Glyphic -- Aug. '01

2001 : Feb · Jul · Aug · Sep
2000 : Jun · Sep

August 2001

Glyphic unveiled its first trade-show booth at this year's LinuxWorld Expo. We spoke with many interesting people, gave a series of short design talks on a wide variety of topics (see below for one of the most popular ones), and gave out over 30 pounds of chocolate!

All in all, we consider our first show a success.

The booth was designed for us by seva. The images in the background are modular origami spheres. The smaller one is a dodecahedron. The larger is a model of a C-80 Buckminsterfullerene. It has 120 individual pieces of folded paper.

the one about 2 + 2...

"2" + 2 - 2 = ?

The answer is surprising, and different in each of the following languages:

Perl: The answer is 2. Strings convert to numbers, then the rest is arithmetic

Javascript: The answer is 20! The type conversion rules for plus turn the first operation into a string concatenation to get the string "22". Then the type conversion rules for minus convert this to a number and subtract.

Java: Illegal: The plus converts the number to a string, but then the minus fails since you can't apply the minus operator to a string

Python: Illegal: Mixed mode plus isn't legal with strings and numbers.

C / C++: The answer is a pointer to the string constant "2". The operators are pointer operations and are legal. However, if we did this with 3s, it would be illegal: the addition would point too far beyond the character array.