New utf8string design may make UTF-8 the superior encoding
in [MFC]
|
From: Mihai N. on 25 May 2010 03:57 > What was the first computer language you learn? Basic, on an ancient Romanian thing, with 64KB, Felix M18 - http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=1021 Followed few months later by FORTRAN, using perforated cards and batch jobs, on a Felix C256 (the bigger brother of M18, with 256KB, under license from a French Iris 50, http://www.feb-patrimoine.com/english/iris_50.htm). -- Mihai Nita [Microsoft MVP, Visual C++] http://www.mihai-nita.net ------------------------------------------ Replace _year_ with _ to get the real email
From: Mihai N. on 25 May 2010 04:15 > But fascinating. Its like me with Spanglish :) Also handy. Once you kind of know two Slavic languages in different families (Russian: East Slavic, Bulgarian: South Slavic), you can understand quite a bit from any other Slavic language. With Romanian and French (both Latin languages) I have almost no problems understanding Italian, Spanish, Portuguese. Basically with Latin, Slavic, German, English, you can cover the whole Europe quite nicely :-) -- Mihai Nita [Microsoft MVP, Visual C++] http://www.mihai-nita.net ------------------------------------------ Replace _year_ with _ to get the real email
From: Oliver Regenfelder on 25 May 2010 04:48 Hello, Pete Delgado wrote: > I still wonder why so many high schools and colleges teach French as it > seems to me that the more useful languages are Spanish, Japanese, German, > Russian and Chinese. The persistance of French in the curriculum seems to > be a by-product of a time when French was considered "cultured". I think the usefullness of a language depends greatly on your geographic locations and what you want to do. For me german is the most usefull one in daily live :-). But the english I learned in school turned out pretty usefull too in my job (and for the original version cinema we have). Nowadays french might still be usefull, it is one of the working languages of the european union (though as english is the other one most people can use that) and it is also quite common in Africa, also I think a lot of people either know english or french. Best regards, Oliver
From: Hector Santos on 25 May 2010 08:00 I remember programming those punch card drums. :) Mihai N. wrote: >> What was the first computer language you learn? > > Basic, on an ancient Romanian thing, with 64KB, > Felix M18 - http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=1021 > > Followed few months later by FORTRAN, using perforated cards and batch jobs, > on a Felix C256 (the bigger brother of M18, with 256KB, under license > from a French Iris 50, http://www.feb-patrimoine.com/english/iris_50.htm). > > -- HLS
From: Joseph M. Newcomer on 30 May 2010 01:06
When I was in high school, my advisor, who was a chemist, told me I did not have a choice in the language I took. While the school offered both French and German, "French is the language of literature, and German is the language of science". My father concurred in this, since his brother was a scientist and was disadvantaged in not being able to read the science papers without having someone translate them for him. Key here was that both my father and my advisor based their opinions on what science had been like in the 1930s. Then there was this little unpleasantness in the early 1940s, and this changed the picture. Today, English is the language of science. Although in my life I have spoken nearly-fluent German (modulo having picked up my college professor's Czech accent!) [It has been 44 years since I last used it, and today, it takes me about two weeks to get enough vocabulary back in my head to be other than working in point-and-mumble mode in a shop or reading a menu] I feel I would have been better served over the years by having learned French. I spend more time in contexts where French would be useful. Strangely, if I lightly doze during a German opera, I can understand it; the dozing seems to release inhibitions that block the vocabulary. Given my interest in Opera, if I studied a third language, I'd probably take Italian, simply because it would make more operas immediately successful to me. With my Latin background (two years in high school) I can usually *read* Italian opera, but I can't understand it in real-time when it is sung. I've talked with Opera singers who can pronounce perfect Russian, Czech, etc. but have no clue as to what they are singing. More of them are literate in German, French, and/or Italian and speak at least one if not all three of these languages fluently. One thing I did learn was that I can tackle most European languages and within a week or two I can almost read a newspaper. Of course, I can't say the words at all like a native speaker, but at least I can read them. But languages like Finnish and Hungarian are clearly outside that set of patterns (the best I've done in Hungarian is reading street signs, rather trivial pattern matching). So it isn't so much the language itself that is useful, but the discipline of learning it that generalizes. joe On Mon, 24 May 2010 02:28:51 -0400, Hector Santos <sant9442(a)nospam.gmail.com> wrote: >Pete Delgado wrote: > >>> Yes. I did some 4 years of Russian some (many) years ago :-) >> >> Hey! I took Russian too! I guess I'm not the only one who thought Russian >> would be a neat language to learn! :-) > >Was it? > >I had four years of French, and I regretted I was never able to use it >for anyting. :) Joseph M. Newcomer [MVP] email: newcomer(a)flounder.com Web: http://www.flounder.com MVP Tips: http://www.flounder.com/mvp_tips.htm |