That's actually what it's like at "Mojave Spaceport". Hangers of small aviation practicioners and their junk. Gary Hudson, Burt Rutan, etc. Old aircraft and parts strewn about. Left-over facilities from Rotary Rocket used by flight schools. A medium-sized facility for Orbital. Some big facilities for BAE, etc. An aircraft graveyard next door.
SS2 has not completed testing and it is probable that there will be a need for redesign of one or more components. So, this is a really bad time to have the hand-off. Publicity isn't a good reason.
OTOH, air pressure at sea level is a variable which can change significantly in even a short period of time. Still, dramatic changes don't happen, but it's better to measure it in
Well....sort of. The CMB is modified by galaxies that are too faint to see, though I don't know by how much. It's filtered by intervening dust clouds moving WRT both us and the "origin of the signals". Etc. I normally assume that this is taken account of as best we can, but it's not unmodified signal. If you look at the raw (uncorrected) observations, I don't know how much noise is present, but clearly that are signals too weak to be recognized even though detected.
OTOH, I am not a cosmologist. But I do recognize that error bars are important, and that they tend to get left out of popular articles.
Nonsense. The cat does not hate the mouse, the cat LOVES the mouse. It's delicious.
Yes. There are numerous reasons to "not fight city hall". But that doesn't mean you can't do it for a good enough reason. E.g., I use tab spacing at the start of Python lines. This causes formatting problems if I use idle, but to me its worth the cost. And I've occasionally had reasons to use a length terminated string in C...though I usually also zero terminate it. (IIRC the reason was that I needed to include 0 valued bytes in the string.)
Similarly you can use zero delimited strings in Pascal, but you need to write the support routines that you would need, and since current Pascal has a string type that isn't limited to 255 chars it they would appear to be rarely needed.
No.
Python is an open source project. Ruby is an open source project. Squeak is an open source project. D is an open source project. Racket (scheme) is an open source project. ALL have decent language documentation. And that was just a list off the top of my head. Being an open source project is not an excuse for lousy documentation.
You forgot time of day and type of riders. Taxi drivers often have to deal with drunks at 2 am. I think that increases risk a bit.
Citizens policed themselves which often resulted in 'certain types' of people being invited to neck tie parties.
Did you ever try to run C on the Apple ][? UCSD Pascal was available, and worked well. C required an add on z-80 chip, and it was still a subset implementation. (Check out "Lifeboat C", though I think that was a later, and more capable version.)
So the situation is more complicated than you are assuming. I didn't get a full C compiler until AFTER I had gotten an 8086...which means probably that the IBM PC was already around.
Sorry, but the length defined strings are optional, though common in Pascal. UCSD (and other early) Pascals usually buit that into the language, but I believe that now it's a part of a standard library, and alternates can be defined (though probably not with the same name). I'm not sure why you consider Pascal data structures more "well defined" than C structs.
P.S.: Strings in C can also be handled with a length byte. The zero terminated strings are purely a library convention, and can be overridden.
FWIW fpc Pascal has a string type in it's library that uses a length value longer than a byte.
FWIW, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with Pascal...or less than with C or C++. Java is worse, hobbled by 16-bit unicode, a horrible decision, which was justifiable at the time the decision was made. (Unicode should be either utf-8 or utf-32 [UCS-4]. I generally prefer utf-8, but that requires more complex library support.)
OTOH, the only real advantage of Pascal is fast compile times, and optimal execution times (which can easily be matched in C).
So, yes, its underrated, but there's probably no good reason to change to it.
fpc is Object Pascal, and not a proprietary language. Unfortunately, its also poorly documented.
From my point of view, the problem is lack of documentation. I *think* that fpc Pascal can not properly handle utf8 strings, and determine the general character class of individual characters (something that Java struggles with), but the documentation is so bad that I'm not sure. And I didn't bother to test because I couldn't find any good samples to start from. Lazarus has a lot of good press, so i can accept that it is a powerful GUI development tool, but that's not what I'm doing.
FWIW, I've got a long series of desires for my programming language, and no language that I'm aware of satisfies all of them. But if its a lot different from languages that I already know, then I'm less willing to invest time learning. Pascal should have a clear bonus here, as I used to program in Object Pascall on the Mac II, but the documentation is so bad that I've tried radically different languages (e.g., Racket Scheme) and passed over fpc. (Mind you, a few years ago it was missing some needed features, but now I think that it has all the features I need, probably, but I can't be sure.)
That, however, is not only unrelated to public domain, it's also unrelated to copyright. That's a patent law disagreement.
You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred. -- Superchicken
