new research into semantic categories

[Joel S. Berson]

If only I'd received this message before sending off my own ... I
wouldn't have had as much fun.

Robin, apology accepted -- and forgive me for an unnecessary lesson.

Joel

At 2/11/2010 06:56 PM, ROBIN HAMILTON wrote:
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>
>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"?
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org