OT Completely!!! Spanish? Que?

"Doug Miller" wrote

I've met very few Americans who speak perfect English.

Max

"Press 1 for English" "Press 2 to hang up and call back when you can understand English"

IOW, about 1 in 7. I'm surprised it's not higher, but I'm sure that the ones who do speak English are more interested in moving to the U.S. than the ones who don't.

So was I!

Almost on-topic for this newsgroup is a comment made to me by the foreman supervising remodeling of our office just outside of the DC beltway. "You have to speak Spanish to workin construction around here."

My personal observation is that Jamaican patois would be useful for anyone in the local tree service business.

UseNet being international it ocurred ot me that your wife might not be teaching in the US. In fact, you still didn't say in which county that inner city is located--might have been Hamburg.

One wonders if that effect is exaggerated by learning the language at a late age. My guess is yes, for the same reason it is harder for peopel to use grammatical consturcts they learned at a later age. After 12 or so, the way the brain learns language changes, using much more of the brain than the parts used for languages learned earlier.

As a multilingual person explained to me, "It is easy to learn to speak English, it is difficult to learn to speak English good."

Because there is a big push to eliminate the American Mexican border. Cheap labor you know. Anything for buisiness.

wrote

LOL. He doesn't speak it well either.

He said 30 or 50, not 300 or 500. ;-)

I'm not sure I do.

Are you saying that teaching American born children foreign languages interferes with foreign born children learning English?

I expect it has been studied.

You can probably get an intelligent discussion of the issues over in misc.kids or sci.lang.

Much as I appreciate it that you value my opinion, if you don't post there, should I not conclude that you really are not interested in having an intelligent discussion with knowledgible people?

In my 360 days I could solve a problem faster in assembler than could a colleague in PL/1. And the resulting program ran 10 times faster.

Ditto. *Much* tighter code too (therefore, faster). Not to mention device control...

colleague in PL/1.

My first assignment out of college was writing TI-9900 Assembly code for embedded test equipment control. My last contribution to that assignment was the hardware and software design for a specific test box; so I do understand the speed efficiency and the ability to do device control quickly. However, after becoming an analyst and systems engineer, I have decided that speed of execution for many applications is way low in importance relative to speed of coding. For example, at a higher level than even Fortran or C, how long do you think it would take to program the following in assembly code?

fid = fopen(filename, 'r'); y = fread(fid); fclose(fid);

x = length(y);

figure(1); plot(x, y, '-xr'); title('Data Plot'); xlabel('Data Point Number'); ylabel('Data');

After doing that, I decided I really don't like writing "for" loops

| My first assignment out of college was writing TI-9900 Assembly | code for embedded test equipment control. My last contribution to | that assignment was the hardware and software design for a specific | test box; so I do understand the speed efficiency and the ability | to do device control quickly. However, after becoming an analyst | and systems engineer, I have decided that speed of execution for | many applications is way low in importance relative to speed of | coding. For example, at a higher level than even Fortran or C, how | long do you think it would take to program the following in | assembly code? | | fid = fopen(filename, 'r'); | y = fread(fid); | fclose(fid); | | x = length(y); | | figure(1); | plot(x, y, '-xr'); | title('Data Plot'); | xlabel('Data Point Number'); | ylabel('Data'); | | After doing that, I decided I really don't like writing "for" | loops

Hmm. Two minutes? I'm assuming that the functions invoked have already been programmed - if not, then add an hour.

Just by accident, I happened to have these on-line:

You didn't specify what figure() does, so I didn't include it in the estimate.

Optimizing compilers have pretty much eliminated the assembly language performance advantage...

-- Morris Dovey DeSoto Solar DeSoto, Iowa USA

Does calling the same functions from assembler code count? :) (and what's with the single quotes?)

Dios Mio!

Talk about an off-topic thread going off-topic! :)

| Dios Mio! | | Talk about an off-topic thread going off-topic! :)

Sometimes these things just SNOBOL out of control

-- Morris Dovey DeSoto Solar DeSoto, Iowa USA

Yeah, forget the smalltalk and get back to woodworking!