Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!rice!bbc From: bbc@rice.edu (Benjamin Chase) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: joke is on you. Message-ID: Date: 7 Jan 91 04:44:38 GMT References: <1990Dec29.110202.3862@mathrt0.math.chalmers.se> <19717:Jan220:38:5491@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <40569@nigel.ee.udel.edu> <3340:Jan322:21:4791@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <19771@yunexus.YorkU.CA> Sender: news@rice.edu (News) Reply-To: Benjamin Chase Distribution: na Organization: Center for Research on Parallel Computations Lines: 30 In-Reply-To: oz@yunexus.yorku.ca's message of 4 Jan 91 15:58:07 GMT Followups-To: alt.flame >brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes: >>Gee. I wrote a Forth interpreter in 8088 assembler. Does that make Forth >>a subset of 8088 assembler? oz@yunexus.yorku.ca (Ozan Yigit) writes: >Not at all, but by your amusing definition, I would say ``8088 assembler >supports Forth'' along with arbitrary-precision arithmetic, composable >functions, ad nauseam... Ozan, you made a small mistake. It is my opinion that Dan would have expressed this as "8088 assembler has Forth". When Dan uses the word "has", he seems to mean "can be used to implement" or "can implement". For example, when he said that C has composable functions, he must have meant that C can implement composable functions. Yes, I know this usage is unusual, and not standard computer science terminology. In the future, it would help if you and all of the other readers of comp.lang.misc could remember this simple abberation of Dan's vocabulary (as well as any other abberations you may have noticed), and perform the appropriate translation of Dan's postings. Thus, the compulsion to reply to his postings will be greatly reduced. Yes, I realize that it would be more sensible for Dan to change, and speak the same language as the rest of us. But I suspect that Dan is not capable of this. Or, you could just put his name in your kill file... -- Ben Chase , Rice University, Houston, Texas