It leads to the catch-22 that when saving a BASIC program you cannot tell which filenames are already in use, since you cannot get a directory listing without losing the current BASIC program in memory. All you can do is guess a filename that is probably free.

Is there still some kind of sales tax in Germany? Shouldn't it be long gone due to the EU value added tax system?

The sales tax is the value-added tax.

It's the same problem with autovectorization. Often the only way to tell whether a compiler optimization is successful is to check the produced assembly or benchmark the code.

It seems that for devirtualization GCC has a warning option -Wsuggest-final-types which is supposed to tell when devirtualization fails in link-time optimization. Not sure how reliable that is, or whether it will produce gobs of unhelpful warnings. Maybe it could be combined with some kind of hint that we want this particular call to be devirtualized, and don't care about calls without the hint.

I don't see why there has to be a special staging area when you could just edit the HEAD commit instead. In git you could do "git commit --patch" to commit selected parts and then add more changes to the HEAD commit by "git commit --patch --amend".

A normal situation in my tasks is when the working copy contains lots of changes that are used for debug (mainly prints) but these changes shall not be committed to the proposed change. For this, even interactive adding (`git add -i`) does not satisfy; I need `git add -e` which allows editing in a patch form, and remove the temporary local changes.

Yes, I pretty much do the same thing with git-gui. You are right that the staging area isn't strictly necessary for this kind of workflow.

It's not so easy any more if you try to rotate the hypercube and have to visualize intersections with arbitrary hyperplanes. Already in 3 dimensions the intersection of a cube and a plane can be a non-regular polygon with 3-6 sides.

So apparently the Elvish spoken in the Peter Jackson movies is as far from the language imagined by Tolkien as the famous Portuguese-English phrasebook is from natural English. That's one childhood fantasy broken. What about the Klingon spoken in Star Trek movies?

The difference is that tlhIngan Hol was created to be spoken in movies and shows, not just to explore the parts of language development that were interesting to the creator. So usually, the tlhIngan Hol used in Star Trek movies and shows is about as good as it's going to get. Sometimes the actors have terrible pronunciation, and sometimes the writers make up names for people and places that aren't actually possible in tlhIngan Hol phonology and we have to just roll with it. And modern Star Trek shows have mostly done a better job than the classics, because they bother to have a Klingon language consultant on staff (I was gobsmacked when in ST: Starfleet Academy they used "qeylIS" and "Qo'noS" rather than "Kahless" and "Chronos") . But unlike Quenya or Sindarin, you can have an actual natural conversation in Klingon, as long as you avoid topics for which the Klingon Language Institute hasn't developed vocabulary.

> they bother to have a Klingon language consultant on staff

I realize there's a fair bit of money to be made, and also that many people are super invested in their favorite science fiction series, but the fact that "a Klingon language consultant" is a real thing still makes me think "wow!".

I'm currently reading a book written by the guy who created the Dothraki and High Valerian languages for Game of Thrones. He had to make what already existed in the books for, so there were a few things already set.

He was a consultant in the show as well as he was the one who had to get the actors to speak it well.

The book is called The Art of Language, and if you have an interest in conlangs, you should give it a try.

>Sometimes the actors have terrible pronunciation

I'm sure this could be easily dismissed as a regional (planetary?) accent.

If Ctrl sets bit 6 to 0, and Shift sets bit 5 to 1, the logical extension is to use Ctrl and Shift together to set the top bits to 01. Surely there must be a system somewhere that maps Ctrl-Shift-A to !, Ctrl-Shift-B to " etc.

It's more that shift flips that bit. Also I'd call them bit 0 and 1 and not 5 and 6 as 'normally' you count bits from the right (least significant to most significant). But there are lots of differences for 'normal' of course ('middle endian' :-P )

I guess in this system, you'd also type lowercase letters by holding shift?

There are plenty of old-school companies in Europe still working on moving to the cloud. Now that there is a burgeoning movement towards avoiding American cloud providers, Oxide could have an opportunity to sell "private cloud" servers instead. If they play their cards right, they could make significant inroads in European markets.

Companies who are still 'on-prem' are not necessary 'old school' and they don't just exist in Europe and many are not planning on moving everything to cloud and just haven't done it yet.

It's probably much more exciting to implement stuff like this when you can experiment with your own ideas to figure out the solution from scratch, compared to someone who sees it as a trivial exercise in signal processing, which they can't be bothered to implement.

Most likely his ancient astronaut theory was the inspiration for the entire Stargate franchise. Of course to make the movie believable they had to give Jackson a more academic background than von Däniken had.