Re: Recursion, Yo

On 16.04.2024 00:32, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Mon, 15 Apr 2024 20:36:58 +0200, Janis Papanagnou wrote:
 

I usually don't think about whether there's a -1, 0, 42, value used to
represent 'EMPTY' in memory. This may stem from the CS education where
I've learned not to assume a physical von Neumann architecture with
registers etc. ...

 
The concept of “bits” comes from information theory. It has nothing to do
with von Neumann or Paul Newman or Gary Oldman or anything else. If you
have zero information to convey, then the number of bits of information is
zero.

Thanks for trying to teach me CS.

I'm not speaking about "concepts" I'm speaking either about "units"
or about "[physical] representations"; here about the latter.

Concerning language - and I cannot speak for English, but suppose
there's something similar there as in my native language - we
differentiate between entities and units; we have the unit "bit"
(not "bits"; e.g. "8 bit") and the concrete physical or whatever
entity that hereabouts you refer to as "Bit". In cases where I
speak about memory _representations_ the word to choose is "Bit",
like "Bytes", "Octets", etc.

 

Other such values like 'EMPTY' are also known from other languages; like
the Algol 68 terms 'NIL' ('null', 'NULL', 'nil'), and 'SKIP'.

 
Those are all entirely different concepts in Algol 68.

Yes, sure. That's why I wrote "like". - Not sure why you make
so many meaningless posts.

Janis