Hi, Clockwise: Terry, Clive, Paul, Christopher, Ken, Ralph, Charles.
Charles used to be part of EMS, Electronic Music Studios, and back then they supplied instruments to the likes of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Pink Floyd. http://www.ems-synthi.demon.co.uk/emsstory.html Some CPU's have a carry bit, others a borrow bit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carry_flag#Carry_flag_vs._Borrow_flag "The 6502 is a particularly well-known example because it does not have a subtract without carry operation, so software must ensure that the carry flag is set before every subtract operation where a borrow is not required." Ken's learning Lua, which is a little unusual amongst the interpreted languages in having a register-based bytecode rather than stack-based. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lua_%28programming_language%29 Occam's Transputer and CSP was mentioned by Christopher, who has heard C. A. R. Hoare give a speech. Picochip in Bath are a distant descendant with their picoArray. http://www.picochip.com/page/12/multi-core-dsp Awk's associative arrays, as they were known back then, now better known as hashes or dicts, come in useful at the command line, e.g. last | awk '!l[$2]++' showing the most recent user on each terminal. Snobol had them and influenced awk. Patents cropped up. Various off-shoots: Publishing licence terms as public record may help a market operating. http://timharford.com/2011/08/taming-the-patent-troll/ Population growth and a patent's "obviousness". http://intridea.com/2011/8/18/whats-wrong-with-patents pg's recent advice to start-ups, the footer's "The Investment That Didn't Happen" is worth a read. http://paulgraham.com/patentpledge.html Unix's setuid bit was patented back in the 70s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setuid#History http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC=US&NR=4135240&KC=&FT=E&locale=en_EP Peter Norvig re-visited an old _Scientific American_ article on a draughts (checkers) computer program by Englishman Christopher Strachey and got it running today with Python. (The "∧" should be "∧".) The errors Peter found probably aren't, apart from the missing close parenthesis, but more a misunderstanding of a-b to mean, in modern parlance, a&~b instead of a^b, XOR being a subtract without carry. http://norvig.com/sciam/sciam.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Strachey The particular oddness I was trying to recall regarding PHP's design is the ternary ?: operator is left associative, not right as in C, Perl, etc. http://php.net/manual/en/language.operators.precedence.php Cheers, Ralph. -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, Tuesday 2011-10-04 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://goo.gl/4Xue
