What's the difference between a language and a metalanguage?
A language is a single specification - a way of describing a series of actions or how some particular data is handled. Whereas a metalanguage is a way of specifying a series of languages to a particular pattern.
An example? HTML is a la ....
I greet new releases of software that we teach with a joy that the software is moving forward, but with an element of trepidation - "what's changed" I wonder. Although programming languages rarely change in that they render the old code incompatible, thre are often changes in default configuration ....
"Get rid of her first, then deal with the three men"
You can imagine the line from a Hollywood movie, can't you ... but this is Melksham, last Thursday evening. And the line was overheard by one of our friends from her seat in the restaurant, eating alone and already feeling somewhat uncomfortable. ....
Don't ask what class an object belongs to
Don't enquire where your cursor is
Don't do two things in a call
Don't duplicate data or code
Don't put two or more values in the same cell
There's lots of different ways of coding - from "dog's dinner" to "Picasso". The dog's dinner looks a mess and is ver ....
Is it frustrating to make a phone call and to transferred elsewhere, or to email someone and get an "out of office" with a note your email has been forwarded? No - a single transfer is acceptable on the lines of "I'm putting you through to Lisa who can take your room details" or "I've forwarded your ....
Right at the tail end of the second full day of the train petition I mentioned yesterday ... and we're already in the top 150 petitions out of over 2000. Not bad - it shows that people ARE concerned and we can reach them, that they'll sign up there names.
Not a regular reader? Campaign is for an a ....
Regular readers may have come across the Save the Train web site which I help with. A disasterous timetable change last December crippled the usefulness of local trains based in Wessex - there's not just one line effected; everyone is up in arms! Yes - Melksham is worst effected but I'm working to ....
Good question - came up on the course yesterday and all the examples I could find were longwinded or obfursacted to avoid them abusing the email addresses of the people named.
At the risk of getting lots of people trying this out and filling my mail box, here is a sample piece of code that emails g ....
Yes, you can nest exceptions in Python - here's an example from yesterday's course.
I'm reading in lines from a data file and counting the numbe of occurrences of a particular series of events in a dictionary of dictionaries.
An exception is thrown if a counter doesn't already exist ... we'll catc ....
We're only a fortnight into the new year yet, already, I've spent two fascinating and very different evenings in London meeting up with other users of our technologies and listening to visions for the future. Training is all about planning for the future ... and networking and learning about other' ....