Where did the Self language get its name? - programming-languages

Why was the language given such a hard to google name?

From here:
It is called 'SELF' because Dr David
Ungar got called to many many nerd
lecturers and got sick of writing his
name on his name badge and just wrote
'Self' instead. SELF is a good name
for it as it automatically assumes
default self method calls for
automatic inheritance.

Yep, Dogbane is right. And it really is a hard to google name so i use "self language" in quotes.
Dave Ungar told the story himself in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ka4KY7TMTU
Very interesting: he talks about the design principles behind Self.

Related

What is called a language-country prefix like "en-US"?

I looking for the proper name for the en-US, pt-BR, etc thing.
I tried searching for a few terms, I've found "LCID" but it seems to be a Windows/Microsoft universe thing.
I'm looking for a better term to describe it, but I'm not quite satisfied with:
localeCode
localeSlug
the language-LOCALE [a-z]{2}-[A-Z]{2} pattern seems to be used everywhere, so I want to refer to it with a name that implies the format.
That specific format is the IETF language tag. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5646
You could more generally call it a "language code" or "language tag".

Searching across multiple languages -- how to?

TLDR: I wanna build multi-language search on my website ala Pinterest, how do I do that?
I am starting a website, where people can publish content that gets metadata typed by the user. People can then interact with the content by looking at it, liking it, commenting on it, sharing it to social media. Also content discovery is mostly done through search.
I do not wish to create geographic boundaries on my website. I would like people who speak any language to find content that is relevant to them in any language. This requirement makes sense because the content is highly visual, ala Pinterest. So even if I don't understand that the word "car" is written in French in the description, it's fine because I'll mostly be interested in seeing the car.
Pinterest is really really good with search across language. For example, on uk.pinterest.com I typed "coupe carrée" which is the French for "bob haircut" and all the results are visually relevant. Even if the pin metadata is in English and the original web site is all in English.
How is that possible? how was Pinterest able to match to my french search query content whose text is all in English? is there translation at some step: coupe carrée > bob haircut > content containing "bob haircut"?
I looked at their engineering blog and all I found is tech to detect the original country and language of a website. Nothing about managing language in search.
please let me know if this is the wrong place to ask the how-it-works question.
Thanks in advance for any help/pointers you will be able to share!
The general strategy in this case is to index your content with every language translation you wish to search.
This would require use of a language translation API at index-time. And a language identification model. Here's a Solr example.

unistd.h implementation

My toolchain (Realview) does not have implementation of unistd.h, I have a code that I need to use that is using unistd.h, some function like access, open.
So I need to implement this functions by myself.
My question is, is there another alternative or some reference (except the function description, found here) that I can use in order to port/implement these functions?
What is the correct way to do that? It's my first time posting.
The "function description" you link to has the page title "The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 6", which indicates that it's perhaps a bit more of a heavy-weight than just being a mere description.
If you implement a function that fulfills all the text on that page correctly, chances are you've managed to re-implement it in a compatible way, so that programs complying to the same standard will build and work.
Not sure what else you feel you would need.

Web: is the convention "//mywebsite.com/mypage" with "//" a standard?

Explanation for people who don't know: this syntax means to Firefox : "use the same protocol than the one the page uses". So if the page is https and the link (or image) is //mywebsite.com/myimage.png Firefox will try to download it this way: https://mywebsite.com/myimage.png
(Edit my question if I'm wrong I don't want to say lies).
I'm wondering: is this a standard and all other Webbrowsers know it or if it's just something recent?
I'm sorry but I can't find the right words when googling for it ("convention" - "https" - "//" and so on don't give good results)
Thank you!
RFC3986, which defines the URI (Uniform Resource Identifier), which is the superset of URLs and URNs, is ambiguous. Appendix A, which defines the syntax, does not show the scheme as optional, but section 5.3, which covers reconstructing a URI, does show the scheme as optional.
That said, it's better for security purposes if you are explicit as to which scheme is used, to prevent the possibility of sensitive information being accidentally sent in the clear.
The inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, has invented these slashes as well, but they have no practical use. He even apologized to the public for them.

What is "timmy whinge" all about?

The SciTE text editor has an option in its configuration files called "tab.timmy.whinge.level".
What's the story behind this name?
As I understand it, "whinge" is a British-ism for "whine" -- Google defines it as "complain persistently and in a peevish or irritating way". So who exactly is Timmy, and what is he whining about? There's got to be a story there.
It's not really relevant to anything, but every time I see that option in the docs, I have to wonder.
According to the definitive source: Neil Hodgson, lead developer of Scintilla:
I shouldn't have named a feature
after a real person.
The standard Python module for
checking indentation is
'lib/tabnanny.py' which was
implemented by Tim Peters.
It is a reference to Tim Peters, major Python contributor and author of the original tabnanny (amongst many other things!). Confirmed by Neil Hodgson on the scintilla-interest mailing list.

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