> On Oct 30, 2015, at 2:16 PM, Noel Chiappa <j...@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
>
> ...
> Apparently nobody had ever told them that a number in memory is... just a
> number. At which point it became clear that they needed to know a little
> more about how a computer actually worked.
That reminds me of an exchange I had with a younger colleague who was writing a
document describing how to do incremental TCP checksum update correctly. He
was tripping over the issue of negative zero. I told him the answer simply was
to subtract the complement with end around borrow. He didn't believe me and
ended up proving it by exhaustively testing every case.
Sigh.
paul
