new research into semantic categories

[ROBIN HAMILTON]

I really shouldn't shoot from the hip quite so quickly, but I'm still inclined to feel I wasn't entirely unjustified.

The minute I sent off my previous post (with a glow of guilty pleasure), I thought, "Uh oh, you miscalled this one quite drastically, Robin.  Joel isn't talking about number systems, or kinds of logic.  He specifically said <"enumerated" data types>, so we're into the Children of Pascal, not the philosopher but the computer language, and BOOLEAN vs CHAR variable types.

I really should have twigged this earlier since, while not as rich in years as Wilson, I *am old enough to remember when there were computer languages other than C++.  Ah, the delights of Forth, the joys of Lisp, and the simplicity of Basic.  Why, linguists even had their very own programming language in Prolog.

        But where is the Trash-80 today? ***

My only real excuse is that while quiche eaters programmed in Basic, and Real Men thought in Machine Code, both kinds of geek sniffed at Pascal, which was only ever used in a hothouse university environment as a teaching tool, which was all it ever was good for.

So, Joel, my apologies -- I got you wrong, and quite unfairly traduced you in my earlier post.

Robin (ex-OS9)

[*** Trash-80 -- a less-than-affectionate name applied in the seventies to the Tandy TRS-80 computer.  In fact, if I may be allowed this digression, when Tandy upgraded their computer to the CoCo (Tandy Color Computer), and fitted it with a 6809 processor, it was actually not that bad.  If you ignored the crappy operating system that came as standard and used it to run OS9..  How the whirligig of time brings its revenges.  To some of us, Linux is simply OS9 under a different name.]

--- On Thu, 11/2/10, ROBIN HAMILTON <robin.hamilton2 at BTINTERNET.COM> wrote:

> From: ROBIN HAMILTON <robin.hamilton2 at BTINTERNET.COM>

> Joel, can I issue a request for clarification with regard
> to your words above, <the simplest of "enumerated" data
> types, namely "Boolean">, as it clashes in a non-trivial
> way with what I think I know?
>
> Or when you say "Boolean", did you simply mean "binary"?

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