Python Gotcha with Octal Numbers

Sam Penrose spenrose at well.com
Mon Feb 18 22:21:20 EST 2002


Charles Richmond  <richmond at ev1.net> wrote:
    Ed Fredkin is semi-famous. He was mentioned prominantly in David
    Levy's book _Hackers_. He also invented some data structures that
    are used today, notably the "trie". 
    
He means Steven Levy. 

http://www1.fatbrain.com/asp/bookinfo/bookinfo.asp?theisbn=0141000511

I finally got around to reading this a couple months ago, and I wish I
hadn't waited that long. It is a wonderful history of the culture of
computing in a few important places, notably MIT in the 60's and 70's.
If you are enough of a geek to frequent c.l.py., you really should
consider this book mandatory reading. A lot of programmer behavior that
seems randomly bizarre can be traced back to management decisions made
by government contractors lo these many years ago. Among other things,
it explains where Richard Stallman came from.

and-the-answer-is-not-"Mars"-ly yours,
s





More information about the Python-list mailing list