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- Looking at ProjectEuler and the OEIS website, it seems that some programming languages offer shorter methods of doing something (mathematical) (and I'm not just talking about the obfuscatory syntax). One language that comes to mind is J; another is Maple. It seems that you can do a lot with just a few short calls. Why isn't that added to most languages? Is there a repository that adds the most optimal method to do something into a library for that language so that it may be used?
- What is the longest running program? I assume the programs developed for Voyager 1 and 2 are pretty much up there. What other types are there? Is there a never-ending program that is calculating all the primes and storing them in a library somewhere?
- Happy January 9 = 1/9 = 3/33 = 3/27 = March 27!
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Quote: Re: A Programming Question (Now That Chris is On Vacation)
Urgentz. Must calculate great circle distance between remote Pacific island and Toronto Canada to minimize flight travel. Send Codez.
Professor is giving extra credit for a flat earth solution. Oops, shouldn't have said that.
Homework must be turned in using Javascript running in a Docker container.
Oops, shouldn't have said that either.
Latest Article - Azure Function - Compute Pi Stress Test
Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny
Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802
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Did you actually read it? Just having nonsensical thoughts.
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Did you actually read him?... His haven't much more sense than yours 
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Bassam Abdul-Baki wrote: Just having nonsensical thoughts.
Who, you or me?
Yes, I did actually read it. I even looked up Maple. 
Quote: Why isn't that added to most languages?
Oops, hit post before finishing this post!
Moving along -- so, Maple looks like a cool specialized language. I note that you can interface to it with other languages.
I guess the point being, Maple is lacking a ton of stuff that I use regularly in C#. So, why doesn't Maple have all that cool stuff?
The answer should be the same for why C# doesn't have all the cool Maple stuff. 
Latest Article - Azure Function - Compute Pi Stress Test
Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny
Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802
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Marc Clifton wrote: Who, you or me?
Me. Always me. or I would have added "or are you" in between the two sentences.
First time seeing Maple? It was my favorite math program in college.
What type of C# things are you talking about? I'm strictly speaking about mathematical features and how you can implement or manipulate things.
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Bassam Abdul-Baki wrote: Is there a never-ending program that is calculating all the primes and storing them in a library somewhere?
well there was Deep Thought that determined the answer to life, the universe and everything ...but that did eventually complete.
Now [given the answer] they're trying to trying to figure out the ultimate question, however that will take a much larger computer.
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Earth is not enough! 
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#1. It is odd that some language-specific features don't spread more broadly (APL's matrix manipulation as another example). I guess that the general language users don't need them, so it doesn't migrate into the more common languages. Some stuff does migrate (quicksorts and whatnot), so I assume it's just need vs. experimental languages.
#2. I know I had asked around when I worked at a different place, and Sabre (computer system) - Wikipedia[^] was listed as one of the oldest still running (albeit likely updated).
#3. Need to work that into a x^3+Y^3+z^3 format
TTFN - Kent
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Kent Sharkey wrote: APL's matrix manipulation as another example
BASIC-PLUS -- which was my first introduction to programming, on a PDP-11 in 1983 -- also has matrix operations built in.
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So has FORTRAN 90, the long-running vehicle
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- Makes you wonder what users are actually programming. Programming for the sake of programming or actually trying to solve problems through automation.
- Cool. Never heard of it before. I know the IMDB website's data is based of the old newsgroup, but that's data.
- Are you familiar with Euler's Equal Sums Of Like Powers?
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I don't think a "system" counts as a program. Granted, SABRE is possibly the oldest civilian system in existance, but the longest continuously running software probably goes to NASA's various interstellar probes. Earth-bound software is replaced too frequently to even come close to the NASA stuff. 41 years (as of this August/September) and counting... They expect the probes to lose power some time in 2025.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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MATLAB, [curses and spits on the floor] is built around matrices and is damned good for that [curses again].
Any IO outside of its ecosystem is totally fubar though.
veni bibi saltavi
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Wow! Someone else has come across APL! No-one else I have spoken too recently has ever heard of APL.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Kent Sharkey wrote: #3. Need to work that into a x^3+Y^3+z^3 format
Sigh. x3 + y3 + z3 = k
You kids today; no appreciation for presentation.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Chris's eyes and ears are everywhere.
Peter Wasser
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell
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2) Apparently, it's MOCAS[^] - started running in 1958 and still going ...
3) Only in backwards colonies. The real world writes it 27/3/.... or ....-03-27
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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OriginalGriff wrote: Apparently, it's MOCAS[^]
Perhaps the question should have been "running substantially unchanged, on the same hardware". The IBM 2098 E-10 was only first available in 2008, to say nothing of the upgrades to the interface etc.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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OriginalGriff wrote: 2) Apparently, it's MOCAS[^] - started running in 1958 and still going ...
If it ain't broke ...
But I am wondering what happened with MOCAS and the Millennium bug.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. - Mark Twain
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Millenium bug? A program storing dates either with 4 digit year (or actually anything else than 2 digit "mod 100" style) encountered no problems with the new millennium. Assuming, of course, that the OS didn't crash or deliver the wrong values. My guess is that the OS used in 1958 was so primitive that it had few if any built-in calendar-related functions beyond reporting the current date and time. As long as that report didn't use a mod 100 year value, you'd be fine.
Related anecdote:
The University of Copenhagen ran a huge Univac 1100 mainframe, from the days when CMOS and battery backed up real-time clocks had't been invented yet. So if the machine was rebooted (which could be due to normal maintenance), the operator had to set the current time manually. At one reboot, the operator happended to mistype the year, setting the machine 10 years into the future. It wouldn't be that dramatic, if they hadn't - before the mistake was discovered - run the program deleting all files that hadn't been accessed for six months. ("On a clear disk, you can seek forever"...)
There is a second part to this story: The data wasn't actually deleted. Storage for large systems was heavily tape based in those days. Univac had a very compact format where all the metadata, the catalog information with pointers to the data blocks, were kept on disk. Only the data blocks themselves were written to tape ... without any metadata. So all the data blocks were there, but with no pointers to them. No indication of which data blocks belonged to which file.
(This was a well known "real life" story in my student days - my U had two huge Univac 1100 mainframes; the operators loved to tell about this incident. I never saw any "hard" documentation. If anyone can point me to reliable sources, I'd be happy!)
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Trust me, back in those days, a mod 100 year would have been used - memory was small and damn expensive - you wouldn't waste a byte per date! (Your code might have worked with year >= 50 == 1900 + year, year < 50 == 2000 + year but in the fifties that was very, very unlikely - that was a big part of the Millenium Bug)
Bear in mind that in those days its was mostly punch cards - which had 12 rows so a month could be encoded in a single digit to save space!
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Now that is something I never thought about. 
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Naah... You worry about those two bytes when you store time stamps thousands or millions of records. An OS that provides a single "current date" value does not chop off two digits to save two bytes in the single date value presented to applications. The chopping off would take far more than two bytes of code! I have worked with several OSes from the early 1970s, and they all provided 4 digit year values. If two digits were chopped off, that was done by the application, not by the real time clock in the OS.
I rather question whether a 1958 vintage system really had a real time clock at all, and an OS that at all provided the current time in a dd-mm-yyyy format. My guess is that after reboot, the operator could set the startup date/time in a single well known location, alongside with a register counting machine cyles since startup. Remember that machines of those days did not have byte addressing, and yyyymmdd in decimal format fits well within a word, even on 32 bit machines (most were 36 bits at that time). Storing yymmdd in a single word saved no space compared to yyyymmdd.
Of course MOACS itself could choose to chop off digits to save space in a million of records, probably to save magnetic tape. I doubt that it held zillions of records in memory at the same time! Also note that it is written in COBOL, The Great Promoter of BCD - PACKED DECIMAL uses 4 bits to the digit, so only a single byte would be saved by a yy format. BCD could save quite a few bytes per accounting record with lots of numeric values. Once you half the space for numeric entities by using BCD, chances are less that you go further to save a single byte by using mod 100 year values.
Anyway: In lots of applications, a time stamp is just a label; you don't do arithmetic on in. In the days of Pascal, with enumeration values as a primary non-numeric data type, I was arguing with fervor that April is not half of September, but followers of this new "C" language protested: Why not? As long as a date is just a label, there is no millenium problem. A person reading the label will know from the context that "95" is ten years before "05" rather than ninety years later.
When we entered the new millenium, quite a few people (not limited to diehard preppers!) had filled their basements with canned food and water bottles, bought freestanding propane heaters etc. expecting the entire society infrastructure to break down at midnight. We know it didn't happen, even though numerous computer systems were NOT updated to handle year 2000 - none of those I worked on, none of those I depended on. That was either because they had never cared to save those two bytes (or nibble), or that they never did date arithmetic. Or that they since long had been prepared for it, making the 100 years run from 1950 to 2050 (I saw that in a couple systems long before the Millennium Panic.
The Millennium Panic was essentially driven by users who wanted to have their systems upgraded, but those sitting on the money said "No!". By creating a big panic that the money people understood nothing of, lots of both software and hardware was updated ahead of schedule, even if it wasn't at all affected by the year. (And which hardware was millenium dependant? Lots of hardware was thrown out!) I consider at least half of the millenium issues to be fictous, just a power tool to force through updgrade that would otherwise have come significantly later.
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Two bytes for the year to hold only two digits was common in the commercial world using languages like COBOL and PL/1, but even COBOL had a condensed mode (forget the exact keyword) to save as BCD which gave two digit in a single byte. In the scientific world we used languages like FORTRAN that use binary values so a single byte could hold up to 256 values so it was common to use 1900 + byte for the year which was (and still is) OK from 1900 to 2255.
The ICL 1900 series dates were in the format ddmmmyy but they had the convention that yy >= 65 represented 1900 + yy, yy < 65 represented 2000 + yy. So, if there are any ICL 1900s still around, they are safe.
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