Another advantage of Pascal is that the programs written in it crashed much less, which also allowed for a much safe development on the machines of that time which didn't have any "memory write" protections.
And safety in development actually translated in less crashy product too.
Pascal is very much like a managed language but without GC or borrow checker. It's not formally memory-safe, but its syntax discourages a developer from playing with fire unless it's really needed.
Additionally all the flaws regarding it being designed for teaching and the raise of dialects, were already fixed by 1978 with Modula-2, which Niklaus Wirth than created, with the learnings from Mesa at Xerox PARC.
Later, we also got the managed language genealogy, via Modula-2+ branch, and Niklaus Wirth own Oberon variants, or inspired dialects from it.
Nowadays GCC has Ada, Modula-2 and Algol 68 as official frontend, we have Free Pascal and Delphi.
Then we also have all the other modern ones that somehow got some inspiration out this history.
Thus we as an industry aren't lacking alternatives.
It sorta did as Ada, tho Ada is a much bigger language than M2 (or Pascal)[1]. There was at least one Ada-83 compiler for DOS (Janus), but it was a tight fit and a miserable experience. To me, the missed opportunity was Modula-3; much of what was nifty about Ada (and other things) in a smaller package.
[1] People often forget how compact a language Pascal (and somewhat M2) is. It comfortable self-hosts on 8-bit machines with a few dozen K (not M) of memory. It does an OK job even on the 6502 (admittedly, p-code). There was even a cross compiler for the 8051.
I think that D and C# are the right descendents to Modula-3, and many aren't still unaware of how much C# has improved for low level programming tasks.
Unfortunely its adoption window has passed by, although there is a guy keeping it going on Github, from the official Critical Mass compiler that once existed,
sizeof s (fun fact: you can omit the parentheses because it's not a function, it's an operator) reports the size of the array s, which is a variable of automatic storage duration.
Consider the following program:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
int main()
{
const char * const s = "gogo\x00gogo";
const char t[] = "gogo\x00gogo";
printf("%d,%d,%d,%d\n",
(int)sizeof s,
(int)strlen(s), // DO NOT EVER USE THIS FUNCTION
// YOU WILL BE FIRED IF YOU DO
(int)sizeof t,
(int)strlen(t) // DO NOT EVER USE THIS FUNCTION
// YOU WILL BE FIRED IF YOU DO
);
}
> 8,4,10,4
That's what Doctorow calls "a cartoonish vision of markets in which “the customer is king” and successful businesses are those who cater to their customers." In reality, the capitalists also don't care, _when they can get away with it._
"To understand whom a platform treats well and whom it abuses, look not to who pays it and who doesn’t. Instead, ask yourself: who has the platform managed to lock in? "
"Smearing" is much more sensible approach for the use cases where it is implemented. There is simply no solution that is optimal for every use case, and insisting on using just one approach everywhere is unreasonable.
We stop pretending that universal time exists and add location to every time stamp relative to some predefined clock at a known location. The issues of when something happened dissapear.
If you stop pretending that universal time exists, then each timezone would need its own NTP stratum 0 atomic clock., Higher strata NTP servers would have to be told which timezone you wanted, and only return you the time sourced from whatever country's national labs count for that timezone, and those labs would not be allowed to compare each others times.
Each clock would run at a slightly different rate, based on imperfections in the equipment, the altitude of the laboratory and the amount of nearby mass in its vicinity. National clocks would drift, relative to each other, and so would everybody's timestamps. CET would be perhaps +1:00:00.000002 ahead of GMT rather than being exactly +1:00.
You'd have to continually measure and publish this drift in some kind of timezone-to-timezone comparison service, so that people who make network connections across the world don't end up finding that packets appear to arrive before they've been sent (due to National Clock drifts)
It's an interesting thought experiment. But I prefer where all the worlds' labs work together to produce a consensus universal time, and we just add fixed political offsets to it.
I like the odea of reference frames. But it isn't just geographic. The unix clock on a starlink is doing double digit mach and goes horizon to horizon in minutes. GPS satellites have always had to account for relativity, so we could look to that system... Hmm, seems gps time doesn't add leap seconds, only using those already added when it started ;)
Sure, you can define the reference frames to allow any orbit on any body. Mars landers & orbiters have slightly different time due to general & special relativity than Earth's surface, and also don't need Earth days/months/years, for example.
"From 1964 to 1973, the United States bombed Laos more heavily than any country on earth. The reason most Americans do not know this is because it was a secret war orchestrated by the CIA; it stands as the largest covert CIA operation to date."
"One team can find anywhere from three to 16 bombs in a day. The UXO Lao’s 2015 annual report states that since 1996, 1.4 million UXO have been cleared in Laos by a combined effort of UXO Lao and other UXO-clearing organizations, like MAG International. At this rate, it will take thousands of years before Laos is free of UXO."
"Forty percent of UXO victims are children who pick up the bombs, usually thinking they are toys."
US didn't bomb Laos, it bombed Vietnamese Communists covertly operating in and from Laos against Republic of Vietnam and US. The reason that it was a covert war was geopolitical - every actor there operated covertly.
In my country we still find ordnance from WW2 or even WW1. I even had some close encounters.
It looks like some early training of children can save lives. What I can read from https://laos.worlded.org/projects/uxo-education-and-awarenes... is that the education is mainly addressed toward primary school children meaning that the children below the age of 6 will not receive any education (from the program, perhaps there are other programs). What is completely lacking is education of parents.
Now what about cluster bombs in Ukraine?
These have been proven to be highly effective against Russian attacks.
If we talk about future safety concerns then Russian forces have laid mines over vast areas. The density can be as much as 5 mines per square meter and I doubt that they will share the mining maps when this eventually ends (if they even have systematic maps). Already the area affected by the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam by Russians has mines randomly scattered all over the area because of massive flooding.
Ukraine is keeping track of its cluster munition usage and the low percentage of unexploded munitions is a mere drop against the mayhem Russia has created.
Keep in mind that Russia has very clearly declared its genocidal goals.
Oh, there's now a bunch of accounts claiming that Galileo was "just" mean to pope and therefore "guilty", but this is an actual pro-religion propaganda. The real sentence is preserved up to this day and is completely clear:
"heresy" ... "that the earth does move, and is not the center of the world" ... "contrary to Holy Scripture"
More detailed:
"We pronounce, judge, and declare, that you, the said Galileo . . . have rendered yourself vehemently suspected by this Holy Office of heresy, that is, of having believed and held the doctrine (which is false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures) that the sun is the center of the world, and that it does not move from east to west, and that the earth does move, and is not the center of the world; also, that an opinion can be held and supported as probable, after it has been declared and finally decreed contrary to the Holy Scripture".
Additionally, Galileo's and Copernicus' books were finally removed from the index of the banned books only in 1835, they were on the banned list for more than 200 years, since the 1616 Inquisition's judgment.
Context: Galileo was the first person to see with his own eyes with his first of the kind self-made telescope the moons that are today known as Galilean moons and recognized them as the satellites of Jupiter in March 1610. Which convinced him that the understanding of the church was wrong. The church sentenced him in 1633 to house arrest where he remained until his death in 1642.
Politics is a complex thing where people don't mean what they say, and their meaning change depending on who are listening, how, why and when.
Heliocentrism was discovered by a joint-enterprise of two enemy churches, and only became heresy post-facto when some very good evidence arrived. But by then it seemed to really become heresy, and was punished by itself. Almost certainly the Galileo's posture was important for that, but the society's context was way more important.
Anyway, you won't get any good conclusion if you insist on analyzing the politicians arguments on logic or expect coherence.
> Context: Galileo was the first person to see with his own eyes with his first of the kind self-made telescope the moons that are today known as Galilean moons and recognized them as the satellites of Jupiter in March 1610.
Which was not evidence for heliocentrism.
In the early 1600s there were seven models floating around: Heraclidean (geo-heliocentric), Ptolemaic, Copernican (heliocentric, pure circles with lots of epicycles), Gilbertian, Tychonic, Ursine, Keplerian.
Newton, in his Principia (1687), did not use calculus to present his Universal Graviation: rather it was carefully structured in Aristotelian form, with axioms and deductive logic. Kepler's laws can be deduced from principles. Still no coriollis or parallax.
The first inkling of the Earth's motion comes in 1728 when James Bradley detects stellar aberration in γ-Draconis. In 1791 Giovanni Guglielmini finds a 4 mm Coriolis deflection over a 29 m drop, thus providing empirical evidence of rotation. In 1806 Giuseppi Calandrelli publishes "Ozzervatione e riflessione sulla paralasse annua dall’alfa della Lira," reporting parallax in α-Lyrae. So parallax, the chief evidence for the Earth's motion came 250+ years after Galileo.
Stellar parallax was considered since at least Aristotle, as he mentions in his On the Heavens (II.14), and since it is not observed then it is reasonable to conclude that there is no motion (it took several thousand years to develop instruments to actually measure it).
Galileo's chief problems were (a) he was an egotistical jackass, and (b) he had no evidence for what he was claiming to be true. He was allowed to put forward the Copernican model "suppositionally", i.e., as an hypothesis, and "not absolutely". The latter of which, (b), Galileo admitted in his first deposition (12 April 1633): it was concluded that his book put forward the idea 'absolutely', which is where his conviction comes from.
By the late 1600s most folks had switched over to the Keplerian model: not necessarily because they thought it was what was actually happening in reality, but probably because it made the math easier.
For a good timeline of events, see (recently late) Michael F. Flynn's "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown":
So yes, that's exactly an example of the "guilty Galileo and the good church" false narrative.
Many useless claims which don't disprove that his sentence was literally because of:
"heresy" ... "that the earth does move, and is not the center of the world" ... "contrary to Holy Scripture"
And the church forbade his book as "heresy" for 200 years.
He was right. The church was wrong, directly referring to the effing"Holy Scripture" to support its claim and played fighting "heresy", keeping being wrong for 200 years afterwards. It's so clear.
Monkeys throwing darts can also (just happen to) be "right" when picking stocks that do well in the market. Galileo had as much evidence in believing Copernicus was right as the monkeys.
If he had simply stuck to simply arguing both sides of an hypothesis in his Dialogue, which he was asked to do by the pope in the first place, it would have saved everyone a lot of trouble. Heck, Kepler's stuff was already around for decades, and Galileo completely ignored it (along with Tycho):
If you want to argue 'for science' then Galileo is not a good example: the only thing he just happen to be right about was that the sun was the centre of things, whereas everything else in the Copernican system (including epicycles) was just as messy as in Ptolemy. There was no practical reason to switch systems, and no evidence to think it was correct.
At the end of the day the person who actually got things right was Kepler, and he kept plugging away at the problem because of this belief that the physical world reflected the spiritual realm (KGW XIII, letter 23, 35; 1595)
> In this way, then, the Sun, itself at rest in the middle and yet the fount of motion, carries the image of God the Father and creator. For what creation is to God, motion is to the Sun. Moreover, it moves [the planets] in a fixed place, as the Father creates in the Son. Unless the fixed stars offered a place, thanks to their motionlessness, no movement could exist. I defended this axiom while still in Tübingen. The Sun distributes motive virtue through the medium space, in which the planets are found: just as the Father creates by spirit or by the virtue of His spirit. And from the necessity of these presuppositions, it follows that motion is in proportion with distance.
See Kozhamthadam's "The Religious Foundations of Kepler's Science" and "Theological Foundations of Kepler's Astronomy" by Barker and Goldstein.
Going further, one needs to believe in certain metaphysical assumptions before you can even start doing what we know call science:
There were plenty ideas floating around at the time, but ideas are cheap. Galileo certainly made important improvements to telescope technology, but his efforts in moving forward new models (specifically Copernican) were a dead end, and he made no practical difference to things: Kepler was already defending Copernicus in his Mysterium Cosmographicum (1e 1596), and put forward his laws in Astronomia nova (1609), a copy of which he sent to Galileo, which Galileo promptly ignored even two decades later when he published his Dialogue (1632).
You still can't deny: the church was wrong, directly referring to the effing "Holy Scripture" to support its claim.
The Earth was never the center around which the Sun rotated. Not in 1AD, not in 1600AD, not now.
If the church claimed that the "Holy Scripture" says that the Earth is in the center, the church was still wrong, and moreover, the "Holy Scripture" was wrong.
The church can't be right to claim "heresy" to somebody who was right then and is still right now.
> You still can't deny: the church was wrong, directly referring to the effing "Holy Scripture" to support its claim.
It was the pope that asked Galileo to write a book in the first place. The Church was so against the idea that… its leader asked a prominent natural philosopher to write about. The book had two imprimatur approvals.
> The Earth was never the center around which the Sun rotated. Not in 1AD, not in 1600AD, not now.
And there was no evidence to support this assertion until 1728 and Bradley with γ-Draconis, and with the first parallax report in 1806 and Calandrelli (a priest) with α-Lyrae/Vega (the actual value he calculated was wrong). It was not a new idea when Copernicus published his book in 1543, nor when Kepler defended it in 1596, nor when Galileo published his Dialgoue in 1623: Aristotle most famously considered it in ~300 BC and rejected it for lack of evidence. Anaxagoras (400s BC) and Aristarchus of Samos put forward heliocentrism.
It was never a grand Science Vs Church issue, not at the time at least, that came perhaps later with legend.
It wan't even the case that the Pope (in person) was mad with Galileo for being used as a Simplicio caricature and figure of fun in his work.
All the data used came from church funded observatories and church backed astronomers, all the main ideas from both sides of the debate came from church funded theorists.
The crux of the dispute and the trial was pretty much that Galileo was a dedicated edgelord who had decades of pissing people off and making enemies on his ledger.
Think less about religion Vs science and more about maverick asshole vs. faction within giant bureaucracy.
Once Galileo had "insulted the Pope" the knives came out and his enemies struck, it was a pure show trial fueled by personal vindictiveness that came from being the target of savage biting insults.
None of which had much to do with the persecution of Galileo.
The Catholic Church has changed its stance on many things through time, see [history].
In this instance the Church itself had officially requested a presentation be made to demonstrate various arguments for and against different viewpoints .. one of which was that the heavens didn't rotate about the earth.
It wasn't a surprise that such a well known hypothetical should appear in a book commissioned to outline such hypotheticals.
There's the evidence of the character Simplicio, who employed stock arguments in support of geocentricity, and was depicted in the book as being an intellectually inept fool.
The arguments made "by an idiot" were clear swipes at both Lodovico delle Colombe and Cesare Cremonini.
And other passages in other works of Galileo, but that alone is sufficiento sink "Evidence-free claim".
This has been batted back and forth since (at least) The Sleepwalkers (1959) by Arthur Koestler so you can argue against the assertaion but it's foolish to pretend there isn't reams of references on this going back decades.
That's not evidence. That's the claim. If you claim that he was put to death for making fun of someone, you can't prove that by claiming that he made fun of someone. It's total conspiracy theory stuff.
All those references are in the class of this salt stuff in the OP. They're whole fiction.
