As others have already said, that is a lot of pasta. If you regularly cook volumes like that, it would really make sense to invest in a large pot as well. A cheap 10l pot will do just fine for boiling pasta, and it sounds like you would get plenty of use out of it.

Do you cook your pasta in a large pot, with plenty of boiling water, and a good amount of salt? Usually I just stir once just after putting the pasta in, and I never have noodles sticking together.

He also called them mûmakil in elvish. In my mind, when the Hobbits call them oliphaunts it is because a long time ago someone talked about elephants, and over the years the correct pronunciation was lost.

Yeah that’s what I thought too. The horrors are described well, they just typically don’t get described through their physical form. As you say, because the human mind cannot comprehend it. There is a lot more focus on impressions, comparisons, and effects, rather than on a real physical description. Personally I thought it was quite neat!

That is true, but from a human perspective it can still seem non-deterministic! The behaviour of the program as a whole will be deterministic, if all inputs are always the same, in the same order, and without multithreading. On the other hand, a specific function call that is executed multiple times with the same input may occasionally give a different result.

Most programs also have input that changes between executions. Hence you may get the same input record, but at a different place in the execution. Thus you can get a different result for the same record as well.

That exact version will end up making “true” false any time it appears on a line number that is divisible by 10.

During the compilation, “true” would be replaced by that statement and within the statement, “__LINE__” would be replaced by the line number of the current line. So at runtime, you end up witb the line number modulo 10 (%10). In C, something is true if its value is not 0. So for e.g., lines 4, 17, 116, 39, it ends up being true. For line numbers that can be divided by 10, the result is zero, and thus false.

In reality the compiler would optimise that modulo operation away and pre-calculate the result during compilation.

The original version constantly behaves differently at runtime, this version would always give the same result… Unless you change any line and recompile.

The original version is also super likely to be actually true. This version would be false very often. You could reduce the likelihood by increasing the 10, but you can’t make it too high or it will never be triggered.

One downside compared to the original version is that the value of “true” can be 10 different things (anything between 0 and 9), so you would get a lot more weird behaviour since “1 == true” would not always be true.

A slightly more consistent version would be

((__LINE__ % 10) > 0)

You want to translate COBOL to another language? That exists as a commercial product! The complexity is not the syntax though, it is the environment and subsystems surrounding the code. A lot of COBOL is designed for mainframe systems, and emulating a mainframe is complex.

You also end up with code that is still written as if it were COBOL. The syntax for COBOL is the easy part and that is all you can easily replace. Afterwards you’re still stuck with the way of working and mindset, both of which are quite peculiar.

The company I work for recently looked at all of this, and we decided not to translate our code.

It’s not racism of you believe those people were born into a lower caste because of their actions in a previous life. It is their punishment and thus you should treat them like shit!

With my professional experience in COBOL, I can honestly say I’m not surprised at all!