From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Junio C Hamano Subject: [OT] if (4 < number_of_children) you're in trouble Date: Sat, 28 May 2005 00:55:44 -0700 Message-ID: <7vfyw7yebj.fsf_-_@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net> References: <7vu0ksrv1v.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net> <7vekbwru6x.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net> <7v3bscqdlr.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: git@vger.kernel.org X-From: git-owner@vger.kernel.org Sat May 28 09:54:12 2005 Return-path: Received: from vger.kernel.org ([12.107.209.244]) by ciao.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1Dbw8p-0004JX-6C for gcvg-git@gmane.org; Sat, 28 May 2005 09:53:55 +0200 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S261858AbVE1Hz4 (ORCPT ); Sat, 28 May 2005 03:55:56 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S262308AbVE1Hzz (ORCPT ); Sat, 28 May 2005 03:55:55 -0400 Received: from fed1rmmtao03.cox.net ([68.230.241.36]:31888 "EHLO fed1rmmtao03.cox.net") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S261858AbVE1Hzp (ORCPT ); Sat, 28 May 2005 03:55:45 -0400 Received: from assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net ([68.4.60.172]) by fed1rmmtao03.cox.net (InterMail vM.6.01.04.00 201-2131-118-20041027) with ESMTP id <20050528075545.MRNT26972.fed1rmmtao03.cox.net@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>; Sat, 28 May 2005 03:55:45 -0400 To: Linus Torvalds In-Reply-To: <7v3bscqdlr.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net> (Junio C. Hamano's message of "Tue, 24 May 2005 18:49:20 -0700") User-Agent: Gnus/5.1007 (Gnus v5.10.7) Emacs/21.4 (gnu/linux) Sender: git-owner@vger.kernel.org Precedence: bulk X-Mailing-List: git@vger.kernel.org I received this from my mentor tonight. Although I said I am not going to discuss this issue anymore, with his permission, I would like to share where the "visual order" came from with the list. From: Paul Eggert Subject: Re: FYI: comparison order in boolean expressions To: Junio C Hamano Date: Sat, 28 May 2005 00:28:31 -0700 > http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git&m=111698274620068&w=2 Thanks! That made my day. You can forward the following to that mailing list if you like: I learned the "textual order should reflect actual order" convention from D. Val Schorre, one of the best programmers I've ever worked with. Val was credited by Donald E. Knuth as the first person to seriously advocate goto-less programming. In 1974 Knuth wrote: When I met Schorre in 1963, he told me of his radical ideas, and I didn't believe they would work.... In 1964 I challenged him to write a program for the eight-queens problem without using go to statements, and he responded with a program using recursive procedures and Boolean variables, very much like the program later published independently by Wirth. I was still not convinced.... Knuth's reaction to Schorre's ideas on avoiding gotos sounds a bit like Linus's reaction to Schorre's ideas on comparison order, no? Anyway, here's the reference, if you'd like to find out how Knuth's story ends: Donald E. Knuth Structured Programming with go to Statements ACM Computing Surveys 6, 4 (December 1974), 261-301. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=356640 PS. The idea that textual form should reflect the underlying reality goes all the way back to Gottfried Leibniz's alphabet of human thought . Leibniz was a brilliant designer of notations -- one of the best the world has ever seen -- and it is amusing to speculate what he would have done with programming had he been born some time in the past few decades. (Personally I suspect that Leibniz would have liked "1 < x".)