Lambda the Ultimate

Hello,

I was looking through the forum of active topics. And there's a problem with the buttons such as "Created". Once you click on it, it adds ?sort=asc&order=Created to the end of the url. You would think that clicking on this again would turn the sort=asc to sort=desc. (Manually typing this in in the addressbar has the expected result). I would also think that a priori people want to see the most recent post first (which is what I was trying to achieve), and therefore start with sort=desc instead of sort=asc. However the main bug is the fact that clicking on the "Created button" again lenghtens the url so that it now becomes: ?sort=asc&order=Created&order=Created

I've noticed that for me (Firefox 1.5.0.1 on Windows XP) when I use the back button on LtU, my browser doesn't remember how far up or down the page I was. It always resets to being at the top, which gets to be a little frustrating. It seems to work for me in general (I tried it out on other - non drupal - random sites). Dunno if it would be a drupal specific thing? Any suggestions / experiences would be appreciated, gracias.

Fortress Language spec 0.866 [sin pi/3] is out!

http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/fortress0866.pdf

I think it used to be that if I
inserted a newline in my post by myself
it would be like regular HTML and would
stay on a single line unless I used
paragraph tags or whatever.

That seems to have gone away, and now
the posts are some strange mixture
of HTML beahviour and not: newlines
appear to turn into <br> which
seems incongruous to me.

I don't like how the blockquote color is in blue, the same color as hyperlinks. Why not keep it black? They already stand out by being indented, having the bar in front, and being in italics!

The link to be found at "Courses" targetting "Comp Sci 319: Lambda Calculus (University of Chicago)" is dead and produces a 404.

If I log in from the recent posts page, I get the same page back, still with the "log in" button and without the little red unread stars. This is a minor annoyance.

A few years back (back around the year 86 or 87 to those who really care) when I worked at Digital Equipment Corporation, I caused a bit of a stir by entering a new "Note" in the Languages notesfile (which was one of many VAXNotes notesfiles paving the corporate intranet of DEC back in the days before the internet really existed to any meaningful extent).

The note was entitled "Battle of the Languages" and the idea was that people would have the opportunity to prove the superiority of their particular favorite language by posting the source code for the now somewhat famous computer simulation called "Life" which was invented by the Cambridge mathematician John Conway, and which consisted of the following rules:

For a space that is 'populated':
Each cell with one or no neighbors dies, as if by loneliness.
Each cell with four or more neighbors dies, as if by overpopulation.
Each cell with two or three neighbors survives.
For a space that is 'empty' or 'unpopulated'
Each cell with three neighbors becomes populated.

In an matter of days, there were upwards of twenty different languages represented as replies to the intitial posting (note). I think the language "C" was the first to post a solution followed by Pascal (my current language of choice), as well as many others (sans Java and a few other more recent languages for obvious reasons).

I think I may still even have a backup tape of this and other notesfiles which was made on a VAXstation 2000 back around 1990 or so if anyone is interested, but I digress...

My main point in posting this is to state that I always enjoyed conducting that little experiment and I am not real sure what was really proven (other than the fact that people can certainly be passionate about their favorite computer programming languages).

I am half tempted to conduct the same experiment today, although I imagine that, due to the wonders of Google and other search engines, that the source code listings of some of the more popular languages would appear within minutes rather than hours or days. This would especially be true for a common mathematical simulation like Life, which has already been posted to death many times over.

It might be interesting to see what were to happen if the same contest were conducted using a different simulation candidate however... any takers on what to use for such an experiment and what parameters to set as rules (graphics or text output only, etc.)?

Thanks

-dav0 (aka David McLure - DEC employee from 1984 to 1992)

Recently I noticed several threads bumping up to the top of the tracker without any new posts in them (e.g., this or this). Upon closer examination, it looks they have a quite recent "last post" timestamp, very different from timestamps of contained posts. Is it a bug, or just a consequence of some administrative behavior (e.g., deleting inappropriate posts)?

If the latter, it's an interesting example of a business rule enforced only in one direction - upon creation of a post its timestamp is propagated to the thread, while upon deletion the effect is not undone. Where is a referential transparency?? :-)

http://www.malevole.com/mv/misc/killerquiz/