Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/01
I wrote a two earlier blog posts around puns in programming book indices before:
- the 1992 Turbo Pascal 7.0 Language Guide having both entry in the manual about Recursion (“recursive loop, see recursive loop”) which of course is similar to “infinite loop” and entries for “infinite loop See loop, infinite” and “loop, infinite See infinite loop”.
- infinite loop in “LaTeX: A Document Preparation System” by Leslie Lamport, printed in 1994.
In the last one, I promised to list more occurrences which I now finally had time for to do.
But let me first elaborate more on the observation that modern computer books (like for instance on C# and Delphi beyond version 1) lack these kinds of index pun.
On the Delphi side, the index entry joke for recursion got removed no later than Delphi 3 (I am still looking for a Delphi 2 version of the Object Pascal Language Guide, see further below) even before the book being fully redone electronically and the index pages generation being automated in
I think I even understand why that is: the process of creating of indices. By the start of this century, more and more indices were automatically being generated and for the last 2 decades or so, all of them are. Back in the days however, indices were mostly done by hand. Nowadays, with everything automated, it is actually pretty tricky in most environments to add such an “infinite loop” index entry like in the Turbo Pascal book, as it would require two things at once:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in .NET, C, C#, C++, Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Delphi 1, Delphi 2, Development, EKON, Event, History, LaTeX, LifeHacker, LISP, Mathematics, Pascal, Perl, PL/I (a.k.a. PL/1), Power User, science, Software Development, Turbo Pascal, Typesetting | Tagged: 1, 7 | 4 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/06/21
Most PNG/JPEG versions of this get the bottom right corner wrong (it should read 66 Celsius, not 68).
I have colourised the table as most of the PNG/JPEG versions have.
[Wayback/Archive] Hitzeentwicklung im Auto nach Zeit und Außentemperatur | Statista (English below)
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in cars, Health, LifeHacker, Mathematics, Power User, science | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2021/09/06
Infinity is not a number and you cannot do arithmetic with it. This means that in mathematics, in contrast to what some people believe, infinity times zero might not equal to zero.
As infinity as mind boggling to most, two interesting videos below.
The first about infinity times zero, the second about some interesting paradoxes around infinity.
But first a few other links:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Mathematics, Power User, science | Leave a Comment »