Incredible dedication to indexing in Kleinberg & Tardos.

@emily_s They don't really include comments in the pseudocode, but in this case, "//" apparently signifies elements of a list that have already been processed in a merge operation. This is the diagram on page 49. The other one is similar.

@anna what book is this? IS it *Algorithm design*? https://a.co/d/03Vmps7Y

@0rkk0 ooooh yeah

@anna OK, but have they made the K&R joke?

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/b9db36/the_original_edition_of_kr_the_c_programming/

@anna

It's like the Oxford English Dictionary's entry for "water". Which goes on for •pages•....

@cavyherd I think it was this recent episode of No Such Thing As A Fish in which they briefly discussed Emily Brewster discovering a new meaning of "a(n)": https://podcasts.apple.com/nl/podcast/no-such-thing-as-gutter-ice/id840986946?i=1000747203795

Couldn't quickly find an original source for that claim, tho.

#Podcast #NoSuchThingAsAFish #nstaaf #Dictionaries #Language

@anna

“The map is not the territory.”

Kleinberg & Tardos: Hold our beer.

@anna

English is so weird....

@cavyherd especially sad that very, very few people will ever look up "a(n)" in a dictionary, and even fewer read the entire definition of it, yet it takes months to write those entries...

@anna

There is •so much work• like that that take ages to create, years of knowledge & experience to inform, that most people just never even see....

@rk but: they only put a single number in the index!

@anna

…well now I gotta know which number. There are quite a lot of them.

@rk it's in the picture that I shared

@rk see also: https://mathstodon.xyz/@anna/116080411694715008

@rk @anna the ZX81 manual (Vickers, 1981) also has an index for all the non-alphabetics.

@edavies no

@anna Old fashioned machine stupidity instead of LLM stupidity, the old ways are being preserved.

@mistersql presence of the Easter egg on that page suggests that some human thought went into compiling that index, tho.