Isn't it odd to read "curly" braces? Every printed dictionary I have, up through the 1990s at least, says that braces are {these}, brackets are [these], and parentheses are (these). Saying "curly brace" is as redundant as saying "round parentheses." Yes, braces are curly, by definition.
At least that's how it always in American English, and ASCII. Apparently British English says more than [these] can be "brackets" and <these> were called "angle brackets" in the 1970s, but when did anyone in the computer industry ever start calling anything but {these} braces?
> At least that's how it always in American English
You already found the answer.
To me, all of ()[]{} (and depending on context <>) are “brackets” in the sense that they bracket whatever is between them. Then a brace is a single side of a bracket (ie. opening brace plus closing brace make a bracket).
So to distinguish between the different brackets/braces you use “round”, “square”, “curly” or “angled” respectively. And “round” is the default so you often skip specifying that.
That’s been the convention in programming and maths everywhere I’ve worked outside America (in English).
Curly braces are a very uncommon piece of punctuation outside of math and programming. If you picked a person at random, they will find "curly brace" (and indeed, "square bracket") much clearer and less ambiguous. Doubly so when accounting for variations between British and American English.
“Curly braces” reads like “the braces—curly ones.” Pointedly emphatic when you want to stress a particular aspect of a thing, much like “rational animals” instead of “humans.”
The real mystery is why anyone remotely aware of the Free Software movement would have ever been duped into advocating for handheld computers so hostile to their own goals.
"Self-driving cars" and Fusion power also come to mind. With the advent of photography, it was widely believed that drawing and painting would vanish as art forms. Radio would obsolete newspapers, becoming obsolete themselves with television, and so on. Don't believe the hype.
Kind of funny that some of those wait-6-month people are basically the same ones behind "no human driven cars being sold after 2025" and "computer vision is all you need"
And your ability to go your own way is only temporary and due to inertia. Today, for a while, you can still buy a vehicle that requires a driver and doesn't look and perform exactly like every other waymo.
But that's only because self driving cars are still new and incomplete. It's still the transition period.
I already can't buy the car I want with a manual transmission. There are still a few cars that I could get with one, but the number is both already small and getting smaller every year. And none of those few are the one I want, even though it was available previously.
I already can't buy any (new) car that doesn't have a permanent internet connection with data collection and remote control by people that don't own the car even though I pay full cash without even financing, let alone the particular one I want. (I can, for now, at least break the on board internet connection after I buy the car without disabling the whole car, but that is just a trivial software change away, in software I don't get to see or edit.)
It's hardly unreasonable to suggest that in some time you won't be able to avoid having a car that drives itself, and even be legally compelled to let the car drive itself because you can't afford the insurance or legal risk or straight up fines.
And forget customizing or personalizing. That's right out.
I think the decline of manual transmission is different from self-driving. Manuals, you could argue are a technological progression that doesn’t change the fundamental economics or sociology of driving. But self-driving has issues far beyond the technology. Like liability, like ownership of vehicles, availability, traffic rules,…
I’m not even sure if, outside of highly mapped environments it even makes sense.
Waymos require a highly mapped environment to function safely in. Not to take away from what Waymo has accomplished, but it's a far more bounded problem that what the "self driving" promise has been.
What does "compute" mean here? It is supposed to be a verb, but here seems to be a noun. I have recently started seeing it apparently mean "computational capacity" but here it seems to mean "an instance of a virtualized computer installation." All this verbing is confusing. Excuse me, I have an eat.
As an emacs user since the mid-80s, I do note this functionality would be nice as a Major Mode, if one were an avid Lisp programmer.
As a Perl Monger since 1994, and as a developer who has used and extended Org::Parser from CPAN, I am happy to see support in any other language, as you have done with Go here. I wonder whether you plan to extend your parser to fairly complete support of all/most of what Org offers.
The original IBM PC could be purchased either with 160KB/180KB single-sided floppy drives, or the 320KB/360KB double-sided. Some early IBM PC users still needed the "flippy" trick!
"...whenever 'a software' doesn't...." Ugh. "A software package" or "a piece of software" or perhaps "a program" but you don't have "one software" any more than you can have "one hardware" or "one information." Grammar, please!
My company "Lindley Systems" did all this from 1980 (when I was 14) until the mid 90s, in the Heathkit (later Heath/Zenith) arena. I still have master diskettes and original manuals ready for taking to the Xerox shop, and only a few years ago tossed boxes full of registration cards (with 13 cent stamps on them).
We made the transition from Heathkit HDOS to CP/M and MS-DOS but never shipped a product for MS Windows. We almost had a product ready in 1996 but then MS "upgraded" VB 3 to VB 4 and we started a rewrite, almost completed just in time for the "upgrade" to VB 5 - by which time our market had moved on.
It was a fun time to build custom and specialized hardware and software.
> We made the transition from Heathkit HDOS to CP/M
A very unusual case of a company explicitly deprecating its own proprietary OS, and shifting to an external standard, on the same hardware. Tandy giving existing Model 16 customers Xenix and shipping it with new units is the only other case I can think of offhand.
IBM did give up on marketing OS/2 by the late 1990s (and the PC division arguably did so around the time Windows 95 came out), but I am not aware of IBM explicitly telling new and existing customers that Windows is the way forward for existing systems.
A slightly different way of answering your question is that sometime after the PS/2's launch, IBM began explicitly noting that its software and peripherals were compatible with non-IBM computers. PC DOS 5.0 might have been the first. <https://np.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1jleun5/ni...>
