The Universe of Discourse

Addenda to recent articles 202211

• I revised my chart of Haskell's numbers to include a few missing things, uncrossed some of the arrows, and added an explicit public domain notice,

  The article contained a typo, a section titled “Shuff that don't work so good”. I decided this was a surprise gift from the Gods of Dada, and left it uncorrected.

• My very old article about nonstandard adjectives now points out that the standard term for “nonstandard adjective” is “privative adjective”.

• Similar to my suggested emoji for U.S. presidents, a Twitter user suggested emoji for UK prime ministers, some of which I even understand.

  I added some discussion of why I did not use a cat emoji for President Garfield. A reader called January First-of-May suggested a tulip for Dutch-American Martin Van Buren, which I gratefully added.

• In my article on adaptive group testing, Sam Dorfman and I wondered if there wasn't earlier prior art in the form of coin-weighing puzzles. M. January brought to my attention that none is known! The earliest known coin-weighing puzzles date back only to 1945. See the article for more details.

• Some time ago I wrote an article on “What was wrong with SML?”. I said “My sense is that SML is moribund” but added a note back in April when a reader (predictably) wrote in to correct me.

  However, evidence in favor of my view appeared last month when the Haskell Weekly News ran their annual survey, which included the question “Which programming languages other than Haskell are you fluent in?”, and SML was not among the possible choices. An oversight, perhaps, but a rather probative one.

• I wondered if my earlier article was the only one on the Web to include the phrase “wombat coprolites”. It wasn't.

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