OI VEY, I AGREE -was once [Re: How far can stack [LIFO] solve do automatic garbage collection and prevent memory leak ?]

Richard Owlett rowlett at pcnetinc.com
Sat Aug 21 00:07:50 EDT 2010


John Passaniti wrote:
> On Aug 20, 6:51 pm, Hugh Aguilar<hughaguila... at yahoo.com>  wrote:
>> You can see an example of lists in my novice package (in the list.4th
>> file):http://www.forth.org/novice.html
>> Also in there is symtab, which is a data structure intended to be used
>> for symbol tables (dictionaries). Almost nobody uses linked lists for
>> the dictionary anymore (the FIG compilers of the 1970s did, but they
>> are obsolete).
>
> Thanks for pointing this out, Hugh.  After reading the code in your
> novice package and symtab, I am confused:  With code of that caliber
> and the obvious stunning intellect behind it, why hasn't everyone
> adapted your awesome symtab for symbol tables instead?  Any why hasn't
> there been an effort to translate symtab into other languages so users
> outside of Forth can also experience the sheer speed and hyper-
> efficient use of memory and CPU?  Let me say I find it refreshing that
> a great programmer like yourself doesn't bother with stupid fads like
> testing algorithms against large data sets and measuring performance
> relative to competitive algorithms.  That's all academic nonsense.
> The only test and measurement anyone needs are the comments at the top
> of symtab where you state your algorithm is better.  You clearly
> wouldn't have written that if it wasn't true.
>
>> Write some programs! Are we not programmers?
>
> Amen!  All this academic talk is useless.  Who cares about things like
> the big-O notation for program complexity.  Can't people just *look*
> at code and see how complex it is?!  And take things like the years of
> wasted effort computer scientists have put into taking data structures
> (like hashes and various kinds of trees) and extending them along
> various problem domains and requirements.  Real programmers don't
> waste their time with learning that junk.  What good did any of that
> ever do anyone?!
>
> Thanks Hugh for a refreshing stance on what it means to be a
> programmer.
>

Never thought I I'd agree wholeheartedly with very verbose John.

Hugh, you are complete idiot!

(and other less complementary  ...)



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