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D language (Dlang). It is especially good if you are porting from C as the semantics are the same enough to rum a lot of code via copy and paste, or if not it will fail to compile.

> not aware of any language that provides this out-of-the-box, unfortunately.

Smalltalk has this. Class "Symbol".


Might be a clip on tie.

Should be "(2014)"

That essay is not well worded. They're confusing property in general with land specifically, with wasn't universal across the States. As I understand it, some States' property requirements could be met with non-land assets. See [1] for an interesting overview of the situation in New Jersey. The following quote makes no sense if property was restricted to land-only:

> Today a man owns a jackass worth fifty dollars and he is entitled to vote; but before the next election the jackass dies. The man in the meantime has become more experienced…and he is therefore better qualified to make a proper selection of rulers — but the jackass is dead and the man cannot vote. Now gentlemen…in whom is the right of suffrage? In the man or in the jackass?"

> -- Attributed to Benjamin Franklin, taken from “The Casket, or the Flowers of Literature, Wit and Sentiment,” 1828

[1] https://www.amrevmuseum.org/virtualexhibits/when-women-lost-...


Alas, the search engine has led us astray once more.


A while back someone claimed to me that WASI was structured as capabilities. True/false?


True

  WASI Design Principles

  Capability-based security
  WASI is designed with capability-based security principles, using the facilities provided by the Wasm component model. All access to external resources is provided by capabilities.

  There are two kinds of capabilities:

  Handles, defined in the component-model type system, dynamically identify and provide access to resources. They are unforgeable, meaning there's no way for an instance to acquire access to a handle other than to have another instance explicitly pass one to it.

  Link-time capabilities, which are functions which require no handle arguments, are used sparingly, in situations where it's not necessary to identify more than one instance of a resource at runtime. Link-time capabilities are interposable, so they are still refusable in a capability-based security sense.

  WASI has no ambient authorities, meaning that there are no global namespaces at runtime, and no global functions at link time.
Source: https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI/blob/main/README.md


> It was literally first programming language taught at university.

Do you mean "It was literally first programming language I was taught at university."? because the first language ever taught was more likely to be one of the autocoder/assembly variants, or FORTRAN.


"First language" is generally taken as a term of art in this sector. It is the first language we're teaching students who we expect to learn other languages as well, so emphasis on "first" here unlike for say a "taster" course in another discipline where you're learning only say, Python, with no expectation you will ever learn other languages.

Edited to expand: For a First Language you can choose to pick a language that you don't expect your students will actually end up using, for pedagogic reasons, just as we might spend time proving fundamental things in Mathematics even though those are already proved and you'll never do that "in real life" after studying, a language which has good properties for learning about programming is not necessarily also the right language to actually write yet another web site, database front end, AI chat bot and video streaming service.

I've spent considerable time thinking about this and I believe Oxford and Cambridge were right to choose an ML as First Language. The MLs have desirable properties for teaching, even if you expect your students to end up writing Python or C++ after they graduate. I am entirely certain that my exposure to an ML at University made it much easier to pick up Rust than it was for people whose nearest previous languages were C and C++


It's indeed hard to imagine that the first programming language taught at any university would be Ada. That would at least mean that the university started teaching programming and computer science very late. There's been a number of main programming languages taught over the years. Back in the late seventies/early eighties, some universities in my region used Simula in their programming courses, for example.


Agreed. My mum learned basic Fortran at university in the early 1970s, before Ada existed. (It was done on punch cards, and they had to wait a day or so to find out if their programs worked!)


I'm not sure if it is your issue or not, but when I searched for "red planet" your index entry says it's the Robert A. Heinlein novel, but the link to Librivox goes to the page for the William John Locke book.


I wonder if there is any way of getting X/Twitter to shake it loose?


My Mom was a midwife in London in the mid-20th century. She used to joke that she was a black belt...in midwifery. Apparently the belt colors had meaning then and still do other places (after a quick search it looks like Ghana still uses a black belt for midwives).


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