i want to see new stuff, like the latest on facebook & twitter.

FTFY,

everything else today uses ASCII or better.

There isn't anything better than ASCII. If it was good enough for Ovid, Jesus Christ, and Shakespeare it's good enough for the likes of you.

Even if I'd known about those features, I would have been taken out and shot for using them. As I said, bizarre coding standards, rigidly enforced.

There was something terribly clunky about arrays. I remember writing an EDI converter. Because the order of the incoming records doesn't correspond to that of the outgoing ones, and they don't correspond 1:1, you need a lot of arrays to park stuff until you have a whole transaction to cut, shut & put. Except either it didn't have arrays, or we weren't allowed to use them. Nightmare.

This is 20 odd years ago, so time plus the natural tendency of the mind to protect itself might have obscured some details.

Never seen a mainframe throw a BSOD. Well, it'd be a GSOD, but anyway...

at time does on

And I just figured out why it's *not* a good idea.

IIRC it doesn't have functions at all. And having seen code where blocks of code[1] were copy-pasted dozens of times with the variables manually changed (sometimes) a typical business report certainly could make use of them.

[1] to add insult to injury, in a language that did support them.

Had to laugh at the is_a thread. Undeprecated, Dedeprecated[1], reprecated? Or just precated?

[1] this has the advantage that if you change your mind again you can dededeprecate it and after that [that's enough - Ed].

In the mid 90's, when I had to use the darn thing, it was primitive control structures, no variable scope (OK, one) and general verbosity.

Though in fairness it was an old implementation, plus the coding standards there were peculiar and zealously enforced, so it's possible that they didn't even teach us the alternatives.

Oh come on, DNA is nothing like XML.

Some people can understand DNA...

Fresh out of college my first job was as a C0807[1] programmer. About the only thing I remember (apart from what an utterly horrid language it was) was that, according to the (c) message the compiler printed before the inevitable ten dozen syntax errors, it was older than me.

Some of the micro guys used these Fisher-Price variants you speak of. Still, unless they're so different as to be effectively something else, I can't think of anything less suitable for graphics.

[1] I will not utter it here.

And before you get those couple decades[sic] experience...?

College is valuable (potentially) in only 3 ways

There's a 4th...

An almost fanatical devotion to the pope?

I spent 3 1/2 years at a 2 year business school studying programming.

Yeah? Well I spent 4 years at medical school studying law, and I still can't play the piano.

Then a socket set with a straight socket. Another common tool mostly useless for plumbing.

Do you mean something like the thing for replacing spark plugs? It would be fine for attaching a faucet - if there was no pipe attached.

Are you honestly saying that tools a regular person bought to, say, work on a car, would work for replacing a toilet or faucet?

Did I write anything remotely like that?

http://www.homedepot.com/p/BrassCraft-12-in-Steel-Basin-Wrench-T151/100006605#.UZmqOSJ9sYV

Eleven bucks. A plumber's going to charge four times that for turning up.

No, it can't be outsourced, but it can be designed better such that

A) It doesn't break so often
B) It can be repaired without tools.

If it doesn't exist then invent it. You'll make a million dollars.