Birch -
I thought Container as well (although Bag leapt to mind too) but Russ
decided against so all that was left was the more abstract
descriptor. Besides, LISP has a data structure or two and underlying
types, loosely defined but they are there - IMHO "Data Structure" is
neither procedural, declarative, nor functional.
Of course.
I merely have my face being rubbed in this right now cuz I'm the
old-school C programmer working with some new-school C++ kids who don't
really even know what a Struct is... They will create a Class when a
Struct is what they really need.
Since I grew up in the early days of Knuth's Art of Computer Programming
(when you were still in a Brooklyn grammar school beating up honor-roll
students for their lunch money)... I tend to the Procedural view of
things... I learned all the Applicative and Object Oriented and
Concatenative ( In my NeWS days) languages offered up to me in the
g(l)ory days. I have loved my Snobol and APL and Prolog and PostScript
(*as a programming language!*) and Objective C and Java and loved to
hate LISP and Haskell and Simula, and made peace with C++, but at heart,
I love the half-step of abstraction from hardware that good ole C
provides. It's a goddamn bit processing machine, gimme some register
variables and an easy way to do bit-shifts and I'll build the rest from
raw stock!
Of course due to my current work situation I am drawn to "bring me a
rock" like a moth to the flame.
Does this mean you are avoiding deadlines? Or just so morbidly
fascinated with all things work-related that answering enelucidable
riddles is like mother's milk?
I have a bottle of Irish Whiskey to replenish yours and Bourbon is
always good (rot gut or not) but you know that I can't condone burning
books for any reason!
Yes, I believe we did do some damage to a bottle of Jamesons last time
you were over. And I don't need you to condone the burning of books,
but that doesn't mean you can't warm your hands by the woodstove while
*I* do. The real sin would be to use good whiskey as an accellerant
(for the combustion, not the attitude).
-Birch
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