srt@LOCUS.UCLA.EDU.UUCP (08/01/86)
"The Great Wall" is Peter Wang's ("Chan is Missing", "Dim Sum") most recent
film. It concerns a Chines-American family's return to the mainland and
the comedy (and drama) that results. It is quite a good film, in my opinion,
but what concerns this group is that in the background of one scene can be
spotted a DN300. The first cameo in a major motion picture by an Apollo?
Also, I recently ran across a rather obscure problem in Pascal that I
thought I'd bring up. I had an IF statement of the form:
if ((p <> NIL) AND (link[p^.lp] = 0)) then ...
where the first test is "guard" to prevent a problem on the second. Normally
this works - Pascal does the right thing and evaluates left to right - but
in this case, the compiler pulls the subscript reference outside the IF
form, causing an error. In essence, it turns this into:
x := p^.lp;
if ((p <> NIL) AND (link[x] = 0)) then ...
A hard problem to catch. The solution is to use nested IFs.
-- Scottrees@apollo.UUCP (Jim Rees) (08/05/86)
"The Great Wall" is Peter Wang's ("Chan is Missing", "Dim Sum") most recent
film. It concerns a Chines-American family's return to the mainland and
the comedy (and drama) that results. It is quite a good film, in my opinion,
but what concerns this group is that in the background of one scene can be
spotted a DN300. The first cameo in a major motion picture by an Apollo?
I saw that too, but wasn't really sure whether it was an Apollo or not.
More film trivia: In "The Terminator," if you watch the computer stuff
going by in the Arnold point-of-view shots, at one point you see the line
"VTOC is full."
Also, I recently ran across a rather obscure problem in Pascal that I
thought I'd bring up. I had an IF statement of the form:
if ((p <> NIL) AND (link[p^.lp] = 0)) then ...
If you look this up in your favorite reference manual, you will find that
Pascal does not guarantee the order of evaluation. This is actually a
feature, because usually the compiler can save some computation if it gets
to choose. If you need to guarantee the order, it's easy enough to do:
if ((p <> NIL) AND THEN (link[p^.lp] = 0)) then ...
Nested ifs are not necessary.
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