Wheeee! CD burner is rolling away nicely. Can't wait!
Thinking last night about random crap. Due to a rather odd set of circumstances, I had NOTHING to due but "stay busy", which is as everyone knows is a business euphanism for "please don't fuck off".
(quick OSX gripe: why oh why can't carbonized apps have sheet dialogs? I hate bringing iTunes to the foreground, and having to wait to have it connect to my fav shoutcast channel, because it is locked in place by the modal "Prebuffering stream..." window... argh.. MacOSX is no better than Windows now, its getting in my way all the fucking time.)
So, anyway, I was thinking. First: I looked through /usr/ include on my OSX machine at work, and found some interesting things.
First and foremost, there's some interesting bits in there; the mix of K&R-style C (well, ANSI C) and internal Apple stuff (sksdjkfjLngPntrToSmeThngThtUsdToBPascal) in horrid Hungarian notation is frightening. I suggest if you get a chance, take a look; its a rather interesting mix of stuff in there.
The MOST interesting thing is how all the Carbon stuff is done via pre-compiled headers. You can look at all the kernel guts all day, but if you want to know just HOW the implement those sheet dialogs (perhaps, to fix iTunes!) you're lost.
My second thought was how alien Objective-C looks to my bright, newbie eyes. Perl looks more like C (at times, anyway) than ObjectiveC. All those odd things. It doesn't visually parse. Well, I suppoes it does, if you're used to it. The thing I'm trying to get at here is that for me, wholly unknowing, it didn't look like it was anything. C looks like its doing something. C++ looks like its working VERY HARD at doing something; perhaps so hard you'd better go lie down and leave it alone, thank you very much. Perl looks like its speaking in cheerful gibberish. But Objective C? Like maybe its thinking about something, and maybe its dreaming up ways to deal with it.
The great irony here is that its probably the language I was fated to become the master of, but I'm too dense to sit down and learn it. I'll stick to mangling C. Slowly. Argh, do I mean "address of" or "pointer to?" grin. I know, I just screw it up all the time. I'll post code soon, honest.