From: Niklas Holsti <niklas.holsti@tidorum.invalid>
Subject: Re: Ada Recursion with strings
Date: Thu, 02 Oct 2008 10:24:33 +0300
Date: 2008-10-02T10:24:33+03:00 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <48e4772c$0$23609$4f793bc4@news.tdc.fi> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <sb40cg.l5a.ln@hunter.axlog.fr>
Jean-Pierre Rosen wrote:
> Adam Beneschan a �crit :
>
>> Yep, the advantage of that is that if the people who design the
>> Internet communication protocols suddenly decide that IP addresses are
>> going to use 9-bit bytes, all you have to do is change one constant,
>> rather than try to find all the 8's in your code and change them,
>> which is more error-prone.
>>
> Reminds me of an old advice explaining why named constants were better
> than numerical values. They took the example of Pi, saying it would make
> maintenance easier "should the value of Pi change" :-)
That reminds me of a former colleague, some decades ago, who was
tearing his hair out because his astronomical calculations with a
FORTRAN program were going wrong. Turns out he had the value of PI
as a variable in a COMMON area, after an array, and an indexing
error on this array was changing the value of PI, affecting several
trigonometric formulae...
--
Niklas Holsti
Tidorum Ltd
niklas holsti tidorum fi
. @ .
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2008-10-02 7:24 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 19+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2008-09-30 20:30 Ada Recursion with strings Joe
2008-09-30 22:24 ` Adam Beneschan
2008-09-30 22:24 ` Jeffrey R. Carter
2008-10-01 0:13 ` Joe
2008-10-01 0:27 ` Jeffrey R. Carter
2008-10-01 1:15 ` Robert A Duff
2008-10-01 11:34 ` Jeffrey R. Carter
2008-10-01 14:29 ` Adam Beneschan
2008-10-01 15:18 ` Jean-Pierre Rosen
2008-10-01 16:47 ` Georg Bauhaus
2008-10-02 7:24 ` Niklas Holsti [this message]
2008-10-02 8:18 ` Ludovic Brenta
2008-10-03 6:54 ` Maciej Sobczak
2008-10-03 7:38 ` Jean-Pierre Rosen
2008-10-03 9:06 ` Dmitry A. Kazakov
2008-10-01 0:28 ` Adam Beneschan
2008-10-01 9:48 ` Georg Bauhaus
2008-10-01 10:22 ` Dmitry A. Kazakov
2008-10-01 3:01 ` anon
replies disabled
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox