Know any Fortran programmers who need a more interesting job?

Paul Koning paulkoning at comcast.net
Fri Oct 30 13:35:22 CDT 2015


> On Oct 30, 2015, at 2:16 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
> 
> ...
> Apparently nobody had ever told them that a number in memory is... just a
> number. At which point it became clear that they needed to know a little
> more about how a computer actually worked.

That reminds me of an exchange I had with a younger colleague who was writing a document describing how to do incremental TCP checksum update correctly.  He was tripping over the issue of negative zero.  I told him the answer simply was to subtract the complement with end around borrow.  He didn't believe me and ended up proving it by exhaustively testing every case.

Sigh.

	paul




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