Languages as a moving target (was: Re: Perl question)

[Fairlight]

You'll never BELIEVE what Jay Ashworth said here...:
> On Fri, Jun 18, 2004 at 09:05:52PM -0400, Fairlight wrote:
> > At Fri, Jun 18, 2004 at 11:39:17AM -0700 or thereabouts, 
> > suspect Bill Campbell was observed uttering:
> > > On Fri, Jun 18, 2004, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> > 
> > And how many versions of gcc have been out in the last few years?  Geez.
> > I'm not even sure what they're adding.  :)
> 
> Fine.  But has the *language* changed?  I don't think so.

Not that I -know- of.  I mean, the last actual change I know of was from
K&R to ANSI, but that was pre-1993, as I know gcc was doing ANSI on the
NeXTStep slabs I was using, since I needed and ANSI C compiler.  I don't
actually know the history of C well enough to know when the shift occurred.

> > I prefer to rely on an old maxim my C mentor impressed upon me, which can
> > be applied/extrapolated to any language:  "Remember, printf() is your
> > friend!"
> 
> As long as you're not chasing a Heisenbug.

I installed Heisenburg Compensators in arcadia long ago.  Got them
retrofitted from the Enterprise-D.  :)

> > I've rarely found something that couldn't be narrowed down with a little
> > debugging output, if I have the source.
> 
> GUI programs, my son.

Geez, Jay....even assuming that I couldn't write to STDOUT simultaneously
(I can in *nix -or- 'doze [or OS/X]), I could write to a file, or I could
just create another window specifically for debugging output of certain
types (although I wouldn't use that for -fatal- errors, of course).  I've
done debugging on GUI, and it really wasn't any harder than debugging CLI.
No biggie.  The biggest problem I had was hardwiring the System icon in a
win32 app to be what I wanted, and having that change an entirely unrelated
widget's size, as well as the geometry of the main window it was attached
to.  The subwidget got longer, the window got shorter.  I managed to fix
the problem and narrow down what caused half of it--one line of code fixed
the other half.  That wasn't really too bad.  Frustrating, but I've had
worse.

mark->
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