I'd trade all the ++s in the world for one type "string" though. Got so tired of having to build arrays in C++ to do what I could do with a simple type "string" in Pascal. To give you some idea of how naive I was when I started in computers, my husband, who was a systems analyst for GE/Honeywell suggested I take an intro to computers class at the local Jr. College. So I signed up for Basic Computer Programming because I thought it was a class on the basics of computer programming. Came home mad as a wet hen, asking my husband why he had never explained to me that computer languages were actual LANGUAGES with a vocabulary, syntax and grammar. I'm a language major....Latin, Spanish, French and German. Basic was just another language, and I never looked back. I've had my own computer consulting business for over 30 years now.
That actually is not a double negative in the way you think it is. As long as the two negatives are each related two separate entities then it is not a true double negative. That is actually how a null hypothesis is stated.
It's a lot easier to do in a computer program. One of my programmers, who was an experienced coder, once came to me because his code wasn't working. It had a double negative, but there was absolutely no way I was able to convince him that it had a double negative...he just couldn't see it. Even after I fixed it, and it ran properly, he couldn't understand why it didn't work the way he wrote it. Best I recall, it was an "if then else" type of error.
LOL, yes, I do love those ambiguous errors. They are common where I work. I think my favorite one is, when on diagnostic tool is having a problem, it will fail to load with a plain white page saying "Unauthroized". Whoever wrote it is obviously spelling challenged and it just makes me laugh.
The ID 10 T error is closely related to a PEBCAK error
I once had a computer shout at me. I was working on a GE time-share mainframe over the telephone modem, and we had some heavy rain. All the cables were underground, and I was having trouble getting a clear signal to the GE mainframe. I put in a common line of code and got back "unknown command." Knowing it was just because of the wet lines, I put it in again. Got the same message again. Put it in a third time and got "UNKNOWN COMMAND, UNKNOWN COMMAND, UNKNOWN COMMAND"
Or SNAFU AND FUBARThe ID 10 T error is closely related to a PEBCAK error
Yes, you are very correct. I used to have to proof all the Excel formulas at work because their if then else statements and nested if's whenever they would not work.
Mmm ... Zilog Z80. Those were the days when coding was coding ... And from there not too big a step to Intel 8086 ...
Completely unrelated to programming language, my favorite sign was on a wall in the laser lab at work. The sign read "Do NOT look into the laser with the remaining eye."
My first home computer was a KayPro Z80 system. CP/M. No hard drive, two 5.25" Floppy disk drives. It was a "portable." It weighed 35 lbs, but it had a handle on the top and the cover became the keyboard, so it was a "portable" computer LOL.
Hi Sharon, I had a Kaypro 2 too. And then a Kaypro 10 with the 10MB hard drive. I thought I was on top of the world in 1983. It was pretty amazing what one could do with a little 4 MHz computer and 64 K of Ram. - I kind of wish I still had it. - Dave
Yep, we had a Kaypro 10, too. Actually, I had two custom Kaypros, with four 3.5" floppies that I built myself! Two floppies mounted in each of the bays for the 5.25" discs. I took them to the CP/M symposium in Bend, Oregon one year. We had also bumped the speed up. Kaypros were much faster than the new IBMs LOL. (I can't remember what that symposium was called...the "something" Unofficial Gathering.)
If you mean Donald Knuth, he is still alive and well. He is also a famous organist...he has a huge pipe organ in his house!
I started with assembler, then Fortran (Call tran) and then Cobol. I traveled hundreds of miles to listen to Admiral Grace Hopper speak. I used her visuals of picoseconds, milliseconds and nanoseconds for my second career.Basic and Cobal in my time - Fortran came later
When I worked for GE back in the dark ages, my job was accumulation clerk. I would go around to all the assembly lines and get the list of what computers were going to be assembled that week, and put together the decks of cards for the parts department. It took me all week to get the deck of cards put together. I had all the cards in a box and was going down a flight of stairs when a guy coming up the stairs caught the end of the box with his briefcase and dumped the whole box of cards down the stairwell. It took me all day and half the night to get them back in order!I did Fortran programing on punch cards in college. What I hated the worst was that the card reader was probably not the best and you held your breath as it read in all your cards that it would do so without chewing one up. If it became jammed up with a card, you had to figure out what card(s) were destroyed, go back and make a new one(s), and then re-run your stack of cards. I remember one program taking 5-6 tries to get through all the cards in one run. Fun times...
My first computer was the original Compaq Portable, 2 floppies, no hard drive. It was a luggable PC, paid around $2,500 for it in 1984 I think. That's about $7,100 in todays dollars according to Mr. Google...
I remember that computer. Funny story about it. Normal setup for a pc was to lay it flat on the desk and put the monitor on top of it. But if the person wore bifocals, I used to stand the computer up on it's left side (so the power switch was on top) beside the monitor. When one of my clients with a compaq had the same problem, I knew the solution! It even had little feet on the side so you could stand it up or lay it down. I stood it up, and put the boot floppy in, and it wouldn't boot. Laid it down and put the boot disk in and it booted just fine. Called a Compac techie to come and he put the disk in with it standing up and it wouldn't boot. Laid it down and put the disk in and it would boot. Neither of us could figure out what the problem was, until I realized that the feet on the Compaq were on the right side, not the left side, and we were putting the floppy in upside down when it was standing up because we were conditioned to put it in label to the left! I looked at him and said "Are you going to tell her?" "Nope, I'm just going to tell her it is fixed and it is free."
Back in 1985 my boss at the first company I worked for in Houston and I left and started our own company.... the company we left had a computer system to keep track of purchase orders, to load into packing boxes and produce invoices and packing lists for customs... was a good system, though a little cumbersome.... we thought to make our own version at our new company and hired a programmer... he showed up one day with a computer much like what you show... it was an early Compac. looks just like the one above except it had an amber screen. He even offer a buy-in on the stock... should have bought a few shares. Compac was bought our or merged with Hewlett Packard some year back.
