About Me
My name is David Jones.
I’m a thirty-something programmer with a maths degree. I grew up knowing my bits from my bytes, though it wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I realised that in some communities a byte doesn’t have to have 8 bits. I’m keen to sharpen and practise my writing skills, hence this blog. Posts are generally extremely geeky and with a computer science / maths slant. I enjoy learning programming languages to contrast them, and it shows.
I’m a founding director of Climate Code Foundation, a registered non-profit whose goal is to promote public understanding of climate science.
I live in the Peak District; I rock-climb.
I have a separate literature review blog.
drj@climatecode.org
DRJ11@UK.AC.CAM.PHX
drj@pobox.com
drj@ravenbrook.com
twitter.com/drjtwit
The title Code Monk was obligingly suggested by Richard Kistruck.
2007-04-29 at 15:56:54
drj here:
I moved your question to a separate post and tried to answer it there.
2007-05-26 at 00:43:32
thanks for the interesting article.
i’d like to suggest that perhaps you have ignored the difference between what a boolean expression returns and how true/false is determined in, say, an if statement.
going from memory (which may be faulty) i think both c and forth return 0/1 for false/true, which would make them IC languages, but they both (again, my memory may be faulty) treat 0 as false and non-zero as true in conditional expressions.
i admit to not reading the article carefully, so my apologies if i missed something.
cheers,
g.
2007-05-28 at 09:54:03
Glen: Thanks for your comments re the Iverson’s Convention article. The second half of the article does in fact discuss how an if statement determines true/false.
2008-09-24 at 14:17:53
Only since you’re keen to practice writing… “that” should be “who”, no?
2008-09-24 at 15:00:38
@william: Agreed. Edited.
2010-04-25 at 11:13:40
Hi code monk.
You say “byte doesn’t have to have 8 bits”.
That’s right, I learned that the only thing you can be sure of (in C at least): char <= short &1, so now I know!
2010-04-25 at 11:15:31
Oops. Very short these replies can be. My main point, in French a byte is called an octet, so they’re stuck with 8 bit bytes. :-)
2010-04-26 at 07:31:45
Well, english has octets as well as bytes. Though only cranks like me even dare to use octet.