That's only for the parallel overload. The ordinary sequential overload doesn't allocate: the only three ordinary STL algorithms that allocate are stable_sort, stable_partition, and (ironically) inplace_merge.
I'm not sure I follow the section titled "From periods to sentences." One of the topic sentences in that section is "Aristotle preferred periodic diction"; but I don't see any examples from Aristotle.
Instead we get an example from the Bible (Psalms 100:4), displaying characteristic parallelism but still with perfectly modern sentence structure: "Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name."
And then we get a new section heading, "Modern English emerges with bibles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries," quoting an identically constructed sentence from the same Bible (Acts 4:8–9): "Ye rulers of the people, and elders of Israel, [consider] the good deed done to the impotent man, by what means he is made whole," etc.
If there's any distinction to be made there, surely it's that the former quotation is from Hebrew and the latter from Greek — but then isn't it rather a little surprising that the exact same rhetorical device, this specific type of parallelism, should be used, than that there should be anything different about the structure of these two verses? But then — guess what — there's nothing different about their structure at all!
So what's the deal with that whole section (or pair of sections), and what actually is the author's thesis? What is the "great shift" mentioned in the headline?
If the thesis is that there was some big shift in sentence structure circa 1600, I'd say it's just demonstrably wrong. Look for example at Chaucer, circa 1400: https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/tale-melibee-0 Nothing unusual about those sentences, is there?
I mean, "obviously" if you don't initialize your variables, they'll contain garbage. You can't assume that garbage is zero/false, or any other meaningful value.
But re the distinction at the end of TFA — that a garbage char is slightly more OK than a garbage bool — that's also intuitive. Eight bits of garbage is always going to be at least some valid char (physically speaking), whereas it's highly unlikely that eight bits of garbage will happen to form a valid bool (there being only two valid values for bool out of those 256 possible octets).
This also relates to the (old in GCC but super new in Clang, IIUC) compiler option -fstrict-bool.
> some of them spaced and extra long; apparently this publisher had a very “inflationary” style!
It's pretty common to see a single em-dash for the comma-like parenthetical usage (p6 etc.) and a double em-dash for the "someone's dialogue was interrupted and cut off" usage (p15).
The "I'm redacting this name" usage (p11) often uses two em-dashes too, although Wodehouse('s typesetter) doesn't in this case.
But if I understand https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46395467 correctly, this em-dash broadside was itself AI-generated, so any similarity to the above might be completely unintended by the human who wrote the prompt. (Anyway, the similarity is superficial or spiritual at best.)
I highly recommend the panel show "What's My Line," on which he was a regular panelist from 1951 to 1967.
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