code tags of course. ;)

<code> </code>

And to post tags with out /. eating those html entities for less than and greater than:

&lt; and &gt; and &amp; for the ampersand itself

Lol, yes, relax. I'm not a pure C guy and I won't offend you by pretending to be.

You know, until I saw it in this thread, it never occurred to me to just open a new block for the purposes of inlining a debug declaration. Thanks, I'll use that.

Cool beans. The one C program I do have to maintain (a small 'plugin' DLL for an embedded system) I have to compile with Visual Studio 2010, which doesn't support C99 syntax. So as of about today I'm still not allowed to, even if the rest of the world has been enjoying it for 16 years. VS2012 doesn't have it either; but i hear VS2013 does. :)

That's not the issue at all. The specific example I gave was the issue:

An IF DEBUG; where the variable was only used within the debug conditional.

In C++, C#, etc I've always declared and initialized anything I needed in a debug block in the debug block, except for in C where not only did i declared it at the top, but it gets its own debug block too since its only used by debug builds.

Even in a short function this is inelegant looking:

void func(int a)
{
      int x = 1;
      int y = 2;
      int z = 0;
#IF DEBUG
      int q = 3;
#ENDIF
      z = dosomething(a, x);
      y += z;
#IF DEBUG // do something that needs z,y and q
#ENDIF
[... rest of function...]
}

Your note that I can start a block anywhere -- Thanks; until now it hadn't occurred to me to use that expressly to inline declarations for debug blocks.

I'm not sure about that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Yes it also says:

Thus C99 is an ANSI standard, but its not "ANSI C"
When you say "ANSI C" its still C89/90.

At least that's my take on it.

// comments were added to the C standard. Not good old ANSI see but still ok.

I haven't looked at the code, but the one thing I usually trip over when having to write pure C instead of C++ that's really mostly C is that everything has to be declared at the top of the function... Always. even some variable you only use in the IF $DEBUG block, I normally declare those in the if $debug block where it occurs, rather than creating a 2nd if debug block at the top of the function just to declare it.

And stuff like that.

Or he loads up a few more of those apps for it...

Wifi not working after suspend on a laptop?
Crashing on reboot every 2nd time?

What you consider minor issues, I would consider deal breakers.

subsitute "so bad" with "controversial" and its about right. Playboy is a source of controversy, and anything coming from it IS going to be indelibly tainted by that controversy.

I accept that the objection to the image may not be entirely rational. I also accept that, rational or not, their objection does exist.

I also note that the provenance of the image usually does come up, because its "interesting", and the inevitable recovery of the full nude image by some interested student, and the content of the resulting commentary is usually inappropriate in a computer science class. While the cropped picture itself is unobjectionable it all but inevitably triggers this chain of events.

Between that and the fact that the image itself is not in any way irreplaceable or indispensable it seems logical to replace the image.

FTFA:

Sounds like the school saw things her way... at least eventually.

So what? If significantly fewer people find it offensive, then its better.

And I can pretty much guarantee than an innocuous headshot photo I take of perfectly normal woman wearing a hat with a feather on it will prove to be far less controversial than a cropped playboy centerfold from the 70s.

Perfect is the enemy of good.

I am not being obtuse. I am well aware it is both a common and famous image. I've seen it several times over the years.

But the only real objection to dropping it amounts to "In a perfect world no one would think we should have to".

To that I would say "Grow up". The entire so-called standard image collection is extremely low resolution, poor quality color, and dated. Nobody is really doing real science on it anymore. We have libraries with thousands of equal or better images. People don't pick Lenna for their publication to compare it with old research - people pick her because she's like a mascot.

We can pick a new mascot image. It won't break science.

Lots of sports teams in the US have dropped their traditional names and selected new mascots over the years due to being inappropriately offensive to native americans. Even now The Washington Redskin's owner is kicking and screaming to hold onto that name, but the writing is on the wall; and its only a matter of time until that gets changed too.

Lenna is a central story in computer imaging history and that's fine. Let it just become history. It's not a appropriate photo anymore, it never really was.

So, not using the image in a high school assignment will somehow diminish the students education? Absurd.

Yes. That's exactly what we do. There are consequences. In most cases simply altering ones behavior to better meet expectations is sufficient.

This really doesn't need to devolve into politics. No question the world is not remotely fair.

You've essentially said the students shouldn't question authority or express themselves when they see misogyny or injustice etc. Yes they will learn the world isn't a perfect place -- that is part of growing up. But trying to change it, and changing what you can is a part of growing up too.

The point? My version wouldn't be a crop of a nude woman that would belong to playboy. There would be nothing the least bit controversial about it, and it would have all the same technical merits in terms of suitability as a test case for an image processing alogorithm.

What does what "you see" have to do with it? Frankly I agree with you about the image itself. I am not personally offended by it.

But surely you accept the empirical evidence that many other people do find even the idea of the use of a centerfold image lifted (even cropped) from Playboy to be inappropriate in an academic setting.

I see it. I even agree its inappropriate. Its certainly not something I'd knowingly do if I were selecting images to create a sample set of images for high school course.

/shrug

your right. it meets a technical definition of censorship. I withdraw my objection based on it not being censorship.

However, even if I accept its "censorship", so what? There is nothing wrong whatsoever with not doing something that pops into your head because you realize other people would not appreciate it, would not understand, or would be offended by it.

There is nothing wrong with that. Yet you make out like its universally wrong. That's ridiculous.

Or are you really suggesting that a high school computer science teacher is showing good judgement if he goes through his porn collection, crops a bunch of the images of various porn actresses and provides those as his sample data set, with attribution. (Because not providing proper attribution is itself academic dishonesty.)

Does he have the right to do it? Sure. Because otherwise censorship right?

But does everyone else have a right to tell him he's an idiot, and refuse to do the assignment, and complain the administration that they feel the assignment is completely inappropriate, and demand he be replaced with a teacher who doesn't make decisions like this. Why yes, they can, because if they couldn't that would be censorship too. And around we go.

Some measure of reasonable self-censorship is part of normal social lubricant. Whether or not you personally feel the image is offensive you are aware that it controversial. If you select it knowingly you provoke controversy. If if you provoke controversy... then own the consequences.

While you have the right to offend. Other people have the right to be offended.

It's not censorship.

http://www.ringwoodbiology.co....

or take your pick...crop to hearts content...

http://www.bigstockphoto.com/s...
http://www.bigstockphoto.com/s...

Yes, its a suitable image. But its not uniquely suitable. Any of thousands of other images are equally suitable.

Hell, I could recreate the pose with a volunteer model (wife), 10 minutes, and trip to the thrift shop for.

Of course.