Peter Ammon:
So, as a Mac programmer, I should really get a good handle on these
floating point thingies. But floating point numbers seem pretty
mysterious. I know that they can’t represent every integer, but I don’t
really know which integers they actually can represent. And I know that
they can’t represent every fraction, and that as the numbers get
bigger, the fractions they can represent get less and less dense, and
the space between each number becomes larger and larger. But how fast?
What does it all LOOK like?
Floating Point Mac Programming
John Gruber:
In a “normal” programming language, the equivalent to “path to fonts
folder from user domain” might be something like:
path_to("fonts folder", "user domain")
And the equivalent to “path of fonts folder of user domain” might be:
user_domain.fonts_folder.path
The point being that in most languages, these two calls don’t look at
all similar. Which is a good thing, because they aren’t at all
similar: one is a global command taking two parameters, the other is a
property of a property of an object. AppleScript’s slavish devotion to
English-likeness, on the other hand, gives us two very different
syntax constructs that read, to humans, as though they’re semantically
identical.
John C. Welch, Rick Schaut, and Pierre Igot discuss the Microsoft
re-organization and Mac Office.
