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Showing posts from January, 2005

Square on the net

I was shopping around lately for wikis. On the way, I stumbled on twiki wiki and registered there to get to try it. Today, I found that when I search for my name in Google, it brings up a page in twiki.org with the registration details I gave ( http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Main/DrorHarari ). A nice place for one to create a personal wiki though I really did not like to see this registeration fiasco.

Goto Statement Considered Harmful Revisited

Jon Udell wrote ( http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/01/20.html#a1155 ) on alternative programming models based on, for example, the tree structure underlying languages such as Java. He referred to a screencast and paper by Jonathan Edwards. The factorial example brings me back about 22 years to the hilarious April 1984 CACM issue where Dijkstra's "Goto Statement Considered Harmful" was "solved" using the COME FROM statement including its more advanced variants of ON x COME FROM label, COMPUTED COME FROM (See http://www.fortranlib.com/gotoless.htm ). That article culminated with a demonstration of the powerful of this new construct. The factorials function was built using COME FROM. Of course it took considerable effort to decipher the logic and understand what it does and how. When I look at Subtext, I get a similar feeling -- I cannot see and get it at once. I really have to work to decipher it. I guess the main reason for that is that us humans think in...