There's a bit of a paradox with this analysis: a win for Ukraine means pushing Russia out. But Russia collapses if it's pushed out of Ukraine. Therefore there's no way to support Ukraine enough that they win. Could explain the timid attitude of the US and the mixed messaging - sometimes you could be mistaken for thinking that the US's position is that Ukraine already won by not being fully subjugated.
With the new President, who knows what the US's goal will be. Given the messaging from Trump and the head of "DOGE" it's looking ominous for Ukraine. (personally I'm baffled as to why making America great would require rewarding Russian imperialism, so I can't really get my head round their attitudes. Is it just contrarianism?)
But Russia collapses if it's pushed out of Ukraine.
No, it just goes back into its corner with its tail between its legs for a while, like all colonial powers do. Whenever they choose to enmesh themselves in conflicts that are definitely not existential to them, or even in their coldly calculated rational interests.
Just like the French, the British, and the US have all done, and as it has itself done, countless times (and quite recently).
> Could explain the timid attitude of the US and the mixed messaging
The US has given Ukraine over 80 billion US Dollars, I believe. It also applied every possible sanction it could on Russia, to the point there's nearly nothing left to sanction, from what I have read on the topic. Biden has also been about as clear about the US being on Ukraine's side, for as long as it takes, as he could've been without declaring full on war on Russia.
Do you really believe that's a "timid attitude"? The way I see it, the only way for the US to do more is to send troops on the ground, which amounts to full on war with Russia and the prospect of nuclear retaliation.
>I write code for people who can read the language
Programming languages often have syntax that's acknowledged as a source of confusion and bugs and better avoided. The line is not hard and fast, but I write C++ and there's "C++", and then there's "the C++ subset that you should use" (I probably couldn't write C++ code without tools slapping me for using the wrong parts). Operator precedence is debatable but our tools force the use of parentheses to disambiguate.
This is true, and, in this case, "confusion avoided" and "what Python does" coincide. The "double equals doing the right thing" is only confusing if you're both unfamiliar with Python and familiar with language design, which is a very small set of people.
People unfamiliar with programming will assume that "if a == b == c" is only true if all three things are the same, and people familiar with Python will know that that is, indeed, what it means.
This makes me think of the "Person unimpressed by Place | person amazed by Place (Japan)" meme. In this case it feels like "Person unimpressed by basic concept | person amazed by basic concept (Philosophy)".
Your original claim "I've not checked but this guy, and by extension the C++ standards committee who worked on this new API, are probably full of shit" was pretty extraordinary.
Look at the compiler-generated instructions yourself if you don't believe the source that I linked; in the cases I've seen all the extra new stuff just adds another layer on top of existing functions and if the former are faster the latter must necessarily also be.
The standards committee's purpose is to justify their own existence by coming up with new stuff all the time. Of course they're going to try to spin it as better in some way.
A pointer parameter can be null and it doesn't make sense for this parameter to be null, so IMO a reference is the better choice here.
A non-const reference is just as clear a signal that the parameter may be modified as a non-const pointer. If there's no modification const ref should be used.
It's about clarity of intent at the call site. Passing by mutable ref looks like `foo`, same as passing by value, but passing mutability of a value by pointer is textually readably different: `&foo`. That's the purpose of the pass by pointer style.
You could choose to textually "tag" passing by mutable ref by passing `&foo` but this can rub people the wrong way, just like chaining pointer outvars with `&out_foo`.
If you want clarity of intent define dummy in and out macros but please don't make clean reference-taking APIs a mess by turning them into pointers for no good reason
In theory a from_char with an optional output parameter could be useful to validate that the next field is a number and/or discard it without needing to parse it; it might even be worth optimizing for that case.
I think organisations (companies, teams) being singular/plural differs depending on what country you're in, so perhaps this is a bleeding across of conventions due to globalisation.
You're right - that has been around for a long long time. But I feel like I've seen a general increase in its usage that can make writing more ambiguous to parse. Like we already know the gender of someone being written about in a sentence, but they become referred to as "they" at random - it's a subtle effect. I'm talking about examples unrelated to "gender stuff" but perhaps that's what's made the usage more popular among younger writers.
Maybe young (and/or non-sexist) writers just don't care or aren't obsessed with knowing and explicitly talking about someone's gender, when it has nothing to do with the message.
I just find it annoying that English is almost entirely gender neutral except for pronouns. It feels like a weird and unnecessary special case (I really don't need to be telling everyone what I believe their gender to be every time I address them!), so getting rid of that makes the language more consistent and uniform overall.
I just wish it didn't conflate singular and plural. But the convenience of broadening an existing pattern rather than inventing a completely new one still wins in the end.
German seems even more obsessed with gender than English, and the exceptions (der Junge -vs- das Mädchen) seem to reveal its underlying assumptions and disrespect for reality in the ways it doesn't align with natural or biological gender, like refusing to assign gender to young females while imposing manhood on young boys, and bizarrely insisting on assigning arbitrary gender to inanimate objects.
Gendered pronouns and nouns are just a bunch of useless sexist baggage and linguistic friction that make languages much harder to learn, and uselessly complex, with more trivial arbitrary details to memorize or get wrong.
But all those gender-critical sex-obsessed people who make a big deal out of getting performatively offended and pretending to be confused by neutral pronouns, angrily insisting that every word possible explicitly defines a gender, are just weird.
German has grammatic gender for all nouns, so it is consistent in that regard, at least. I also don't like novel ungendered forms for languages like Spanish ("latinx" etc) for the same reason - they stick out like a sore thumb because they don't fit the overall feel of the language where gender is already a pervasive concept. It's kinda like taking a statically typed language and introducing completely new syntax to omit the type in one very specific case, but not all the others.
But English nouns are already ungendered with very few exceptions. Pronouns are also all ungendered except third person singular, so there's a much stronger case here for eliminating the exception in contexts where it really doesn't contribute anything useful.
As far as getting offended, I think one has to distinguish between the person getting misgendered being offended themselves vs people getting offended "on behalf" of others (who might actually be rather offended at such misrepresentation of what they actually want). E.g. with Spanish it's far more common for native English speakers to be adamant about "-x", while many native Spanish speakers actively dislike it.
It depends how far back you go. Gaelic was spoken across the country, not just on the west coast. Nowadays it's been more or less eradicated, except from the Western Isles (where it's not that widely spoken - English is the main spoken language). And it's increasingly become a political football so you see untrue statements made about its history.
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