> Yeah, there's even another gun-rights organization

Except the NRA really isn't a "gun rights" organization. It's original charter was to encourage the development of marksmanship skills. Basically, they wanted to make sure that people could effectively use the kinds of weapons one might find in the Army or Marines.

You can't really do that if you can't own a rifle.

That whole "well regulated militia" thing can't happen if people at large aren't ever allowed to practice.

The problem with the "lets guess what a psycho will do" game is that it really never ends. We live in a very technologically sophisticated and open society. The means to do stupid or evil things are all around us. It's not just guns. It's our entire modern society. If you think otherwise you're just kidding yourself.

Or you have no imagination whatsoever.

If you try to ban anything that anyone could abuse, then everything will unravel because psychos and terrorists will adapt even if you can't.

> I don't know why you think you can determine what long dead people intended based on grammatically ambiguous language with very little context

People wrote stuff down. None of this is a mystery. You simply can't get away with re-writing history because someone already wrote it down when it wasn't even history yet.

That's the problem with a literate society. You can't just make up nonsense and pretend it's reality. Any one is free to dig up primary sources (or even secondary sources) and demonstrate just how much of a corrupt piece of shit you are.

Fine.

If you want to butcher it then there is a well established procedure for that. Just use it. Good luck with that.

Weak transparent lies just undermine law and order and democracy. Redefining terms to suit your political agenda should be rightfully placed next to the worst political abuses anyone can summon.

Although in truth you are just trying to pretend that a severe and pervasive economic issue is instead a matter of simply interfering with personal property rights.

Blaming the committee, group or department is a cop out. You should know that by now.

I need my own navy of laser appointed sharks, sirrah!

Nope. I didn't. Read it again.

Well, yeah, raping children and giving them drugs, it's pretty illegal, but has nothing to do with the 2nd Amendment.

At the time there were limited arms (you took about 2 minutes to reload) vs able to empty a couple clips in that same amount of time, now.

Further, rifle, cannon and naval mines were about all there were. The most literal interpretation of that 2nd amendment means I could possess nuclear weapons, bacterial weapons, chemical weapons, and were I wealthy enough, my own tanks, APCs, fighter jets, bombers, etc. In short, the 2nd amendment favors the rich because they can arm themselves to the hilt, should they wish. Not very equal, is it?

And American residents and businesses are spending something like US$432 BILLION per year (according to some economists) for tax compliance. We need a drastically simpler tax system, if only to cut this spending by 60% or more.

o Sunglasses
o Facial Hair
o Make-up
o Big Floppy Hat

These are your weapons, use them wisely.

Let's see how they handle that, as I keep messing around with facial hair 8^{)>

C++ (and do a lesser extent C) lose support because of their extremely poor support for utf8. And the absurd part of it is that they could easily do a good job. Utf8 is just a byte array with various routines to interpret the code. Glibc does a reasonable job for a C library...not ideal, but reasonable.

All the array needs is a way to address a chunk by character # rather than by byte #, a way to copy of a character or a slice of chars, and a way to determine the general character classification of any character. Also a few methods: first(), last(), hasnext(), hasprior(), next() and prior(). And these all "sort of" exist, except getting the general character classification. (Do note that these functions need to operate on utf-8 characters rather than on bytes.) But several different ways of doing this are already known. Vala, e.g., handles it without difficulty, and is able to emit C code (using Glibc libraries).

So it's not a programming difficulty that's holding things up. It's the standards bodies...or, perhaps, some members of them.

But I've looked at C++11, and it is not a satisfactory answer. Vala has a good answer. D (Digital Mars D) has a different good answer. Even Python3 has a pretty good answer. (I don't like that in Python you can't determine memory allocation within the string.) Also Racket, etc. But C++ doesn't.

It's hardly a solved problem. There are approaches that can be made to work, but that's not the same thing. The current approaches are all clumsy, and often that's a charitable description. It's usually doable. Saying anything beyond that is fulsom praise.

OTOH, because different languages have different basic derived structures, it's often not clear exactly what the best approach would be, even when one is considering things carefully. For one purpose the best I've been able to come up with is marshalling everything into a byte array, and then separating it back out. Doable, but hardly what I'd call "a solved problem". Probably an insoluble problem because the different languages map the same concept differently internally. So you need to deal with it on a special case by special case basis.

Perhaps you need to define what you mean by "more general purpose". I tend to consider C the most general purpose of languages, because it *isn't* specialized to some task. It's true that , e.g., FoxPro was better at interfacing to the FoxPro database, but that's NOT being general purpose, that's being special purpose.

OTOH (to get back on thread) I don't consider C a very secure language BECAUSE it is lacking in specializations. This means you need to keep creating, e.g., hash tables from scratch, and every time you do it you are likely to introduce an error.

Ada is in an in-between state. It's very secure against some types of errors. The facility for defining specific types is a particular instance. If one defines a meters type, then one cannot store an inches type into it...unless one uses a numeric literal, because one needs to allow instances to be created from numeric litrals. OTOH, this very security introduces verbosity, and verbosity is a common entry point for errors. (I used the meters/inches example because of the nortorious example of the space probe where that was misused. Ada did NOT save the day. And the reason that it didn't was because doing things properly would have been too verbose.)

In principle, every "Turing complete" language is as general purpose as every other. Practical considerations are the distinction between them. If you're doing database programming, then you are less likely to make mistakes if you use a language that contains extensions specialized to make database use easier. (I barely count embedded SQL, because while SQL is reasonably great for manipulaitng databases, it's lousy at interfacing to programming languages. Everything either needs to be converted into a string, or a blob, and blobs are clumsy to handle.) But note that these "databse extensions" are specializations away from "general purpose".