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Without a NULL That String Would Never End

Without a NULL That String Would Never End Without a NULL That String Would Never End curmudgeon Stan Kelly-Bootle, Author N-streak, I 1-STREAK, t ™s an undiluted pleasure to be invited to contribute a third column for ACM Queue under the surly rubric œCurmudgeon.  Curmudgeons are not usually associated with pleasures, diluted or full strength, but at my age the cheap thrill of thrusting a poisoned pen is especially welcome since the targets for satire bob daily as upstart sitting ducks for the roasting: mere œJuvenal delinquents,  as master curmudgeon George Crabbe [sic] called them. My first snipe is at those mathematicians who are over-fond of redefining everyday concepts to remove possible ambiguities, yet not always successfully. Thus, the œstreak  of the sports-stats lexicon means any decent run of victories (or defeats). The formal definition of an Nstreak for a given event-type, E, permits N to assume any non-negative integer. The abstract 0-streak differs from no streak at all, just as the empty set is far from null in the usual sense of œlacking substance.  In fact, the empty set is truly unique (if you ™ve seen one of them, you ™ve seen them all) in that it has, according to the http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Queue Association for Computing Machinery

Without a NULL That String Would Never End

Kelly-Bootle, Stan
Queue , Volume 2 (5) – Jul 1, 2004
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Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 by ACM Inc.
ISSN
1542-7730
DOI
10.1145/1016998.1017016
Publisher site
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Abstract

Without a NULL That String Would Never End curmudgeon Stan Kelly-Bootle, Author N-streak, I 1-STREAK, t ™s an undiluted pleasure to be invited to contribute a third column for ACM Queue under the surly rubric œCurmudgeon.  Curmudgeons are not usually associated with pleasures, diluted or full strength, but at my age the cheap thrill of thrusting a poisoned pen is especially welcome since the targets for satire bob daily as upstart sitting ducks for the roasting: mere œJuvenal delinquents,  as master curmudgeon George Crabbe [sic] called them. My first snipe is at those mathematicians who are over-fond of redefining everyday concepts to remove possible ambiguities, yet not always successfully. Thus, the œstreak  of the sports-stats lexicon means any decent run of victories (or defeats). The formal definition of an Nstreak for a given event-type, E, permits N to assume any non-negative integer. The abstract 0-streak differs from no streak at all, just as the empty set is far from null in the usual sense of œlacking substance.  In fact, the empty set is truly unique (if you ™ve seen one of them, you ™ve seen them all) in that it has, according to the

Journal

Queue – Association for Computing Machinery

Published: Jul 1, 2004

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