Formerly u/CanadaPlus101 on Reddit.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Yup. We should really zero-index century names and years AD/BC as well, but we don’t. If we were still using Roman numerals it would be no big deal, but we rarely do, so there’s a confusing clash. I’m not sure if it was this programming humour community or another where I had a big exchange on the topic before.

    I suppose you could have some kind of positional system that’s one-indexed, so 999AD = 1111999AD, and 2000 would be written 2111, but you’d have to completely redo the way arithmetic works, and that defeats the point a bit. And, the new 999 would not be our 999, because it’s effectively base 9.




  • Ordinal vs. cardinal. It’s “first” not “onest”, right? Even the ancient proto-Germanic speakers could tell there’s a difference. (In fact, it’s basically a contraction of “foremost”, and has nothing to do with numbers; their weak numeracy was an advantage on this topic)

    If we weren’t implicitly choosing 1-indexing it would be 1nd for “second” (and still not “onend” or something). That breaks down once you get to third and fourth, though.







  • Maybe I just like the idea of a closing tag being very specific about what it is that is being closed (?).

    That’s kind of what I was getting at with the mental scoping.

    My peeve with json is that… it doesn’t properly distinguish between strings that happen to be a number and “numbers"

    Is that implementation-specific, or did they bake JavaScript type awfulness into the standard? Or are numbers even supported - it’s all binary at the machine level, so I could see an argument that every (tree) node value should be a string, and actual types should be left to higher levels of abstraction.

    I actually don’t like the attributes in xml, I think it would be better if it was mandatory that they were also just more tagged elements inside the others, and that the “validity” of a piece of xml being a certain object would depend entirely on parsing correctly or not.

    I particularly hate the idea of attributes in svg, and even more particularly the way they defined paths.

    I agree. The latter isn’t even a matter of taste, they’re just implementing their own homebrew syntax inside an attribute, circumventing the actual format, WTF.



  • I think we did a thread about XML before, but I have more questions. What exactly do you mean by “anything can be a tag”?

    It seems to me that this:

    <address>
        <street_address>21 2nd Street</street_address>
        <city>New York</city> 
        <state>NY</state>
        <postal_code>10021-3100</postal_code>
    </address>
    

    Is pretty much the same as this:

      "address": {
        "street_address": "21 2nd Street",
        "city": "New York",
        "state": "NY",
        "postal_code": "10021-3100"
      },
    

    If it branches really quickly the XML style is easier to mentally scope than brackets, though, I’ll give it that.