Re: What is Forth best at?

Hi John,

On 21 Mar, 22:09, John Passaniti <n...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Howerd wrote:
I think its called having an opinion.
Lots of people have opinions. There are people who think the world is
roughly 6000 years old. There are people who think the moon landing was
a massive conspiracy/hoax. There are people who think the Holocaust
never happened. There are people who think there were weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq.
I think the world is more than 6000 years old, but that the estimate
of 4.5e9 years is probably way out.
I believe the moon landing did actually happened. I am offended by the
unscientific cultural vandalism of the hoax claims.
I've met people who survived the Holocaust.
There most certainly were WOMD in Iraq, at least on 16th March 1988,
in and around Halabja : http://www.kdp.pp.se/old/chemical.html
YMMV

Yes, lots of people have opinions. And some of those opinions are stupid.
Yes, some people are stupid.

[snip]

I take a jet and land in Brazil. I walk into a restaurant where they
only speak Portuguese and waiter hands me a menu. It's also in
Portuguese and I can't read it. I ask the waiter to bring me a
cheeseburger and fries. He replies in broken English that it's a
vegetarian restaurant.

Clearly, the restaurant is awful. It was hard to understand anything
because they use English, and they didn't even have what I wanted. But
not only is this restaurant awful, I'd say all restaurants in Brazil are
awful.

Sound familiar?
No, it sounds patronising.


Yes - comp.lang.forth is a newsgroup where people chat about their
opinions.

Yes, and it's also a newsgroup where we all *evaluate* those opinions.
You don't evaluate my opinions, you shout them down.

You don't seem to like that part. You apparently want to be respected
for having an opinion, but not for the quality of that opinion.
I would like to be respected for expressing my opinions honestly, and
for being prepared to have them questioned, scrutinised and evaluated.
And I reserve the right to change them at any time.

This is not a court of law where I have to prove beyond all reasonable
doubt that my opinion is absolute fact.

False premise. Absolute fact is not the standard here. Logically
defending your statements when you are questioned on them is.
OK, I got that wrong. I am prepared, and hopefully able, to defend my
statements logically.

I've looked at some open source, and its not very good for what I
expected it to be used for. My bad.

Now you're downgrading your opinion.
Yes, I'm modifying by views, based on our discussions.

This started with your statement
that open source (quote) "relies on the principle that programming is
complicated" (unquote).
Yes, I still think that.

Ogg Vorbis is a valient effort to stop corporate control of software
distribution.
No way would I call that junk. The code is perfectly respectable C
code, and documents many key functions.
My complaint is the difficulty of getting to the code through the
"open source" format.

Flawed argument. If Ogg Vorbis was distributed privately, the quality
of the code wouldn't magically change. Your beef is with the quality of
the documentation of Ogg Vorbis. How you morph that into some grandiose
indictment of open source is not demonstrated by anything you have written.
My beef is not with the quality of either docs or source code of Ogg
Vorbis or any other open source project.

But hey, don't just stop there. Clearly, you can
make sweeping generalizations about all open source software.
Yes. Maybe I'm wrong. Surely everyone reading this must know to
question any and all opinions.

I certainly wish more people in comp.lang.forth would start openly
questioning the opinions and prevailing assumptions that underscore most
of the discussion here.
Yes, absolutely.

So because you're a logically consistent man, you would also fault
Charles Moore for his release of the ColorForth source code, since the
assembly-language listing is essentially uncommented, and the supporting
documentation doesn't cover how the kernel works.
No, because Chuck did not release colorForth as open source, just a
snapshot of his work for those who were interested.

The essential quality of open source is that the source code is
available. Different open source projects make the source code
available for different reasons. Charles Moore most certainly did
release ColorForth as open source. To say otherwise suggests you're
using a very private and very bizarre definition for "open source."
You are right about my inconsistancy here.

[snip]

Programmers tend to want to hide their expertise? Where is the evidence
for this?
I have anecdotal evidence.

Wow, that's compelling.
Is that a question, requesting my anecdotal evidence?

[snip]

"wav format" can mean one of several things, but I'll assume you mean
PCM audio, probably signed integer format. You don't say if it's
stereo, so I'll assume mono. You also don't specify what the audio is,
which is important when choosing a codec (is it speech, music, a
mixture). One would also want to know other details like if this needs
to operate in real-time or if it is processing offline. And if it is
real-time, what kind of processor and memory bandwidth do you have.
Stereo, PCM 16 bit signed, mixed speech and music, real time, running
on a PC.
The comms bandwidth is ~48kbits/s, memory is "more than enough" i.e.
Windows PC

MDCT (or variations on it) are part of many audio compression standards
and yes, it's obviously useful in that context. The question is if the
specific attributes of MDCT (such as using overlapping buffers) makes
sense to your application.

Banter and OT discussions aside, I would appreciate any help in
developing this codec.
(Its a project that might generate income one day),

Regards

Howerd 8^)



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Relevant Pages

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