It's a small world (and debate about indexing arrays for some reason)

Computer Science Related sciences
, ,
1

Well, I was reading this guide to the FAIL assembly language, and found this:

Acknowledgements

The original version of FAIL and the original manual (SAILON-26) were written by Phil Petit in 1976. Various additions and modifications were subsequently contributed by William Weiher, Fred Wright, Ralph Gorin, and others. This manual was prepared using PUB, the document compiler created by Larry Tesler, using the Xerox Graphics Printer, with fonts by Brian Harvey. Brain McCune and Les Earnest reviewed the manuscript and made helpful suggestions. Cover picture: United Press International.

It's a small world :P

2

Makes sense that Brian was in charge of the fonts.

3

Ah, Brian Harvey... where have I heard that name? @bh, perhaps...

Also, I can't like this post, so I'll just give it a :heart: :)

4

Namely, Baskerville! I couldn't make it look anything like real Baskerville at only 200dpi, which was the resolution of the XGP.

moncom
moncom2114×729 342 KB

This took me a long time and was sort of planting a flag; mostly people were saying that at 200dpi you couldn't make a readable serif font.

PS Not just fonts; this sample is from a manual I wrote. :~)

5

You're a really interesting person, y'know that?

6

Thank you!

7

I'm being taught Python by an old guy that looks identical to Gabe Newell (founder of Valve and Steam), and I thought of you when I met him. (it's also really convenient that javascript's and python's array system are exactly the same)

8

No, they're not. Python allows negative numbers to wrap around to the end of the list, but javadcript doesn't allow it. Not to mention, javascript arrays are implemented very very differently, in fact, you can tell if an array is an array (with isinstance([], list)), but javascript says it's an object (unless you use the Array.isArray([]) method).

9

Okay, okay. Sorry. What I meant was, doing print(foo[0]) in Python and console.log(foo[0]) in Javascript would both return bar to the console, assuming the first (zeroth?) item in foo was bar in both arrays.

10

That's the same in most languages...

11

..and?

12

Well, I don't know. You just mentioned that they were exactly the same, I was just saying that they're not. I don't even know why you mentioned it.

13

Python and JavaScript's array system are nothing alike. They just share square bracket notation (x[y]), which is used pretty universally amongst C-style languages for indexing arrays and other data structures.

Edit:
I wouldn't consider Python a C-style language, but they share square bracket notation all the same.

Edit again:
How did we get so offtopic from fonts in a 1960/70s assembler manual?

14

Does Lua use this too? I know way too many languages that use bracket notation, like Java, JavaScript, C, Python, Lua, Haxe, and a lot more like them.

15

Yes, Lua uses square brackets for indexing tables.

16

Lmao. Nice title change. You can thank mr_owlssssnap2 and a few others for that.

17

Does this mean simply that their arrays are both zero-origin? Or am I missing something?

18

nooo I just meant the way to index them is similar :c
i barely know anything about python besides how to define functions and the like, but that was something other than print() and defining variables I was able to do on my own

19

Ah, so you did mean the square bracket notation, as @sir_kitten2 thought.

20

Yeah