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But Mitchell is arguing an offset is "symbolic" | 89 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
But Mitchell is arguing an offset is "symbolic"
Authored by: hardmath on Friday, May 18 2012 @ 09:20 AM EDT
The expert witness for Oracle asserts that since the offset
is not itself a memory location, it is "symbolic".

:begin rant:

Of course this is nonsense. We're talking about a virtual
machine. Nothing in the instruction stream is ever an
actual memory location, nor is such a requirement consistent
with the ordinary meaning of "symbol".

A symbol is something that represents a thing (a person, an
object, a value, a process) while being distinct from that
thing.

The bytecode value here is the numeric offset. It
represents that value in the most literal way possible (a
binary integer that appears in the instruction format). The
fact that it is used as an offset (indirect address) rather
than in some other way to locate an item in memory does not
attest to a "symbolic" use.

:rant end:


---
"Prolog is an efficient programming language because it is a very stupid theorem
prover." -- Richard O'Keefe

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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