Timeline for Are we allowed to illustrate questions about cryptographic algorithms with executable code?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
7 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| May 19, 2019 at 12:57 | comment | added | Maeher | Naturally, this whole question is completely pointless. I mentioned my opinion about the interpretation of the sites scope. My opinion has no bearing whatsoever on the sites rules. If you want to turn this site into a QA about programming minutiae, that's fine. I'll find somewhere else to spend my time when and if that happens. | |
| May 19, 2019 at 12:54 | comment | added | Maeher | Well, I for one am not a computer. So the fact that there exists an interpreter for your obscure syntax is not helpful in the slightest. And to turn your asinine argument around: what if I wrote an interpreter that that interprets your python code differently. Suddenly the execution of your precious code is no longer uniquely defined. The horror! | |
| May 18, 2019 at 15:28 | comment | added | Squeamish Ossifrage | What if I took working Python code, and inserted a bug in it so that it won't even compile? Then would it be an ‘abstract description’, because you have to guess what I meant and can't ask a machine to execute it—would that satisfy your criterion? | |
| May 18, 2019 at 15:11 | comment | added | Squeamish Ossifrage | And, let's take this criterion at face value. Suppose you wrote an ‘abstract description’. Suppose, then, that someone did guess what you meant, and wrote an interpreter for the language that seems to execute the algorithm as you ‘abstractly’ described it. Would that turn the ‘abstract description’ from a good, admissible exposition into a bad, inadmissible exposition because it is now executable? | |
| May 18, 2019 at 15:07 | comment | added | Squeamish Ossifrage | Why is it preferable to take a clear fragment of code that works and runs and replace it by one that doesn't work and requires a human familiar with vague sociological conventions to guess what it even means? Why is this a criterion? (Obviously working code can sometimes have piles of administrivia spread across Java class files and hoops to jump through, but those barriers to exposition are not what I'm asking about: I'm asking about using executability itself as a criterion for whether code is an admissible way to illustrate a computational idea.) | |
| May 18, 2019 at 13:37 | comment | added | Ella Rose Mod | Does psuedocode count as an "abstract description"? I am not convinced that abstraction benefits readability greatly - It can easily make a concept much more difficult to understand than a concrete example. | |
| May 18, 2019 at 6:07 | history | answered | Maeher | CC BY-SA 4.0 |