Herodotus wouldn’t have written it quite the same — no Jupyter notebook for example, Jupiter being a Roman term; the nearest equivalent for the Ancient Greeks was Zeus.

Safe to assume Herodotus would have used a Zeus notebook.

Finally C# will have a more idiomatic way to represent this classic code example from “The Daily WTF” in 2005 —

    enum Bool 
    { 
        True, 
        False, 
        FileNotFound 
    };

See https://thedailywtf.com/articles/what_is_truth_0x3f_

What about Microsoft's own "MsoTrioState"? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.offic...

  enom MsoTrioState {
    Toggle,
    Mixed,
    True,
    False,
    CTrue
  };

Is it called "trio" state because 3 of the 5 states are not supported?

I also like how True is -1. Beautiful all around!

-1 means every single bit is 1, the truest possible value.

I’m having a surprisingly difficult time deciding if I strongly agree or disagree with this statement.

I know VB used -1 as the truth value, not sure about other languages.

Apparently it's sort of sensible, but weird.

msoTriStateMixed applies to aggregates. Eg, text.isBold() can be true, false, or a mix. Partly bold, partly not bold.

msoTriStateToggle isn't a real value but only used as a sort of flag. So eg, text.setBold(tristate), where "Mixed" would be invalid, and "Toggle" would flip the bold-ness of the text.

The msoCTrue one is where it gets really weird, no clue what's that for. I suppose an ill-conceived attempt to support the other way to express True.

True being -1 was a thing in Visual Basic and I suppose by some other Windows stuff. Logic being all the bits are 1.

note CTrue, the one true true

CTRUE IS A FALSE PROPHET AND ITS WORSHIPPERS SHALL BURN FOR THEIR HERESY

More languages need to support enoms.

Usual reminder that one of the hardest problems in software engineering is still naming things ;-)

Awful as it is, I can easily imagine how it happened... Probably says more about me than the code.

You're a true Romantic: Idealist and Pragmatist in one.

About 12 years ago I went to go and work on some legacy C++ software when I was very green. We had a big code base and it had enum Bool { False = 0, True = 1 } everywhere. I thought it was a good idea to rationalise this since we had conversions all over the place to the modern bool type.

So I suggested it, got a PR up (bit painful) it got reviewed, went in, everything worked fine, and we came about a week towards releasing the product (6 monthly releases) before someone noticed that we couldn’t load files from previous versions. Turned out that we wrote lots of these old Bool types to binary data files and so the 4 byte data was now being read as 1 byte data. Oops. Reverted the whole lot. Lesson in humility!

And as always when there is a mix of state and result, i post rop https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/rop/

…months after it began.

You must be referring to the abridged Strnk n Wyt

In Superman III, the eponymous man straightens the leaning tower of Pisa, and in Superman II he spins the earth backwards to reverse time.

A better idea would be to un-tilt the earth’s axis, thus getting rid of variable day lengths, annual seasons, the need for DST etc, just one enjoyable spring day, every where, all year round.

> Yurchick was one of 21 people that had been indicted for conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute kilogram quantities of methamphetamine in Texas and elsewhere from August 2019 to March 2021 … Yurchick subsequently pleaded guilty to that charge on February 1, 2022

From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icy_Blu

Feel free to dig deeper, I’ve only taken a shallow look.

Interesting point.

It’s a kind of reframing (or consequence of) the bullshit asymmetry principle.

Yes, absolutely.

The survey could say, “given that the existence of corporate monopolies demonstrates weak and non functional governments, should governments a) cede more power to the monopolies, or b) pretend to claw power back from the monopolies?”

Absolutely.

They hand-wave tremendously complex questions, in such a way that the respondent is free to interpret them any way you wish.

A similar survey question might be:

> I am thinking of a number. Is it, a) too high or b) too low?

A “ministry of truth” would (I assume) be a part of the executive branch of government.

Whereas the creation of laws and the interpretation of laws are powers that the executive branch does not have, and are held separately by the legislative and judicial branches.

In a, well, y’know “functioning” democracy. Apparently.