Difference between revisions of "Talk:1692: Man Page"

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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—[[User:PhantomLimbic|PhantomLimbic]] ([[User talk:PhantomLimbic|talk]]) 07:30, 10 June 2016 (UTC)
 
—[[User:PhantomLimbic|PhantomLimbic]] ([[User talk:PhantomLimbic|talk]]) 07:30, 10 June 2016 (UTC)
  
:Indeed. Turing's proof for the halting theorem says that there is no algorithm that can determine whether any possible program/input combination will halt. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that it's impossible to develop an algorithm that determines whether a particular, fixed program will halt on an arbitrary input. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.104.141|141.101.104.141]] 08:14, 10 June 2016 (UTC)
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:Indeed. Turing's proof for the halting theorem says that there is no algorithm that allows a Turing machine to determine whether any possible program/input combination will halt. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that it's impossible to develop an algorithm that determines whether a particular, fixed program will halt on an arbitrary input. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.104.141|141.101.104.141]] 08:14, 10 June 2016 (UTC)
  
 
Currently, there is no mention of the unmatched square brackets in the synopsis, or unmatched parenthesis in the title text. Presumably a reference to XKCD comic 859. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.77|141.101.98.77]] 07:51, 10 June 2016 (UTC)
 
Currently, there is no mention of the unmatched square brackets in the synopsis, or unmatched parenthesis in the title text. Presumably a reference to XKCD comic 859. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.77|141.101.98.77]] 07:51, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

Revision as of 08:20, 10 June 2016


I do not entirely understand how wikis work; however, I have attempted to add a transcript. I apologize if anything breaks. I also apologize if this is not how I should be apologizing.

108.162.241.135 04:27, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

The Pope flag is referencing the time of the Avignon Papacy --108.162.237.243 04:56, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

Would have frickin' loved Randall if he inserted a reference to Pope of Dope here. :D Todor (talk) 08:17, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

The horrible thing about this comic is that somebody is sure to have implemented this program by the end of the day... 141.101.104.140 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Found one on Github: https://github.com/iKevinY/blerp . It has a man page file, but the program itself just outputs "bleep blerp" and doesn't implement any of the flags (yet?). 141.101.104.141 08:05, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

"Behavior Not Defined" might be a reference to undefined behavior, where a program is allowed to do anything including make demons fly out your nose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undefined_behavior 108.162.219.12 06:48, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

162.158.135.36 06:58, 10 June 2016 (UTC) Søren Mors

I thought Ansel was a deliberate misspelling of ANSI, the most common 8 bit codepage. 162.158.135.36 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

The commit "Revision as of 07:08, 10 June 2016" reverted an IMO good explanation for the debug option with a bad one. Consider changing it back. Todor (talk) 07:20, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

I agree. The bad explanation also mixed up piping with redirection --141.101.104.76 07:41, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

I don't think `blerp -a -d -t -p "AVIGNON"` is a valid call to blerp, because the syntax line syntax is utterly off. For example, the first line has an unclosed open [, whereas the second line – in addition to having the corresponding unmatched ] – plays with the fact that even though {} is usually used to list a set of required items, {} is also how `find` (which might do something similar to blerp, and is in fact mentioned in -v) denotes its results when passed to an exec. 141.101.104.30 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Command line options do not normally use n-dashes; they use hyphens. Another problem with this option is that n-dashes and m-dashes cannot usually be displayed properly in the fixed-width fonts commonly used for command line terminals. The usual custom is to use two hyphens to represent a dash (which for proportional font display will often be converted to either an n-dash or m-dash).

While "check whether input halts" clearly alludes to the halting problem, it may not actually be impossible, depending on what blerp actually does and what sort of input it accepts. (It says nothing about actually reporting the result, and it makes no guarantees that it will itself halt.)

PhantomLimbic (talk) 07:30, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

Indeed. Turing's proof for the halting theorem says that there is no algorithm that allows a Turing machine to determine whether any possible program/input combination will halt. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that it's impossible to develop an algorithm that determines whether a particular, fixed program will halt on an arbitrary input. 141.101.104.141 08:14, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

Currently, there is no mention of the unmatched square brackets in the synopsis, or unmatched parenthesis in the title text. Presumably a reference to XKCD comic 859. 141.101.98.77 07:51, 10 June 2016 (UTC)