Fun fact: I looked this up in the online version of the Duden (the predominant German dictionary). It does have an entry "Black Hole" (so the English term!) but not for "schwarzes Loch", which is the normal German term for it.
(In the printed versions, you might need to go to the Universalwörterbuch or so to find the English entry, it might not be in the normal "Die deutsche Rechtschreibung"; I have not checked.)
I wrote "predominant", not "official". And I think that is still true.
Also, from what I can tell using the site, it does not serve as a full dictionary. Rather, it lists the general rules of German orthography (as decided by the Rechtschreibrat) and has some limited tables of special words.
I don't quite get what you mean here. While you need to allow infinite expansions without repeating patterns, you also need to expansions with these pattern to get all reals. Maybe the most difficult part is to explain why 0.(9) and 1 should be the same, though, while no such identification happens for repeating patterns that are not (9).
This article is weird. It wants to shoot against JSON, but then has to make half of its arguments against YAML instead. JSON has no "ambiguity in parsing", JSON has no indentation-based syntax, and JSON has no implicit typing to turn "no" into false.
XML "lost" because it is also a poor format for structured data. It requires constant choice between whether some content should be conveyed using attributes or child nodes. If you use child nodes, indentation may or may not be relevant (because it can introduce leading/trailing spaces). There is also no standard for data types. (Do you write a boolean attribute foo as foo="foo", foo="true", or foo="yes"? Sure, a schema can describe the allowed values, but whoever interprets the XML still needs to add the right translation to true and false in their programming language by hand, presumably.) Due to the manifold ways of expressing essentially the same data, working with XML is always painful.
This is not really XML's fault. It was designed as a way of marking up text. When that is your goal, XML is not a bad choice, and all of its features make a lot more sense. (For example, this child-attribute distinction: Is this part of the text? If so, it should be represented as child nodes. Otherwise, it should be an attribute.) Here, something like JSON really falls flat.
But most data is not marked up text. And yet, some people and institutions tried to push XML as the universal solution to all data transfer problems. This is the reason for the push-back against it.
This isn't to say that we did not also lose some things. In complex cases, having something like a schema is good. Comments are appreciated when the files are also read and edited by humans. JSON's data types are underspecified. But I firmly believe that the solution to this is not XML.
> This is the reason for the push-back against it.
Do you have evidence for that? From memory, it was basically because it was associated with the java/.net bloat from the early 2000s. Then ruby on rails came.
I think that's basically the same reason, right? XML itself is bloated if you use it as a format for data that is not marked-up text, so it comes with bloated APIs (which where pushed by Java/.NET proponents). I believe that if XML been kept to its intended purpose, it would be considered a relatively sane solution.
(But I don't have a source; I was just stating my impression/opinion.)
I assume that "all the different levels" might not exist yet. The author is probably creating them a bit in advance, and will keep going as long as they're motivated. Having a regular schedule for new releases helps, and doing it daily seems as sensible as any other schedule.
There is also the problem that they decided to make all references nullable, so `NullPointerException`s could appear everywhere. This "forced" them to introduce the escape hatch of `RuntimeException`, which of course was way overused immediately, normalizing it.
But XML was designed as a markup language. That is was often used for configuration is not its fault. (And it works much better for its original purpose, where the otherwise strange distinction between attributes and child nodes actually makes sense.)
MAML seems to be designed as a configuration language, but calls itself a markup language. (YAML did too, but they changed it at some point.)
(Without knowing the precise nature of these laws) I would expect that they don't forbid you to store backups elsewhere. It's just that they mandate that certain types of data be backed up in sufficiently secure and independent locations. If you want to have an additional backup (or backups of data not covered by the law) in a more convenient location, you still can.
This kind of provision requires enforcement and verification. Thus, a tech spec for the backup procedure. Knowing Germany good enough, I'd say that these tech spec would be detrimental for the actual safety of the backup.
When you live in Germany and are asked to send a FAX (and not a mail, please). Or a digital birth certificate is not accepted until you come with lawyers, or banks not willing to operate with Apple pay, just to name few..
I generally agree that treating substrings that are numbers as numbers is a good default for most users in most situations.
However, for hex numbers this simply won't give good results because some of them will just happen to not contain any of the digits A to F and be treated as base-10 numbers by the heuristic while others will include these digits and be sorted differently.
(So, a having a strict lexicographic mode as an alternative in file managers would be nice.)
Dijkstra is right, of course. However, most math texts still use 1-based indexing. If you want to translate them into code, it's easier when the conventions match.
(Now, if you had a proposal for switching math over to 0-based indexing ...)
> The above has been triggered by a recent incident, when, in an emotional outburst, one of my mathematical colleagues at the University —not a computing scientist— accused a number of younger computing scientists of "pedantry" because —as they do by habit— they started numbering at zero.
I did have one or two math professors who would use x_0 and x_1 instead of x_1 and x_2 when they had to name two objects.
But I have also seen places where 1-based indexing was used despite being "obviously wrong". I don't quite recall what it was, but there was sequence of objects A_1, A_2, ... and a natural way of combining A_k and A_l to get A_(k + l - 1). Had the indices been shifted by 1 to be 0-based, the result would have been A_(k + l), which would be much nicer to work with.
(In the printed versions, you might need to go to the Universalwörterbuch or so to find the English entry, it might not be in the normal "Die deutsche Rechtschreibung"; I have not checked.)
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