thetic's comments

On: A Tutorial on Portable Makefiles

[thetic]

> The bad news is that inference rules are not compatible with out-of-source builds. You’ll need to repeat the same commands for each rule as if inference rules didn’t exist. This is tedious for large projects, so you may want to have some sort of “configure” script, even if hand-written, to generate all this for you. This is essentially what CMake is all about. That, plus dependency management.

This isn't a case for CMake. It's a case against POSIX Make. The proposed "portability" and "robustness" of adherence to the POSIX standard are not worth hamstringing the tool. GNU Make is ubiquitous and is leaps and bounds ahead of pure Make.

On: Porting 4.5K lines of C to Go

[thetic]

This one tripped me up too. I'm guessing he meant `a |= b`.

[Arnavion → thetic]

Of course he meant that. My point was that `if !a && b { a = true; }` is a silly way to write `a = a || b;`

On: How Did Anyone Do Math in Roman Numerals?

[thetic]

On the subject of annoying ambiguities in mathematical notations, I would like to point out the ridiculous convention of inverse function notation.

Is there any sensible rationale for sin^(-1)(x) meaning arcsin(x) while sin^2(x) means (sin(x))^2?

On: Input Mono – A Typeface for Code, from Font Bureau

[thetic]

I used Input Mono for quite a while, but the '8' and 'B' characters are too easy to confuse.

On: Getting started with vim

[thetic]

This sounds like visual mode.