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. -- Scott
rees@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. -------