be false, of course, but who knew)."""

Everybody in the world knew, except American's watching FOX News and giving any basis on Bush era "intelligence reports". Weapons of mass destruction, my ass. Just an excuse to attack on the same man that was a valid us ally for decades (like in Iraq/Iran war era).

Re: printf("goodbye, Dennis");

#87

Post by drdaeman » Sat, Oct 22, 2011, 2:45 PM UTC

yxhuvud wrote: post #74

pjscott wrote: post #5

I am slightly bothered by the lack of a '\n'.

I'm more bothered by the lack of #include and abysmal function signature.

My first thought, too.

Quite surprising, though, at least as Wikipedia claims¹, this (except for the lack of "\n") was the exact "hello world" code from the first edition of K&R.

____

¹) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_(programming_language)#.22Hel... and I don't have any copy of the first edition.

Re: printf("goodbye, Dennis");

#88

Post by nobody3141 » Sat, Oct 22, 2011, 3:37 PM UTC

makecheck wrote: post #44

Unfortunate that they give Linus Torvalds so much praise for "reinventing Unix" with Linux. It was at least substantially, if not equally, made possible by projects such as GNU. Clearly the kernel was a huge and necessary part, but it was just that: a part.

It was also made possible by cheap ubiquitous i386 PCs - so it was really all due to the Microsoft monopoly

Re: printf("goodbye, Dennis");

#89

Post by anamax » Sat, Oct 22, 2011, 3:40 PM UTC

ced wrote: post #35

I'm curious about what a world without Mr. Ritchie would look like. What were the popular alternatives to C and Unix in 1970?

There was a lot of OS research pre-unix. In some sense, unix, at least the API, killed them.

Lots of folks were working on "portable" (as in "easy to port") OSs at that time but unix won the battle on PDP-11s and the other ISAs failed to gain much traction.

My favorite was OS was Tenex, from parc (?) which later became TOPS-20. (TOPS-10 ran on the same basic hardware but was completely different.) However, it wasn't portable.

Re: printf("goodbye, Dennis");

#90

Post by getsat » Sat, Oct 22, 2011, 6:05 PM UTC

bremac wrote: post #43

getsat wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding a newline doesn't flush anything. You'd want to call fflush() to do that.

printf prints to standard output, which is line-buffered by default when reading from a tty on UNIX variants. This can lead to strange problems for those who try to use it to track which parts of a program are being executed, as demonstrated by the following program with an infinite loop: #include int main(int c, char **v) { printf("Hello\nJello"); while(1) ; return 0; }

Yes. You're not agreeing or disagreeing with me. Did you reply to the wrong post?

Also, using printf() for debugging? In 2011? I seriously hope you guys don't do this.