sarehu

The sun's surface rotates with a period of 25 to 35 days, depending on latitude, so I would guess not.

It's my understanding that a theory of everything describes the rules by which the universe operates. It doesn't say anything about emergent properties of these rules.

For example, if everything in the universe obeyed Newtonian mechanics, I would say that Newtonian mechanics was a theory of everything. You would say that it isn't.

What about it? All Godel's incompleteness theorem says is that there will be open questions about a universe describable by finitely many rules. The laws of physics don't need to provide answers to questions about whether computers in its universe will halt or whether planetary systems are stable.

That's complete nonsense. There's nothing about Godel's theorem that says the physical rules of the universe can't be described. You're babbling religiously.

How is vi considered minimalist compared to Notepad?

Imagine... people doing what they want and making decisions that are best for themselves.

He should be downvoted; there's no need for him to grand stand about how hard he's trying.

But it does filter out people who don't have that tenacity. Those people who do have that kind of tenacity would already have learned about pointers and O notation.

I wasn't asking why macros were useful in general, but thanks anyway.

You can perfectly easily write with-foobar functions of any kind, so macros aren't a win there, except maybe in Lisp where it saves you a parenthesis or two. You can replice define-memoized-function with

   (define f (memoize (lambda args ...)))

so I don't see what macros gain you there. (Well, they save you from having to write lambda.) Especially if you're using a language with 'nicer' syntax, like Haskell:

    withFile $ \h -> do
      ...

    fib = memoize $ \n -> if n <= 1
                          then n
                          else fib (n - 1) + fib (n - 2)

Example (2) seems interesting though. And I'd like to see some examples of (3) that couldn't be so easily overcome. (Granted, my example is rather fake, since I don't know how you'd implement memoize for general types that only have a comparison function on them, without resorting to using some IO operation.)