"Portable assembly language" is an oxymoron. And I have never heard anyone use that phrase to describe C.

Never mind building abstractions. The C language itself is a significant abstraction from the machine level. Only a small handful of operators and constructs in C have a close analogue to assembler statements (e.g., accumulation, shift and bitwise logical operators.) Therefore I maintain that it is not a low-level language.

No, it's a reference to this.

Assembler is a low-level programming language.

Machine language is a low-level programming language.

C is not a low-level programming language, although you can do low-level programming with it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Q: How many hardware engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: None. We tell the software engineers to patch around it.

Hemisphere-wide communication by strobing The Sun!! Mwahahahahaha...

Of course, the latency sucks (9 min both ways) but I'm working on it.

'Scuse me, I'm off to Kickstarter...

Or companies owned by Jehova's Witnesses can opt-out of health-insurance plans that include blood transfusions.

Or companies owned by Orthodox Jews can opt-out of plans that include medications derived from pork products.

Or companies owned by Hindus can opt-out of plans that include health products derived from cows.

We all want our friends and neighbors to have religious freedom. But when they become our employers, shouldn't there be a limit to their expression of it when it affects our access to health care?

Tell that to the person who modded the OP as "Informative."

You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: 'now, you are free to go where you want, do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.' You do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe you have been completely fair... This is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity—not just legal equity but human ability—not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result.

-- Lyndon B. Johnson

Well, that's basically a tautology. It's like saying "research shows most people think water feels wet." True statement, but so what?

Considering the Windows-centric nature of .NET, it's hardly surprising that Visual Studio has far more VB and C# programmers than any other IDE.

And yes, I know about MonoDevelop.

Light years ahead?

Between Eclipse and VS, I'd pretty much call it a tie. They're both good.

This.

Someone once said that IQ tests only measure how good you are at doing IQ tests. I would put it another way: they only measure a certain kind of intelligence -- the kind that is good at solving logical puzzles. Not necessarily the kind that excels at sports, arts, empathy, ethics, etc. As the OP says, they might be a proxy for ranking within groups, but not between them.

Good point. Thanks.

It does if you want to employ SI-unit conventions correctly.

In fact, the convention is to use kelvin (lower-case k) for the name of the unit, and K (upper case) for the abbreviation.

Clarification: I grew up in a country where High School started at grade 9 (not 10) and that was the grade in which this book was taught. The book did have somewhat mature content, but it was teachable at the upper-grade-school level (e.g., grade 8.)

And arguably are the better for it. (I remember the book fondly.)

Just about everything you read in High School is "forced" on you. I still appreciate the teachers who taught me, who knew full-well the majority of their students would out-earn them.