Quotes

[jack]

> > PS. Please limit comments to the question asked.
> I think the question asked is inane.
--rec.games.brdige

"We Googled the sentence: "Jar Jar, you're a genius". Up until today, that short English sentence appeared nowhere on the Internet. Darths & Droids: Breaking new dimensions in originality."
-- Darths and Droids.

"Then I found some spaceships I didn’t remember building, flying around my home world. They didn’t respond to my commands, and it wasn’t until just before they began bombing the place that I realized why."
-- Seamus Young

"I don’t know what these are for. The one looks like some of the cables already inside of my computer, except this one doesn’t shock me when I lick the contacts."
-- Seamus Young

"Annual Movie-plot threat contest. For this contest, the goal is to create fear... a fear that you can alleviate through the sale of your new product idea. There are lots of risks out there, some of them serious, some of them so unlikely that we shouldn't worry about them, and some of them completely made up. ... Special mention for his Safe-T-Nav, a GPS system that detects high crime zones. It would be a semi-finalist, but it already exists."
-- Bruce Schneier

"Every Arabic word has a basic meaning, a second meaning which is the exact opposite of the first, a third meaning which refers to either a camel or horse, and a fourth meaning that is so obscene that you'll have to look it up for yourself."
-- ???

"In the present case, the Internet could be viewed as a super-telescope set up on the Welsh hills overlooking the Irish Sea. Via the web (or the super-telescope) it would merely be possible to look into the defendant’s shop."
-- High Court judgement

"I'm sure a lot of you would have mocked Josh's collegue for having a constant named COMMA. Ha! Who's laughing now?"
-- Daily WTF, comment on

#define COMMA "|"

Comments

[rochvelleth.livejournal.com]

"Every Arabic word has a basic meaning, a second meaning which is the exact opposite of the first, a third meaning which refers to either a camel or horse, and a fourth meaning that is so obscene that you'll have to look it up for yourself."
-- ???

I like that :) When you say '???', do you mean it's anonymous or that you can't remember where you heard it? ;)

[oedipamaas49.livejournal.com]

There's a similar saying about Sanskrit: every word means itself, its opposite, a type of lotus, a sexual position, and the name of a God.

[with variations, e.g. substituting elephant for lotus]

No idea where it comes from - a kind of academic folk wisdom, I guess.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

do you mean it's anonymous or that you can't remember where you heard it? ;)

Yes, at least one of those; I don't remember :)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Ooh, yes, indeed. That's a lovely description.

[simont]

#define COMMA "|"

That reminds me that I did once write a program containing

#define FOUR 4
#define FIVE (FOUR+1)

on the grounds that I might at a later date want to try redefining FOUR to be 7, though I have not in fact done so and may well never bother. Care to guess what program and why? :-)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Care to guess what program and why? :-)

Tell me?

[simont]

"Map", in my puzzle collection. Currently it's based around four-colouring a map drawn on a plane, but it crossed my mind that a generalisation might be to also have a mode in which it seven-coloured a map drawn on a torus.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Ah, of course! I guess it was something to do with puzzles, but only vaguely. Of course, it has to be something where four is sufficiently inherent that that's the best name for the variable, but might in theory change.

Come to think of it, as in the classic "In case the value of PI ever changes" example, you might legitimately have wanted to change FOUR to 4.0 at some point :)

[simont]

something where four is sufficiently inherent that that's the best name for the variable, but might in theory change

Quite so; well put.

(Of course, in production code I would eventually have converted FOUR from a #defined constant into a variable, so that the same source file could switch between the two modes; but for initial preliminary experiment I'd probably just have changed the value in the #define.)

might legitimately have wanted to change FOUR to 4.0 at some point :)

*blinks* I can't immediately see a reason why I might want to attempt to colour a map with a non-integer number of colours! :-)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

*blinks* I can't immediately see a reason why I might want to attempt to colour a map with a non-integer number of colours! :-)

Because you can? Err, even if you actually can't...

Actually, I think my tenses were insufficient, I was trying to say you might have used "#define FOUR 4" for some other context, where you never expected the number to change (of which I expect there are some), but one in which you might conceivably start to want to perform non-integer computation on it.

[pizza.maircrosoft.com (from livejournal.com)]

a 4, rotated onto its side, *squints* and flipped, could be a 7. I see in reading the rest of your comments that this is nothing to do with your program :)