riiiiiiiiight, but that's not what they're talking about when they say that removing the semi-colon would make white-space significant.

HAHAHAHAHA! Sorry, it's too good of a post not to pass along.

What dirty secrets?
Me and a friend regularly chat about this sort of social trends. His father was an enforcer for the Hell's Angels. He's lead a slightly more colorful life than I have. I have to remind him at regular intervals that some of us actually kept our nose clean and don't have a sordid past and a laundry list of activities that others could hold over our head forever.

But sure, in such a hypothetical scenario: I'D ABSOLUTELY OPPOSE THE NSA'S ILLEGAL PROGRAMS! (especially when it gathered said dirty laundry). I'd just do it anonymously, because otherwise they could end me at a moment's notice. Because I'm not sure I'm such a martyr that I'd make that sort of sacrifice just to showcase how badly they could abuse their power.

Now... if I were a hypothetical politician, becoming a martyr and exposing such actions is actually good for the career. Sooooooo maybe I'd try to exchange the dirty laundry for the good deed.

Time to remind everyone of the last time this happened.

Except it was J Edgar Hoover, the FBI, their programs like COINTELPRO, and those crazy radicals like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Albert Einstein as well as people on the list for being part of the women's right movement, civil rights movement, "the new left", criticizing the Vietnam war, and the typical boogy-man organizations of socialists and communists.

Or hey, how about MINARET? or SHAMROCK?. Both of which had no warrents, but when people got a whiff of them, congress came down hard and the projects were discontinued.

What's so different about this time? Why are the power that be not doing their job?

Here's a great quote by meta-monkey, from A YEAR AGO:

One YEAR. The exact same trend is continuing. No one of power is fighting this. No one is backing down. Just what the fuck is going on?

What hardware? I mean, ANSI C, C99, and C11 don't lay out the X86 i/o map nor tell the compilers how to talk to ARM chips or MSP430's. What spec are you talking about?

I'm not sure you can claim "unofficial extensions" to Lisp are disqualified while saying C is more than it's spec.

I'm just saying, if you can do it in one language, you can do it in any other. As long as they're all turing complete. You seem to put assembly and C on some sort of pedestal. I'm just pointing out that the pedestal isn't real. There are so many better reasons to praise C, use one of those.

Not the best example, but you managed to point out what the problem is.

Here we go:
  i=i+1;j=j+2;k=k+3

If we simply remove the semicolons:
  i=i+1j=j+2k=k+3

Then we have variable names starting with numbers which is invalid.

If we replace the semicolons with spaces, then the compiler can infer the end of a statement, and everything is peachy. AH, but the complaint is that whitespace is now significant. But let's look at an example that doesn't run afoul of the "numbers starting variable names" issue:

i=i+foo;j=j+bar;k=k+var

If we remove the semicolons we get:

i=i+fooj=j+bark=k+var

fooj and bark are not the variables you intended. And that could cause problems. For everything else in C, the variable names are going to have some sort of operator or symbol or whatnot on either side of them.

Hmmm. But you sill need a space between void and main(), and any other such keyword. So I'm not sure you can say that whitespace is insignificant in C. But getting rid of the semicolons would make whitespace more significant.

Serious problems like avionics, medical software, space-probes, life-support. Critical applications. Where errors and bugs are absolutely unacceptable. Or back-end OS software, or server software where you care about speed of execution.

And this is the bit you're getting wrong. Turing-completeness has deeper ramifications than the ability simulate a Turing machine. It has to do with computability. The question of CAN we describe an algorithm to do X. And it turns out that if you have some basic building blocks like the ability to branch and remember things (and an infinite amount of space to work with), then you can compute anything that any other Turing complete machine could do.

As does EVERY language. Even Assembly. Microsoft's masm, or yasm are specific programs that know how to map x86 hardware to software, but the exact same thing can be done for a Lisp compiler. You're confusing an implementation of a language with the language itself. I could say that the KEIL51 C compiler gives me special function registers, sfrs, which are mapped to the 8051's serial port. BAM! just the same functionality that the assembler gives. Either you consider that an aspect of the language or you don't, but assembly, C, and Lisp are all in the same boat.

It does now. Because it's rare and uncommon. And if it goes well for him and people like him, then you're going to see more and more people performing PR campaigns on their own histories, re-writing the past, and burying their past sins.

The streisand effect only happens when someone steps out of line and deviates from the norm. It was an oddity that Streisand sued Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com for some aerial photography. Because it made waves, it attracted eyeballs.

Stan O'Neal using this law is a oddity right now. Let's see how commonplace it is in 5 years.

"right to be forgotten"
Sounds like a con-artists wet-dream.

I understand the whole forgiveness thing. Some people deserve a second chance. Some people can change.
But what about my right to tell my friends that that asshole just screwed me out of a ton of money and that he can't be trusted?

Huh? Have you ever written a compiler? A C compiler could infer the end of statements, regardless of semicolons or whitespace.

Well, yes, a little. But so what if it's a little harder to make a compiler for the language? That has nearly zero impact on the vast majority of people using the language. I mean, have YOU ever contributed to the GCC?

Or were you talking about coders' ability to read the code?

The response to that would be that new statements should go on another line, what kind of barbarian are you if you don't do that? Whether or not the line ends with a semicolon doesn't especially make anything more readable.

Just take a chunk of C code. Now delete all the semi-colons. Is that so much harder to read?

Whoahohold on there buddy, let me fix that for you

When people talk about "expressiveness" they usually refer to how easy it is to express such thoughts, not if it's possible.

No, actually, that's not true. You see, anything any Turing complete language can do, can be done by any other Turing complete language... eventually. The actions are 100% translatable. It might take you a whole boat-load of code to replicate objects in C, but it can be done. And sometimes that a Turing Tarpit.

Not conceptually. I mean, sure, you can do things faster in assembly, using less opcodes, just as you can do things faster in C, using less lines of code. But if you want result X, C can get you result X.

And here's the crux of the argument. That C is harder, less concise, and not as "safe" as other languages. Now, I love C. I'd even say that it's the best language to tackling serious problems. But for web-dev? For "expressiveness"? No man, no. I have to disagree. C is unsafe as all get out. It let's you shoot yourself right in the foot. We don't need no stinkin' safties! C can do anything, but it takes a lot of work to wrangle it into shape. Have you looked at the GTK? You CAN make you own garbage collector, but that's a lot of code. And simply put, C is hard. It's not a good language to learn on.

Uhhhhhhh, I'd say there's two camps.

1) The sort that forces you to do something because that's a good practice. Good to learn on. "This is the way child".

2) The sort that gets out of your way to let you do what you want.

Take the semicoln in C. It's not needed. It's really just a pleasant confirmation to the compiler to let it know that your current statement is done. But it doesn't strictly need to be there for compilers to know that. It's certainly how the language was written and how all C compilers expect code to be written, but that aspect of C is from the first camp.

A good language to learn on should enforce good practices. A good language for getting shit done shouldn't. I know that unit testing is a good idea in theory, but sometimes I just want to crank out some code and see how it goes.

Hey, that story isn't all sad:

"Three officers were tried for manslaughter and other charges surrounding falsification and were sentenced to ten, six, and five years."

The entire narcotics department (that weren't in jail) was flushed with new hires replacing them and no-knock warrents are more restricted.

So far they're doing better than LA cops...

Right, there's no money in selling the ammonia.

But there's a profit to be made selling the thing that can run on free fuel as opposed to $5.00/gal oil.

And there's a fuckton of profit to be made inventing the technology that allows the car-makers to earn a profit over the heads of their competitors.

This would be a FANTASTIC business.

AAAAaaahhh, implied anti-competitive practices by the entrenched powers. That's a legitimate concern and if these guys wind up mysteriously murdered and/or promoted to the oil/gas industry, then you can bet your ass then people are watching and will chase after that golden opportunity, albeit quietly.

Holy SHIT!
You can go back up the stairs in Nethack!? Does the maker of Rogue know?

No, actually it didn't. The reason they had a procedurally generated map is that they COULDN'T save the game-state to disk. Disks were really small back then. Size constraints are a thing of the past, but they were a super-bitch back in the day. Their "fractal engine" created the world from an algorithm. And then I think they saved a couple flags if the player dinked with a planet or advanced plot. Saving the delta could really add up, so I don't know exactly how they persisted their map.