31 AUG 2013 by ideonexus
COBOL as a Programming Language
I worked with COBOL near the end of my last contract and found aspects of it fascinating compared to today's languages. Everything is about structures that map directly to the bits on disk, with fine grain control on precision and data types. But then the language reads as a series of macros where you don't have to remember the low level details: do this to this, put this here, if this do that.
It's also a terribly difficult language to parse because it was designed for ease of use by humans...Folksonomies: history computer science
Folksonomies: history computer science
Comment captures what's interesting about it historically, how early programmers needed algorithms to handle all the bit-switching.
07 MAR 2012 by ideonexus
We See the Momentary End-Point of the State of the Earth
In the course of the history of the earth innumerable events have occurred one after another, causing changes of states, all with certain lasting consequences. This is the basis of our developmental law, which, in a nutshell, claims that the diversity of phenomena is a necessary consequence of the accumulation of the results of all individual occurrences happening one after another... The current state of the earth, thus, constitutes the as yet most diverse final result, which of course repre...Folksonomies: causation
Folksonomies: causation
What we see on our planet is the result of a several-billion-year accumulation of events.
03 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
A Primitive Alien Considers Human Visitors from Space
Tines. I like it. If that was the alien’s image, then it was the right name for his race. His pitiful advisors—and sometimes even the Flenser Fragment—were still intimidated by the ship from the stars. No question, there was power in that ship beyond anything in the world. But after the first panic, Steel understood that the aliens were not supernaturally gifted. They had simply progressed—in the sense that Woodcarver made so much of—beyond the current state of his world’s science...Their technology is not magic, he realizes, but, as a multi-bodied lifeform, he is deeply disturbed by our singleton nature.