archives

What is the most bizarre thing you have seen done with TeX?

Who's online

Earlier today I enabled a drupal feature that list the names of users currently online. It was on the bottom of the right-hand navigation bar, and looked something like this:

Who's online
There are currently 7 users and 887 guests online.
Online users:

Matt M
Ehud Lamm
Mattias Engdegård
naasking
Andreas Rossberg
...

Some might see this as a privacy violation or otherwise object. Since I heard complaints I disabled this feature. What do you think?

Call-by-reference decided by caller

I wonder if it makes any sense if the caller of a function decides weither a parameter is passed by reference or value. Often when I look at code (C++ mostly) I ask myself "Is this one changed by the function?" and I have to look up the function declaration. Does anyone know of a language implementing such abstraction?

Edit: I just realized, that the caller can control how an argument is passed by either making a deep copy before passing it (call-by-value) or not (call-by-ref). Only thing is, the function needs to define this argument as ref. Also this does not work well together with manual memory management, because if you create deep copies of stuff on the fly they do not get cleaned up afterwards, because the function receiving the arg does not know it has been copied before.

Best maintainable evaluation strategy?

Lets face it: Almost all code needs to be maintained, meaning it needs to be fixed and/or extended (Except TeX, but even that needs to be ported to new languages/environments ;)). In order to be maintained, code needs to be understood. So what is the evaluation strategy that you would think is best maintainable? I vote for call-by-value.