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GW-Basic was my first programming language. And i never found out what the 'GW' stands for.
From the Wikipedia article:
There are several theories on what the
initials "GW" stand for. Greg Whitten,
an early Microsoft employee who
developed the standards in the
company's BASIC compiler line, says
Bill Gates picked the name GW-BASIC.
Whitten refers to it as Gee-Whiz BASIC
and is unsure if Gates named the
program after him. The Microsoft
User Manual from Microsoft Press also
refers to it by this name.
It may have also been nicknamed
Gee-Whiz because it had a large
number of graphics commands.
Other common theories as to the
initials' origins include "Graphics
and Windows", "Gates, William"
(Microsoft's president at the time),
or "Gates-Whitten" (the two main
designers of the program).
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The following link mentions some types of dynamic programming:
http://www.mii.lt/olympiads_in_informatics/pdf/INFOL056.pdf
one of which is "broken profile".
I am pretty sure it is a valid term since I have seen references to it in other programming competition sites like TopCoder and CodeForces.
But I can't seem to find anything on this topic. This term has been used mostly by Russian sources.
Does anyone what if means, or what kind of problems within dynamic programming it solves? Or even better a tutorial?
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Out of sheer curiosity and the pursuit of trivia, I couldn't find an answer on Google quickly.
Dear fellow programmers, what is the first programming language to provide an interactive shell?
I can't prove other systems weren't earlier but the LISP REPL construct is one common name given to this style of interpreter.
The LISP I Programmers Manual from 1960 (PDF) includes a mention on page 2 that is apropos:
Enlargements of the basic system are available for various purposes. The compiler version of the LISP system can be used to compile S-expressions into machine code. Values of compiled functions are computed about 60 times faster than the S-expressions for the functions could be interpreted and evaluated. The LISP-compiler system uses about half of the 32,000 memory.
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I want to generate some fake people for a piece of software I'm writing. These people also have ethnicities, and I'd prefer not to have names that don't look totally out of place when compared to those ethnicities.
My first idea was to base it on data. There is a table of first and last names from the 1990 US census with attached frequencies, but that says nothing about ethnicity. There is also a table of last names from the 2000 US census which is broken down by ethnicity, but it says nothing about first names.
So I need some way of generating first names based on ethnicity. Any ideas?
Use behindthename.com. They have very extensive lists of names by usage, including lists of popular names.
The site http://www.babynamefacts.com/ contains lists of most popular baby names per country. This may be a good starting point. For example, this page shows the most popular baby names for Serbia in 2009: http://www.babynamefacts.com/popularnames/countries.php?country=SRB .
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I was trying to understand and remember keyboard shortcuts for bash. I was wondering why is the char 'u' used in
CTRL-u --- cancel the line before cursor location
While unix-line-discard is a good mnemonic, the use of CTRL+U as a line-erase character precedes the invention of UNIX. It was used as such on various Digital Equipment (DEC) systems, including the PDP-8. For instance, from my dusty bookshelf I see that CTRL+U was used as line-erase in the PDP-8 Symbolic Editor (page 5-13 of the 1972 edition of the PDP-8 Introduction To Programming (Volume 1) manual published by DEC). In fact, in the early days of UNIX, the # character was often the default line-erase character. Other systems used CTRL+X for the same function, which made some sense since the ASCII control character description for it is Cancel. The DEC convention of CTRL+U eventually won out in the popularity contest.
"unix-line-discard": http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/php/chet/readline/readline.html#SEC17
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We are thinking of using a Wizard pattern to help a user complete a task.
The Wizard pattern seems to solve our problem. We are also interested in what human factors research might have to say about the basic problem of a non-expert user needing to accomplish an infrequent and complicated task-–-are there other, possibly better paradigms for doing this than a wizard?
You posted this question over two years ago and no one has offered a better interaction design pattern than the wizard.
That looks like an answer to me.