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you have no logical answers to the points i raised do you ?

I'll answer any logical question I see. Arguing to use a word in a way not used by the rest of the speakers of that language is not really logical, now is it? You put forward an argument for why the rest of the world is wrong, I remain unconvinced that you are correct and the rest of the world is wrong. You need to provide some evidence for why you think the rest of the world is wrong. PS. Aren't you even just a little bit concerned that no on on earth shares your definition of the word "specimen"? I know if I was arguing for something, I'd rethink my position if the rest of the world unanimously disagreed with me. After all, you haven't found anyone who agrees with your definition of "specimen". You should be very concerned.

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i will answer your questions after i obtain answers to mine .

You can't find a link that agrees with you, can you?

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i do not recall attempting to redefine the term only to utilize the correct one .

The dictionary, with example, did not convince you that the "code specimen" is not a replacement for "code snippet". A Large Language Model in trained in English did not convince you. Do you have a link to any publication in English that uses the word specimen as you assert is "correct"? In other words, can you find anyone who agrees with you that your definition is correct? Just one link, preferably an authoritative source like a real publication. If you cannot find anyone who uses the word "specimen" in the specific context that you want to use it it, why remain certain that English is wrong and you are right?

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i wish to discuss deleted default constructors so present above code . is it a snippet or a specimen or an example or a sample or as extract or an excerpt ? if you insist on "snippet" i will state it has not been "snipped" from anything .

If you insist that it is not part of a larger piece of content, then "sample" or "example" are accurate. Specimen, as your links pointed out to both of us, refers to representative samples of a category. Are you arguing that two lines of C++ code is a representative sample of C++, or a representative sample of a program? What exactly do you think those two lines are a representative sample of?

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unless the larger whole is referenced it is only confusing to the reader to indirectly refer to its irrelevant existence by use of term in question .

Maybe it is, but that's what the word means. Snippet as always meant "snipped out of something". That you find it confusing is not really relevant to what the meaning of the word is.

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as for specimen below i rather doubt any such code exists in a larger whole as no doubt the author is a fine programmer .

You are literally saying that those two lines are not a representative sample of the author's code. You literally say it doesn't fit the definition of "specimen", so why use the word? As the person proposing to redefine existing meanings, maybe you should provide a good argument for why you'd like to redefine existing meanings?

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re/ "Snippet" has always meant "a part taken out of a larger whole". please show where the above "snippet" is present in a larger whole as i am unable to find it .

Why would something be present if it was taken out of a larger whole? What's the point of extracting something specific from a larger whole if you're going to reproduce the whole anyway? The point of presenting something snipped out of a body of content is to avoid presenting the entire body of content. TBH, if your definition of the word "snippet" differs from both dictionary and usage, it's your definition that's wrong, not the damn dictionary.

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re/ "Specimen has always meant "a representative sample of a category"." that is precisely what the "specimen" is as it is representative of the use of structured bindings to classes .

"Demonstration of usage" is not generally accepted as a part of a taxonomy. Why do you feel that an example is the same thing as a category?

Well, the only place it uses the word snippet is when referring to a shot piece extracted from a longer example:

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In the above snippet, we bind to myPair. But this also means you can provide support for your classes, assuming you add the get interface implementation. See an example in the later section.

You are using the word snippet to refer to return, but the article uses the word example liberally for the code it presents. "Snippet" has always meant "a part taken out of a larger whole". Specimen has always meant "a representative sample of a category". Try this with a Large Language Model:

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User What does "analyse this specimen" mean? ChatGPT "Analyze this specimen" is a directive to closely examine and evaluate a particular object, sample, or subject. The word "specimen" refers to a representative example or sample of something, often used in scientific contexts. When someone asks to analyze a specimen, they are typically requesting a detailed examination, assessment, or study of the given object or sample to gain insights, draw conclusions, or gather information. The nature of the analysis can vary based on the context, such as scientific research, medical diagnosis, forensic investigation, or any other field where a careful examination is required. User What does "analyse this snippet" mean? ChatGPT "Analyze this snippet" is a request to examine and evaluate a specific, usually small portion or excerpt of something, such as code, text, data, or any other content. The term "snippet" refers to a brief and typically representative section of a larger whole. When someone asks you to analyze a snippet, they are asking you to closely examine that particular portion to understand its details, identify patterns, extract information, or gain insights relevant to a specific context. For example, in programming, you might be asked to analyze a code snippet to find errors, understand its functionality, or suggest improvements. In a literary context, analyzing a text snippet could involve examining its language, themes, or literary devices. The nature of the analysis depends on the specific domain or context in which the snippet is presented.

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Unfortunately the term snippet has become entrenched in some peoples minds as the correct term for a short piece of code.

I think the problem the OP is going to run into is that "snippet" already had a meaning decades before the first computer was even invented, and it's the same meaning as used for code as it was used for newspapers. If the word had a different meaning in the context of computers, OP might have a point, but right now arguing that a well-defined word with well-defined meaning should mean something else when computers are involved is difficult, and it is doubly hard when the replacement is another existing word with a completely unrelated meaning. If I were propose "I don't like the word 'content' in the context of programming, I think we should replace it with 'automobile'", I'd expect similar confusion from my audience as OP is getting.

BernardIE5317 wrote:

re/ "... a portion of a whole C++ program" in my encounters w/ the term i could find no whole program anywhere in sight .

Well, obviously not. When someone says "here's a snippet", why would they post the whole program? If they were showing the whole program they wouldn't say "here's a snippet", would they?

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thank you for the correction to my incorrect usage . one such error and you deduced i am from Mars . perhaps my green complexion gave it away .

Well, on the internet it's not rare to read posts from people who don't have English as a primary language.[1] And it's not like I leapt to conclusions after just

one such error

Look at it from the point of view of a native English speaker: you misunderstood the dictionary definition of "specimen" even with the explanatory example given in the dictionary that you quoted, and you misunderstood the usage of "exemplar". I meant no disrespect by assuming English was not your primary language; I'd expect a similar response if I, in my secondary language, confused two unrelated terms and used a third term incorrectly, all in the space of a single paragraph. [1] I myself am bilingual, and I know that I make trivial errors when speaking in my second language (first is English). I don't automatically jump to accusations that the other party, who's a native speaker in that language, considers me an alien. PS. Have you typed "what is the difference between a snippet and a specimen?" into an English-language LLM? After all, it's a Large Language Model, so something like ChatGPT is going to easily be able to provide the difference in meaning between two extremely common words.

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'b' suits my purpose as stated i find the term utilized upon discussion / study of brief samples / specimens of code intended to be exemplar of more general usage

Maybe you should have used the example given as a guide - the portion in question is not a unique portion. In order to count as a specimen, using the example given in the section you quote, it must be identical or consistent with the whole from which the specimen was taken.

b: a portion or quantity of material for use in testing, examination, or study

a urine specimen

I'm guessing that English isn't your first language from the incorrect phrasing of "exemplar" (which is a noun) and should be "an exemplar of". I can understand, then, why you would consider "specimen" to be related to "snippet".

Unfortunately "specimen" already has a meaning in English, and it means "An example of $CATEGORY". The phrase "the following specimen of C++" would literally mean "The following content is an example of C++ programming", while "the following snippet of C++" means "The following content is only a portion of a whole C++ program". You are going to find it difficult to get people to agree to overload an existing well-defined word with a new unrelated meaning. I'm not saying it's impossible to assign new made-up meanings to existing words, I'm just saying that's it's an uphill battle with low likelihood of success, especially in the case of overloading a well-defined and universally understood word. What you propose is no different from proposing that the word 'and' is replaced by the word 'green'. You'll just confuse people when you say "Me green my brother went out green got snacks".

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In what other areas do you have knowledge or experience with? What are they, and how do you use them?

The thing that made a colleague go "Woah - how did you do that?" was when his car broke down in the company parking lot with a snapped clutch cable, and I drove it all the way to his home without once needing the clutch[1] even though I worked it through all five gears, both changing up and changing down. [1] Stalled at every stop, started with a jerk after every stop.

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[Go to Parent] Octophobia sounds like a Discworld thing

Sounds like an Octopus thing. Octaphobia sounds like a Discworld thing.

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Regardless, I think a fuse and ground connection might come in useful.

Grounding, certainly - it will prevent electrocution of people touching the tree in the event that a live wire closes a circuit with the tree. Fuse? Not so much. It can't prevent a fire started by arcing because the arc will jump before the fuse is involved, hence a fuse is not going to help with arcing. It can't prevent a fire from a non-arc short because your house's breaker will trip before the element in question heats up enough to start a fire (breakers typically trip within milliseconds of overcurrent). After all, with almost 100m American households having a flammable[1] tree at christmas, it's still almost unheard of for house-fire statistics to rise in December. In fact, I don't think they ever did! So the dangers are less than one would think (numbers don't lie).

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The question I can't answer is, why? Does it symbolize something? What meaning does it have, and what amount of importance supports that meaning?

Why do modern people do it? Because tradition! Why did the tradition arise? Because, in order to propagate, Christianity leaders chose existing holy days as christian holy days (after all, no one had a clue what month Jesus was born in, let alone what day of the month that was. I'm pretty certain that they weren't quite sure of the season either), and the day they chose as Christ's birthday was an existing Pagan holy day that involved Trees. [1] Plastic is flammable too!

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I don't understand why it's difficult - DFA at least.

I am going to answer your question as thoroughly as possible. Regexes are simple in theory, not in practice, which is why people have problems with them. ========================================= In theory, that's all you need to know. In practice, that's just the start - you missed '^' (which has two meanings), '\' (used for escaping those special characters) and '$'. In $PROGRAM, which of the special characters need to be escaped? How about the replacement expression in "%s" (different to the match expression "/s")? How does it match newlines (hint: in Vim, for example, '$' vs '\n' vs '\r do all different things). Write your expression to work in vim, and it fails in your Javascript program. Write your expression in sed and it fails using the regex library in C#. The expression that works in the default invocation of grep fails in the default invocation of Perl. Use `grep -E` and the expression fails on some tools but not on others. Even passing a regex on to an engine is difficult: in an interactive bash shell you'd use sed "s/\\t//g". In a script that sets the results of that invocation to an environment variable you'd use sed "s/\\\\t//g". You run into a similar problems within your programs when you pass around string variables containing regexes, which is why even though many of the programs which use match expressions in their configuration (like nginx) have quoting and escaping rules that differ to the command-line programs which use the same regex library. When you use regex liberally in Python, Bash, Grep, Vim, C#, Perl, Javascript and everything else, you never remember how they all handle the special cases - you have to keep looking them up for that particular program. I'm fairly comfortable with them, having spent the 90s as a Perl programmer, and having used Vim as my default coding editor daily for almost 30 years during which time I collected a couple of postgraduate CS (not IT) degrees (which means I know automata theory better than most), and yet even I have to look regex stuff up on a per-product basis. I am skeptical that you can look at an expression and go "This will work in $x, $y and $z, but not in $a, $b and $c.", and if my skepticism is correct, then you have problems too, but just don't know it. And that is why people have problems with them - you never quite know which contexts allow '.' to

Well, okay, if you want to take the risk, fine. But that's not what you did, is it? You called the risk aversion silly. We all have different risk thresholds. Using the word "silly" to describe the experts' view of this risk is ... well, how would you categorise that? Especially in light of the fact that for all the really risky stuff, avoiding Windows is considered good practice. IOW, when you are disagreeing with people who have demonstrated more competence than yourself in a particular domain (The TrueNAS devs, and just about everyone who uses Linux over Windows for reliability), it might be wise to refrain from immature behaviour.

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Apparently I had silly expectations. Software RAID over a USB connection is "just not reliable enough", so TrueNAS doesn't support it.

Yeah, it's much better to simply switch to Windows and use the unreliable mechanism ... for your important data /s. In *my* experience, I appreciate software that warns me about using a mechanism that will lose my data.

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I mean, they don't sell Apples at Newegg AFAIK, but given that Apple has two ARM based offerings now, it's only a matter of time before other manufacturers follow suit.

There's a big difference between Apple computers and Dell/HP/etc computers: Apple owns the entire vertical, the others don't. This is why the others can't follow suit. Briefly, Dell aren't fabbing their own processors, Apple are. Why would Dell, et al, switch to ARM and lose the benefit of economies of scale from using X86_64? Sure, they offer ARM[1], but that's an expensive product for them to produce. Apple owning the vertical means that it is neither cheaper nor more expensive for them to offer ARM over X86_64: it's exactly the same! Dell doesn't own their vertical - they assemble existing finished components into a finished product - for them moving to a new chip is going to be hella expensive. It's not about technology, it's about business, and Apple is in the business of providing products at premium price points. The other companies are not, so you can't expect the same level of vertical ownership from them. With all that being said, low-powered laptops and desktops would certainly be welcome, as long as the price point is in line with the product offering. It makes no difference to the end-user (even us embedded devs) whether the chip is based on X86, X86_64, ARM, MIPS, Sparc or m68k[2] - you're gonna do roughly the same work, with the roughly the same constraints, using roughly the same devtools, to produce roughly the same products. The people who it matter to are hardware designers, specifically verilog/VHDL engineers who are designing those chips and peripherals, but I don't think they care either. [1] Well, they used to. I don't know about now. [2] I've programmed for all of those at some point or the other. Even the z80 processor (Zilog?) when I was but a young lad.

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I don't know why people complain about MS trying hard to get people to move from Chrome to Edge. Whenever I visit Google properties, I get as many incessant popups trying to convince me to switch to Chrome. Google isn't any less annoying.

Windows is likely preinstalled on their machine, that's why they complain. You only get google popups if you deliberately visit a google site. You get Windows popups just by turning on the machine. You don't get that difference? To opt out of google popups, just don't visit certain sites. To opt out of Windows popups (i.e. switch OSes), you have to change your whole workflow, then do without the applications you previously used which weren't portable, then learn how to use your new OS (good luck if you're moving to MacOS, which has a primitive but pretty UI). You don't see the difference?

I've used FF for decades (since before the getfirefox campaign, since it was still in beta, actually). I'm not particularly happy with the way Mozilla is going with it, but considering that the alternative is to further the monopoly of a single browser engine, I still stuck with it. Recently, I've heard good things about a FF fork - Floorp. Tried it briefly only. It's about time that someone forked FF properly: Mozilla is a horrible steward, and spends all their money on diversity outreach while firing FF engineers. It's no wonder that FF went from 75% market share (pre-diversity initiatives) to around 5% market share (post-diversity initiatives). You cannot even contribute money to FF development anymore (I used to contribute), you can only contribute to Mozilla, and they make no promises about what they use your contribution for. Download - Floorp[^]