7 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2023
    1. && nil

      first sighting: I don't think I've seen someone write exactly && nil before.

      Apparently to avoid having the return value from errors.add — which should be done solely for its side effect, not to get a return value -- inadvertently being used as a return value for user. It wouldn't make sense to return from user. That should only return a User or nil. And more statically typed languages would allow that to be expressed/enforced from type annotations alone, which would have caught the mistake of returning errors.add if someone had accidentally attempted to return that.

      Having user (and therefore call) return nil is key to the unless @current_user working.

    1. The thing most obvious about the type systems of Java, C, C++, Pascal, and many other widely-used “industry” languages is not that they are statically typed, but that they are explicitly typed.In other words, they require lots of type declarations. (In the world of less explicitly typed languages, where these declarations are optional, they are often called “type annotations”.) This has nothing to do with static types. continued
  2. Sep 2023
  3. Jan 2023
    1. Transcriptions taken from Goitein’s publications were corrected according to handwrittennotes on his private offprints. The nature of Goitein’s “typed texts” is as follows. Goitein tran-scribed Geniza documents by hand from the originals or from photostats. These handwrittentranscriptions were later typed by an assistant and usually corrected by Goitein. When Goiteindied in 1985, the transcriptions were photocopied in Princeton before the originals were sentto the National Library of Israel, where they can be consulted today. During the followingdecades, the contents of most of these photocopies were entered into a computer, and period-ically the files had to be converted to newer digital formats. The outcome of these repeatedprocesses of copying and conversion is that transcription errors and format glitches are to beexpected. As the Princeton Geniza Project website states: “Goitein considered his typed texts‘drafts’ and always restudied the manuscripts and made revisions to his transcriptions beforepublishing them.” See also Goitein, “Involvement in Geniza Research,” 143. It is important tokeep in mind that only the transcriptions that were typed were uploaded to the project website.Therefore, e.g., Goitein’s transcriptions of documents in Arabic scripts are usually not foundthere. The National Library of Israel and the Princeton Geniza Lab also hold many of Goitein’sdraft English translations of Geniza documents, many of which were intended for his plannedanthology of Geniza texts in translation, Mediterranean People.

      Much like earlier scribal errors, there are textual errors inserted into digitization projects which may have gone from documentary originals, into handwritten (translated) copies, which then were copied manually via typewriter, and then copied again into some digital form, and then changed again into other digital forms as digital formats changed.

      As a result it is often fruitful to be able to compare the various versions to see the sorts of errors which each level of copying can introduce. One might suppose that textual errors were only common when done by scribes using manual techniques, but it is just as likely for errors to be inserted between digital copies as well.

  4. Dec 2022
  5. Mar 2018