[NBLUG/talk] Invention of the Unary Number System

ME dugan at passwall.com
Mon May 19 18:09:00 PDT 2003


> On Mon, 19 May 2003, Eric Eisenhart wrote:
> [snip]
>> (Seriously, the Romans found 0 so scary that they outlawed it)
>
> Yeah, but then the Roman Empire fell because they had no way to indicate
> successful termination of their C programs.

Wha-do-you-mean? They can try to typecast an int to become a Bool or enum
a Bool into existance. This way they could specify "true" (1) for
successful termination of a function, and by being MS about hte issue
(remember, they *were* the roman empire) they could then state the
industry standard for  successful termination of a program was "true" (1).

Of course, you might then ask, "how would they specify a problem?" Oh!
That is simple. They can just throw exceptions. ;-)

heh-heh-hheh

-ME




More information about the talk mailing list