Or just type your calculation into Google and let them calculate it for you - save your processing power for something useful (minefield?)

Wally actually did some work?? :omg:

More on 'Modder Crow' here: [^]. I donno but its parts suggest a computer: Quote: Parts List: CPU i7 7700K MB MSI Gaming Pro Carbon Ram G.SKILL TRIDENT Z RGB (8X2) PSU Corsair SF600 Fan : Coolermaster MasterFan Pro 120 «When I consider my brief span of life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, now rather than then.» Blaise Pascal

The Lazy<T> threading support can be robust, depending on which LazyThreadSafetyMode value you pass to the constructor. (The default is ExecutionAndPublication, which is the most robust.) But the Dictionary<TKey, TValue> definitely isn't thread-safe if you modify it. It's not a problem if you're pre-populating the dictionary with a Lazy<T> for every possible key, and never modifying the contents of the dictionary. But if you have a large set of keys, some of which are rarely used, you might want to avoid the memory overhead. "These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined." - Homer

My introduction to programming was a year of FORTRAN in high school, 1973-1974. Taught at the local community collage, but for high school students. Coding forms and punch cards. Got to see the computer once, on the first day of class. Liked it, but didn't do it again until Fall 1978. One semester of FORTRAN was required in the undergrad program in the College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Teletype terminals connected over 300-baud serial lines to the mainframe computer in the Computing Center. Relearned what I'd learned in two semesters of high school, and more. For the final project, I wrote my first computer graphic program: drawing shear, bending moment, and deflection diagrams for a simply-supported beam with a uniform load and up to 10 point loads. Output to a pen plotter in the Computing Center. There was a well-worn trail in the snow between the Art & Architecture Building and the Computing Center. Followed that in Winter 1980 with an elective course in computer graphics, in the Master of Architecture program, still in FORTRAN. Working on Tektronix storage-tube graphics terminals. Couldn't erase a line without erasing the whole screen and redrawing all of the lines except the one to be erased. Also, for a sesmster project in an advanced lighting design course, I wrote a program to intercept a temporary data file from a FORTRAN batch lighting analysis program (LUMEN II) to draw perspective views of room surfaces with shaded luminance contours. (LUMEN II itself "drew" surface contours with ASCII art on the line printer.) I used a lot of dense cross-hatching on the pen plotter (which invoked the ire of some), and on the storage tube terminals. Then we got a Chromatics color raster terminal. Wow -- 4 bits per pixel: red, green, blue, and blink! So I changed my program to support that. This continued through two additional semesters as an independent study project. And that's where the REAL learning happens ... In the spring of 1980, with one year of architecture school remaining, I took a job in the Architecture and Planning Research Laboratory, working on software for a Computer Aided Engineering and Architectural Design System (CAEADS), for a project sponsored by the Corps of Engineers. In the spring of 1981, I graduated from the professional program in architecture as a professional computer programmer. I've been doing it ever since. Self-taught in C (and combining C and FORTRAN libraries, with function-calling in both directions), C++, a bit of JavaScript, occasi

OriginalGriff wrote: What it needs is better users . Isn't the primary issue here how to move, or kill, OT and 'gimme questions quickly ? cheers, Bill «When I consider my brief span of life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, now rather than then.» Blaise Pascal

I found a really great description of dotNet garbage collection in CLR via C#[^]. That book turned me around about automatic garbage collection. At least half a dozen times I said to myself something like "Hey, that's smart! I would never have thought of that if I were to manage the heap myself!" I used to be sceptical about automatic GC - now I am sceptical to those who claim they can do better themselves. It is like an optimizing compiler vs. assembly code: The optimizer will discover a lot of tricks that the assembler coder wont. The only problem remaining now is that you believe that you have removed the last reference to that 1 Gbyte data structure, and you are waiting for ages for it to go away, forgetting that you still have a reference to it in some static struct holding, say, user preferences. (Maybe you needed that reference e.g. during initialization, but never after that.) This is similar to, say, forgetting to close files. (There was a similar situation in old style Unix file systems, where anyone with read access to a file could create another link to it, preventing it from being deleted: When the creator/owner removed his last link, he lost control over it; your 'secret' link might be the only access path to the file, keeping it alive, keeping disk space from being released. But the owner is still the same, so he will have to pay for the disk storage! - I think remedies for handling this was introduced many years ago, but in the first years of Unix, it was a real problem.)

Hey, I wasn't particularly interested in the topic, so i didn't look too closely. But are you saying you don't like cartoons? Some developer! I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!

I share (I think) a sense of BitVector32 being a kind of strange creature: not close enough to the metal to be suitable for hard-core bit-twiddling; not high-level enough to carry with it state information: if I send you a BitVector32 value you can know nothing about whether it uses masks or sections, etc. I wrote an extended 'BitVector32 a while ago (as a Class), but realizes I was duplicating what you can do with [Flags] Enums more easily/ cheers, Bill «When I consider my brief span of life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, now rather than then.» Blaise Pascal

I would say that Python is no less expressive than many other languages out there. It takes some getting used to, but that is true of every new language. My major problem with Python's syntax is that it uses indentation to delimit blocks, which is error-prone (especially when refactoring). That being said, I would not use Python for anything other than small, in-house programs. Given that there is no deterministic memory management, and (AFAIK) there is no Python compiler, it is unsuitable for large or for commercial programs. I agree with you about the snowflakes. The entrance to the campus reads "University", no "Kindergarten"; if you can't handle that, you have no business being here. If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack. --Winston Churchill

Well, given that the best idempotent answers are recursive, it's safe to say that we're either broken or not, until the box is opened. I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!

I totally agree.

Cattle are the most unpredictable of animals, particularly if they have young. In the UK, it is not unknown for people and particularly dogs to be killed by cattle even when they are using public footpaths. Not that the cattle know they are public footpaths. The cattle will surround the "intruder" and either herd them away from the calves or just trample them. Some years ago, a woman and her dog was herded by cattle into the River Severn near Worcester, when it was running high and fast after heavy rain. The lady's body was finally found miles downstream. They never found the dog.

That seems a bit over complicated. Defiantly so for anything I have ever done.