Post #563442
2026-03-07 02:36 UTC
@dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @kentpitman@climatejustice.social @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @cdegroot@mstdn.ca
Then there was the section on call-by-name (the default parameter passing convention for Algol)
... including a half page on Jenson's Device, that, I should note, was presented COMPLETELY UNIRONICALLY because this was 1972, as in, "Here's this neat trick that you'll want to know about."
And my reaction was, "WTFF, why???"
and also, "That can't possibly work, either."
Not having any actual computers to play with yet, that was that for a while.
Some years later, I got to college and had my first actual programming course...
6/n
Replies (1)
-
@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net 2026-03-07 02:39
@dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @kentpitman@climatejustice.social @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @cdegroot@mstdn.ca ... in Pascal.. And there I finally learned about and was able to get used to using recursion. Although I'd say I didn't *really* get it until the following semester taking the assembler course and learning about *stacks*. It was like recursion was sufficiently weird that I didn't really want to trust it until/unless I had a sense of what was actually happening under the hood, And THEN it was cool. 7/n