163: Donald Knuth - Revision history

Lettherebedarklight: /* Trivia */ add Category:Comics with a Spanish translation

2025-12-15T09:01:04Z

‎Trivia: add Category:Comics with a Spanish translation

FaviFake: added Category:Comics featuring real people using HotCat

2025-05-11T10:11:39Z

added Category:Comics featuring real people using HotCat

FaviFake: /* Explanation */

2025-05-11T09:32:50Z

‎Explanation

FaviFake: /* Explanation */

2025-05-11T09:32:06Z

‎Explanation

Lettherebedarklight: /* Explanation */ from volume 0

2024-04-12T07:05:23Z

‎Explanation: from volume 0

Mushrooms: two trivia sections

2023-12-15T20:19:13Z

two trivia sections

FaviFake at 20:30, 29 August 2023

2023-08-29T20:30:00Z

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← Older revision		Revision as of 09:01, 15 December 2025
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	[[Category:Programming]]		[[Category:Programming]]
	[[Category:Comics featuring real people]]		[[Category:Comics featuring real people]]
		+	[[Category:Comics with a Spanish translation]]

← Older revision		Revision as of 10:11, 11 May 2025
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	[[Category:Comics featuring Donald Knuth]]		[[Category:Comics featuring Donald Knuth]]
	[[Category:Programming]]		[[Category:Programming]]
		+	[[Category:Comics featuring real people]]

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 Black Hat cites Donald Knuth to support his rebuttal, but the quote he uses does not seem relevant. Presumably, Black Hat had illegally entered the professor's house in order to question him on indices. Donald Knuth's words were not an intellectual response to the question, but rather an alarmed response to the presence of an intruder. It is not clear if Black Hat is aware of this.
-The title text suggests that Black Hat finds Knuth's books intimidating, due to perhaps their size or complexity, to the extent that he considers breaking into Knuth's house (a risky, difficult crime) to be the better option in finding his answer. Even for Donald Knuth's books, this is very exaggerated and illogical behavior.{{Citation needed}}
+The title text suggests that Black Hat finds Knuth's books intimidating, due to perhaps their size or complexity, to the extent that he considers breaking into Knuth's house (a risky, difficult crime) to be the better option in finding his answer. Even for Donald Knuth's books, this is exaggerated and illogical behavior. In ''[[xkcd: volume 0]]'', four other responses are included:
 * "Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration." - {{w|Stan Kelly-Bootle}}
 * "What are you doing with that thing? Eww, it's still alive!" - {{w|Paul Graham (programmer)|Paul Graham}}

@@ Line 8: / Line 8: @@
 ==Explanation==
-{{w|Donald Knuth}} is a computer science Professor Emeritus at {{w|Stanford University}} who is famous for writing ''{{w|The Art of Computer Programming}}'' and developing the <span class="texhtml"><span style="font-family:cmr10, LMRoman10-Regular, Times, serif;">T<span style="text-transform:uppercase; vertical-align:-0.5ex; margin-left:-0.1667em; margin-right:-0.125em;">e</span>X</span></span> computerized typesetting system.
+[[Donald Knuth]] is a computer science Professor Emeritus at {{w|Stanford University}} who is famous for writing ''{{w|The Art of Computer Programming}}'' and developing the <span class="texhtml"><span style="font-family:cmr10, LMRoman10-Regular, Times, serif;">T<span style="text-transform:uppercase; vertical-align:-0.5ex; margin-left:-0.1667em; margin-right:-0.125em;">e</span>X</span></span> computerized typesetting system.
 In computer science, an array is a structure that stores multiple values in a fixed order, and the elements are accessed by their index number.  In {{w|Fortran}}, for instance, one writes <tt>array(1)</tt> to access the first element in the array. Most "modern" (read: descended from {{w|C (programming language)|C}}) languages use 0 as the index for the first element in the array, but it is possible (if one is careful about it) to ignore the 0th element and use 1 as the first index. In some programming languages, such as {{w|Pascal (programming language)|Pascal}} or {{w|Ada (programming language)|Ada}}, it is possible to select an arbitrary range of indices for each array type, so the first index might not only be 0 or 1, but also −42 or 100000. [[Cueball]] is complaining that [[Black Hat]] was not consistent in his choice of where to start his arrays. This is a valid complaint, as a lack of such consistency can make coding errors both more likely and more difficult to detect.

← Older revision		Revision as of 07:05, 12 April 2024
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	The title text suggests that Black Hat finds Knuth's books intimidating, due to perhaps their size or complexity, to the extent that he considers breaking into Knuth's house (a risky, difficult crime) to be the better option in finding his answer. Even for Donald Knuth's books, this is very exaggerated and illogical behavior.{{Citation needed}}		The title text suggests that Black Hat finds Knuth's books intimidating, due to perhaps their size or complexity, to the extent that he considers breaking into Knuth's house (a risky, difficult crime) to be the better option in finding his answer. Even for Donald Knuth's books, this is very exaggerated and illogical behavior.{{Citation needed}}
		+
		+	In ''[[xkcd: volume 0]]'', four other responses are included:
		+	* "Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration." - {{w\|Stan Kelly-Bootle}}
		+	* "What are you doing with that thing? Eww, it's still alive!" - {{w\|Paul Graham (programmer)\|Paul Graham}}
		+	* "I'm calling the police once I get my cell phone back from your squid." - {{w\|Bruce Schneier}}
		+	* "Sorry, I thought you were Microsoft." - {{w\|Richard Stallman\|RMS}}

	==Transcript==		==Transcript==

← Older revision		Revision as of 20:19, 15 December 2023
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	Later, the topic of breaking into a software expert's house through the skylight became topic of [[225: Open Source]] again.		Later, the topic of breaking into a software expert's house through the skylight became topic of [[225: Open Source]] again.

−	~~==Trivia==~~
	This is the first xkcd comic featuring [[Donald Knuth]].		This is the first xkcd comic featuring [[Donald Knuth]].

@@ Line 27: / Line 27: @@
 ==Trivia==
 Later, the topic of breaking into a software expert's house through the skylight became topic of [[225: Open Source]] again.
 {{comic discussion}}
 [[Category:Comics featuring Black Hat]]
 [[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
 [[Category:Comics featuring Donald Knuth]]
 [[Category:Programming]]