found in comments in some early 90's C code

honey the codewitch

/* Confused? Good! Read my MS thesis [Purdue Technical Report TR90-30].
TJP 8/93 -- can now read PhD thesis from Purdue. */

This is not how you comment software, Terrence. This is just not how you do it.

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Jon McKee

Pull request: Denied
Reason: How about you read the comment guidelines, Burgess?

On a different note, what on Earth code are you reading that has to do with "Intrinsic Ultracontractivity and Probability"?

honey the codewitch

It's the C version of antlr - a very early version before it was rewritten in java

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Mike Hankey

You wouldn't want to look at some of my comments. Would make a sailor blush!

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honey the codewitch

I've had a few of those, but my favorite was a troll of myself? future devs? I won't repeat it here and spoil it

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Mike Hankey

A lot of mine is of the chastising nature or to put it Simpson like DOH! (But in language suitable for a Marine)

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Marc Clifton

I googled that. "Instrinsic Ultracontractivity and Probability" by Burgress Davis. WTF are you getting into there, miss codewitch? Contagion research? ;)

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honey the codewitch

I'm not sure that's the right paper. This is a parser generator.

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Jon McKee

My thought was maybe the probability equations were somehow useful in parsing. Because yea, Purdue TR90-30 is a paper relating to heat kernels.

honey the codewitch

Maybe they reuse numbers. The paper Terrence referred to was pretty old judging by the other comments, though that would be strange if they did.

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Jon McKee

The paper's from 1990, but maybe the numbers don't distinguish between departments so there's a TR90-30 from the CS department too or something. No clue, but now I know heat kernels are a thing :laugh:

honey the codewitch

haha, well maybe he mistyped the comment. I don't know. this source is decades old - very late 80s in some places.

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Lost User

Well, I invested 10 minutes looking into this and found the thesis here: Obtaining practical variants of LL (k) and LR (k) for k greater than 1 by splitting the atomic k-tuple[^] I can't seem to find the original technical report. I even checked the TRAIL archives[^]. Although I suspect the original paper is behind this wall[^]. Best Wishes, -David Delaune

honey the codewitch

Yeah I found his thesis but it explains the theory of the code, but not the code itself, which is rather convoluted.

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BillWoodruff

There is an Ockham's Razor hypothesis: often, in the academic world, what matters is passing the orals, and getting the advanced degree by whatever means. All the code has to actually do is exhibit some functionality: the effort goes into the thesis, and getting the thesis committee members to sign off on it. Most likely, the author knew the likelihood of any reviewer actually examining his code was low. That may account for his "teasing" remark you cite. I can speak from personal experience on this: I was awarded a Master's degree from UC Berkeley after returning from a year-long 1975~76 fellowship for study in India with a 200+ page thesis with 200+ footnotes. None of my committee actually read it ! I remember with delight my meeting with the key person on signing off that the thesis was kosher in terms of methodology: he picked up the thesis, appeared to be weighing it, and said: "well, as long as I don't have to read this ..." I was kinda disturbed by this: both happy I was getting the degree six-months early, and, disappointed no one read the tome I literally sweated blood to write :) Of course, as Bob sang: "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."

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Stuart Dootson

PCCTS? If so - does that have anything of interest that isn't also in [ANTLR](https://www.antlr.org/)?

Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p

honey the codewitch

it was something ANTLR was a part of back when antlr was written in C and public domain

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Forogar

Quote:

200+ page thesis with 200+ footnotes.

My thesis was only 85 pages, including some short code listings, and no-one read that either! "That looks like enough work. Here, have a PhD!"

- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.

Janes Diary

There is also A Practical approach to LL(k); LLm(n) [TR-EE 92-30] (1992) and The Use of Predicates In LL(k) And LR(k) Parser Generators (Technical Summary) [TR-EE 93-25] (1993)

Gary Wheeler

Hmm. While the tone of the comment isn't helpful, the content is useful. A long time ago in a job far, far away... I implemented an algorithm from a master's thesis in a piece of code. I documented the source pretty thoroughly - thesis title, author name, institution, dates, institution identification numbers, and so on. After having been the victim of plagiarism(*), I despise people who fail to attribute sources. (*) The quarter I took a class called Real-Time Programming (I got A's) my final project listing was missing from the cabinet where instructors returned projects. A couple quarters later I got called into the department chairman's office. Someone had taken the RTP class and turned in a program 99% identical to mine. The instructor remembered my code because I was the only person in class who used assembler macros. At first they asked if I had given or sold the code to someone. I told them that my listing had gone missing when I took the course, which the instructor remembered. The last I heard, the person who did all of this was expelled from the university for the quarter and on probation for the remainder of his time.

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