A Personal Pantagraph

Programming used to be about moving bits, so programmers memorized the power of 2 and ASCII or EBCDIC. Then it was about control flow, and programmers learned how to loop over an input deck and perform an operation for each element of the deck (and how to handle the pesky EOF case, which may [...]

How could we get it more wrong! Recently, I’ve been reading or rereading classic science fiction stories. And I ran into The Quest for Saint Aquin, a short story by Anthony Boucher that first appeared in 1951. Although not evident at first, the story has all to do with robots and how [...]