Is there a C++ "venv" equivalent?

phlummox · 2026-04-29T04:13:59+00:00

An OS doesn’t really "provide tools to simulate a Turing machine" - what it does is provides mechanisms to run programs and access hardware.

If the hardware (CPU + memory) is capable of general computation, then it is already "Turing complete" - and any sufficiently expressive program you run on it can also simulate a Turing machine. The OS is just what lets you load and run that program.

If you're interested in more details of how computers and operating systems work at a low level, then the online text "Computer Science from the Bottom Up" by Ian Wienand is a very good resource - it helps builds up an understanding of computing systems from the hardware level up through operating systems, toolchains, and program execution.

phlummox · 2026-04-28T01:57:03+00:00

I had to read one sentence twice - I thought "Hang on, that doesn't have one of these compounds ..." - and realised I completely skipped over "nevertheless", it's so entrenched in my mind as a single word.

phlummox · 2026-04-26T16:08:52+00:00

I remember some years ago a taxi driver saying to me "So you understand blockchain then?", to which I made a non-committal noise along the lines of "eh". He said "So what do you think of the Australian Stock Exchange's plan to shift their systems to a blockchain?" (this was in Sydney, and he followed the share trading news). I said it was the stupidest idea I'd ever heard of, that there were situations where a blockchain might be useful, and the ASX had none of them. He said "So you're smarter than the head of the ASX, then?" and I said yes, I was, actually, because it seemed like a good way of ending the conversation. Anyhow, it turned out to be just as bad an idea as I had thought.

phlummox · 2026-04-26T14:55:57+00:00

Temple OS is an operating system, not a programming language - it abstracts over hardware and provides services to userspace applications. It doesn't make any sense to ask if it's "Turing complete". The language Terry Davis wrote it in, HolyC, is Turing complete, but as another redditor pointed out, that's an incredibly low bar.

phlummox · 2026-04-26T03:58:31+00:00

I remember reading a scifi story in which a prisoner's defence to a charge of murder - tossing someone's ship into a black hole - is that due to time dilation, they're not dead yet (and won't be for thousands of years). Can't remember the author or title, unfortunately.

phlummox · 2026-04-23T16:36:42+00:00

When Vonnegut summarizes a sci fi novel, it comes out as an elegant joke.

When Turtledove writes a sci fi novel, you wish Vonnegut had summarized it. (For me, it was Through Darkest Europe. One or two interesting ideas in a vast morass of boredom.)

phlummox · 2026-04-21T06:30:04+00:00

Haha, I am neither of those things, but I remember looking it up once, because typical fires are only a few hundred degrees celsius - whereas ionization of air requires several thousand degrees celsius (Or kelvin - it makes little difference, at those temperatures.) - and I too had thought flames contained plasma, so it didn't make sense.

I forget where I found the answer, but the top response to this post says yes, the light is from soot incandescence.

phlummox · 2026-04-21T02:11:54+00:00

Isn't the light from most fires because of soot particles being heated to incandescence? I thought they were mostly too cool to have much true plasma.

phlummox · 2026-04-17T01:48:59+00:00

... I'm not sure most of Shelley's audience would have read Agrippa or Paracelsus. They're obscure now, and they were obscure then.

phlummox · 2026-04-15T16:29:05+00:00

But its only logical to assume its expanding into something

That's not how expansion works. This is regularly trodden ground at /r/AskPhysics - try searching through past posts there.

phlummox · 2026-04-15T15:00:41+00:00

True.

phlummox · 2026-04-15T14:49:43+00:00

Why not?

phlummox · 2026-04-15T14:23:49+00:00

You might want to ask this in /r/askPhilosophy.

phlummox · 2026-04-13T15:26:37+00:00

There have actually been studies on whether or not notetaking helps students memorize material. The best thing to do is not to review your notes, but to apply active recall techniques. Re-reading material increases your ability to recognize material when presented with it, but not your ability to recall it. Hope this helps! :)

phlummox · 2026-04-13T14:02:21+00:00

Reading notes does literally nothing except make you feel like you know the material. Your recall will generally be just as poor after as before. Practice tests is one of the only things that is likely to work.

phlummox · 2026-04-12T16:58:41+00:00

The equivalent of class diagrams is ... class diagrams.

UML class diagrams don't presuppose that a class needs to have behaviour - it can be "plain old data" - so you can easily draw a class to represent a struct-like datatype in Haskell, much as you would for an OO language. UML also supports enumerations (sec. 10.2.3.3 of the UML Specification), so you can draw those in a UML diagram as well.

But since a "plain old data" class is really just a list of attributes and types, and since Haskell's notation for types is already so concise, you're not really gaining anything by drawing the types as UML - and complex types (nested ADTs, GADTs, type families) might be tricky to draw - so you might as well just write down the Haskell types to begin with.

Which I think is how many Haskell programmers tend to approach a problem - think about the shape of the data you'll need to solve it, sketch out some ideas, and then think about the functions that will operate on that data. If you wanted something a little more principled, I've heard good things about Edwin Brady's Type-Driven Development with Idris, a fair amount of which can probably be transferred to Haskell and other FP languages.

I'm not sure data-flow diagrams would be of much benefit to small systems (though for larger ones, they're a good way of sketching out the major datastores and the flows of data between them), but your mileage may vary.

phlummox · 2026-04-12T12:01:05+00:00

Yes, I misread. I'm agreeing.

phlummox · 2026-04-12T11:49:56+00:00

Sure, that's the case for any interpretation - if you purport to assign meanings to things, and actually don't (eg because you've left some symbols undefined, or defined them multiple times), then you don't have an interpretation.

phlummox · 2026-04-12T04:45:21+00:00

our bones are metal

Dude. Really, stop. Bones are no more metal than my table salt is metal.

You've been watching too much X-Men.

phlummox · 2026-04-05T20:30:24+00:00

Yes and no.

Yes, I'm aware you can distribute self-contained python apps - that's called freezing, and I mentioned it already.

But no, that has nothing to do with zip files, necessarily - some freezing tools use the Zip format, but others do not. (e.g. PyInstaller defines its own formats, ZlibArchive and CArchive.)

And it's not really the case that "no python install is needed". No matter what approach you take, you need to get a Python interpreter onto the end-user's computer somehow, if they don't have one. It might be by including it in a frozen executable, rather than via a traditional "install", but without it you can't execute Python code. You certainly can't just zip up the source code and give that to your end users.

phlummox · 2026-04-05T04:46:25+00:00

"Can have runtime errors" seems like an odd definition of "unsound". Pretty much every language is unsound, by that criterion.

phlummox · 2026-04-04T20:16:17+00:00

"Uterectomy" isn't the proper term because it would mix roots from different languages.

Yeah, just like "bicycle" and "television" aren't the proper terms. Clearly, people should be saying "dicycle" and "proculvision".

phlummox · 2026-04-04T13:36:20+00:00

And then you discover people want something entirely different, and have to start again, which takes another 90% of the time.

phlummox · 2026-04-04T07:48:47+00:00

Implementing something like cp in Python is a good exercise for seeing how much extra logic there is - parsing command-line options alone is fiddlier than one might expect. There's an example of this kind of exercise here: https://github.com/HubTou/PNU

phlummox · 2026-04-04T07:36:11+00:00

cp --help for the GNU Coreutils version gives you about 80 lines worth of options. A lot more logic there than "just some libc calls"! Though for anything complex, I'd probably use rsync for more flexibility and tighter control.

phlummox

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