Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Diplomatic pouch? (Score 1) 299

Surely Police in the UK have the right to stop and require people to identify themselves, especially when in a car.

No. If you are driving a car, the police can stop you for any reason and you must present your documents (driver's licence, registration, MoT and insurance). But you don't have to carry them on you and if you don't you need to present them at a police station within seven days. This only applies to the driver.

At other times, the police have the power to stop and question you at any time. They can also search you, if they have reasonable grounds to believe you are carrying drugs, a weapon, stolen goods or something used to commit crimes (I guess any tools would count there). But you are not obliged to show them any identification.

In fact many people don't carry photo id around. There are no id cards and older style British driving licences don't even have a photograph on them. I got a new driving licence with my photograph on it last year and that was only because a photo licence will be mandatory from 2015.

Comment Re:Python for learning? Good choice. (Score 1) 415

The problem is that different humans have different ideas about exactly what white space to use and where. For instance, for brace indentation, I prefer Allman style whereas most people go with some variant of K&R style.

The other problem is that white space is actually invisible to humans and glancing at a piece of code that is indented, a we cannot tell how many white space characters are there. Think of make files where it matters if the indent is made of tab or space characters. For human readability, the number and type of white space characters (including line feeds) should make no difference to the meaning of the code. If you need to enforce a project standard, there are tools that can do that and that obviate the source of errors that you think Python eliminates.

Comment Re:another language shoved down your throat (Score 1) 415

I disagree. When somebody is learning how to program, you wan the language to be as easy to use as possible. You want to be able to solve real problems with a minimum amount of "boiler plate" and extraneous concepts.

For instance, in Java, you cannot write anything without having a class, so you have to introduce classes and methods (including static ones) to the beginner right at the start. Whereas with Python, you can pretty much type statements that do things straight away.

Also, you want the error messages to be simple and descriptive in terms that a beginner can understand. So when you index off the end of an array, you want the computer to print an error message that says "you've indexed off the end of the array", not to silently scribble over the process's memory.

This is not to say that Java and C don't have their place, they are just less suitable as a first teaching language than Python.

Comment Re:Obvious (Score 2) 285

Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote the first BASIC interpreter for a microcomputer. Of course before they did that, they had to write an emulator for the target hardware since they didn't have an Altair. It's not enough to put him in the top ten, but it's unfair today he was no great programmer.

Comment Re:What the fuck is this thing? (Score 2) 69

The segmented memory model was actually more flexible than the flat memory model, because even individual processes could manipulate their own segment registers to address the full 1 MB range.

Should really be written

The segmented memory model was actually less flexible than the flat memory model, because individual processes had to manipulate their own segment registers to address the full 1 MB range.

There's no doubt that, from the point of view of a programmer, the flat memory model is simpler and more flexible. You only have to see the kludges that 8086 C compilers introduced to make the full 1 Megabyte available to C programmers to understand that. Also check out every operating system, designed for the 386 and up which immediately set all the segment registers to point to segments that were 4Gb in size and that started at address 0.

Comment Re:Hey... (Score 1) 173

Well, for a start, its address is

Flat 3b, 3 Hans Crescent, London SW1X 0LS

In Wikipedia, it is described as "a suite of rooms occupying part of the ground floor of the building, which has been described as an "apartment block".

It's likely not very big. It would probably be quite comfortable for Assange if he didn't have to share it with the Ecuador diplomatic staff.

Slashdot Top Deals

"I've seen it. It's rubbish." -- Marvin the Paranoid Android

Working...