We have internal email lists for questions about programming languages. Here's one that came across recently that I thought illustrated a good point about language design. An interview candidate gave the following awful implementation of the factorial...

I've talked a few times in this blog about the semantics of the equality operators in various languages. (Such as here , and here .) Recently a reader asked me how JScript implements object identity. That is, given two objects, how do we know if they...

OK, back to scripting today. But before I get back to scripting issues, one brief correction. An attentive reader noted that "The Well-Tempered Clavier" was in fact designed to sound good on a "well tempered" instrument, not an "equally tempered" instrument...

Back in the 1960's a guy named Shepard published a paper which described a way to create a descending scale of twelve notes such that every consecutive pair was perceived as being two notes, the second one lower than the first. That's not hard -- every...

We’ve established why every just about piano in the world -- in fact, every concert-pitched musical instrument in the world -- is slightly out of tune. No one actually plays perfect fifths; every fifth interval is slightly flat. Why don't we hear the...

Last time we established the diatonic scale which has the nice property that there are five tone intervals and six fifths: Note Frequency A 220.000 B 247.500 C 260.741 D 293.333 E 330.000 ...

Last time we talked about the Pythagorean's discovery that sounds with vibrations in the ratios 1:2 and 2:3 sound consonant to the human ear. Let's explore the consequences of that a bit. Suppose we're building a stringed instrument from scratch and...

Whew. That's enough wacky VBScript for a while. As I said a long, long time ago now, I came up with the idea of doing a little "wacky VBScript" quiz in order to illustrate some of the weird corner cases in language design. I want to do a long -- potentially...

11) X and Y are both Booleans. Which of the following always assigns True ? Why? (a) Z = Not X Or Y = X Imp Y (b) Z = X Imp Y = Not X Or Y (c) Z = X Eqv Y = Not X XOr Y (d) Z = Not X XOr Y = X Eqv Y (a) assigns False if X and Y are both False ....

One year ago this week I was the Channel Nine guinea pig -- I'm still not sure why, but for some reason The Scobelizer and his cohort chose me to be the first guy interviewed for their project. (Probably because I'm mostly harmless.) Channel Nine has...