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Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2015 March 20

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March 20

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C follows B - inspired by music?

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The name C# is, by intention, a higher-pitched C. Some C#-textbooks claim that this pattern of "upgrading the note" was started already when C was named after B, but this seems to find little support in sources about the history of C. Was music an inspiration back then or rather not? --KnightMove (talk) 11:22, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The # can be geometrically decomposed into 4 small crosses, so possibly it might read here 'plus-plus PLUS PLUS', after C++...? --CiaPan (talk) 11:58, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Note the above is a pure OR...
That's indeed another common interpretation of the # - there might have been a merger of the two motivations. However, this is not directly related to my question. --KnightMove (talk) 12:08, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
You are making a leap of logic to assume that C is named after B. It is not certain that B is named after BCPL. There was no A (and it is silly to assume that BCPL is named after ALGOL). While there are myths that Ritchie named his languages B and then C and would then continue to D if he made another one, Ritchie, himself, has never verified anything. When I saw him speak in the 80's, he was specifically asked where he got the name C from. He said (joking) that he submitted the improvement on B as his PhD thesis and he got a C on it, so he decided to name the language C. That is, of course, completely false - but it demonstrates that Ritchie is not stating where he got the name from. So... You are taking a "best guess" at the name of C and assuming that Microsoft made C# the same way. It is more likely that they just wanted a character that is easy to type and wasn't already reserved. I assume they tried C!, C*, and C^ before settling on C#. It would make more sense if they went with C$. 209.149.113.207 (talk) 13:12, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
First, as to B, it was invented and named, not by Dennis Ritchie, but by Ken Thompson. Ritchie says here that "Thompson decided that Unix... needed a system programming language. After a rapidly scuttled attempt at Fortran, he created instead a language of his own, which he called B. B can be thought of as C without types; more accurately, it is BCPL squeezed into 8K bytes of memory and filtered through Thompson's brain. Its name most probably represents a contraction of BCPL, though an alternate theory holds that it derives from Bon [Thompson 69], an unrelated language created by Thompson during the Multics days. Bon in turn was named either after his wife Bonnie, or (according to an encyclopedia quotation in its manual), after a religion whose rituals involve the murmuring of magic formulas." Thompson had a strong taste for brevity, as is shown in the design of the language as well as its name (another famous example was the spelling of the UNIX system call creat without a final "e"), and it's just his style to go with a one-letter name, all the more so if there were multiple associations possible; I would have guessed that Bell Labs itself would be another.
As to C, what more explanation is needed than that it was the letter after B? --65.94.50.15 (talk) 14:25, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Well, sure, but do you mean the letter after B in the alphabet, or in "BCPL"? As the C FAQ list notes, there was speculation at one time, if only partly seriously, over whether C's successor would be D or P. --Steve Summit (talk) 07:43, 21 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Well I think either way, it would seem there's no reason to bring music in to it. Perhaps this came in to play for Microsoft's decision on what to call C#, but I don't see any particular reason to think it could come in to play for C coming after B in general. Nil Einne (talk) 12:42, 25 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Internet Interruption

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If the Internet were to be temporarily down is there a way to interface to informational files on your server? regards, John Wilson - — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.162.44.40 (talk) 13:06, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think the whole internet has ever been completely down, even temporarily, but I assume that you are asking about the Wikipedia servers, of which there are many, and the answer is that even if all of them were down at the same time, there are other unofficial (and perhaps out-of-date) copies worldwide. If it is your own internet service that is down (in Tucson, Arizona?) then you might be able to access Wikipedia by tethering your mobile phone to your computer, or just travelling to another area. Dbfirs 18:48, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
A full scale nuclear war could pretty much take the Internet down, between destruction of servers, communication lines, and electricity sources, due to blast damage, electromagnetic pulses, and lack of people to keep them operational or repair them. StuRat (talk) 07:05, 21 March 2015 (UTC) [reply]
User:70.162.44.40, there are many ways to read Wikipedia in locations where is difficult to access the Internet. Generally the idea is for people visit a place like the following while that person still has Internet, download an offline Wikipedia reader app there, and let that app download every Wikipedia article. Later that person can use the app to browse the downloaded copy, even in places where that person can't get an Internet connection. (For efficiency, most of these apps use BitTorrent to download a database dump rather than scraping articles one by one. For efficiency, some of them can update to the latest version using small updates using differential compression rather than re-download all 10 GB or so from scratch).

See Wikipedia:Database download for more details. --DavidCary (talk) 14:45, 26 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Chrome issues

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Apologies if this is the wrong place. I have Windows Vista and use Google Chrome. A few days ago, I think Chrome updated and now the text on this site seems to have shrunk. The bar at the top (toolbar/taskbar?) where all the tabs are has now turned blue. I don't think this is a Vista problem, as I used Safari to open Wikipedia and the text was as it should be (I use MonoBook btw). I can't seem to find anything about these issues anywhere and wondered if anyone had any insight/advice on how to get things back to 'normal'. Thank you. - JuneGloom07 Talk 19:26, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

This support page] tells how to adjust the display text size, but does your Chrome not retain this setting? Dbfirs 20:53, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I guess not in this case, I'm not sure. That didn't seem to work though, all the other pages changed but Wikipedia. Strange, but I guess I can live with it. Thank you! - JuneGloom07 Talk 02:18, 21 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
If you adjust the page scaling in Chrome with CTRL + and CTRL -, does that fix the text size issue ? StuRat (talk) 07:08, 21 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
MS had a Vista update that affected text quality; see 3037639. --  Gadget850 talk 19:06, 21 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
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