Shame on your teacher for stealing that letter from Arthur C Clark. I bet it would be worth something today and worth a lot more to you personally.
When i learned to program I hated "if" statements and I tried to make everything table driven: You could tweak values in the tables to fine tune results and these days i thnk AI neural networks are indeed table driven.
At a lecture i explained to some IBM engineers my idea for 8 bit to 10 bit look up table for DC balance on magnetic media. They disappeared very excited and later patenting 8b/10b coding!
I particularly liked using tables of function pointers in Fortran 4. This was back in the late 70's. I think I stumbled on polymorphism before Stroustrup did, but my tutor said i should be programming in Pascal and lining up my begins and ends. He said function pointers were an abomination and "unstructured". He wasn't even trying to hear what i was saying. I lost interest and dropped out of university.
Today i think AI neural networks are mostly table driven with automatic tweaking of the table values.
Shame on your teacher for stealing that letter from Arthur C Clark. I bet it would be worth something today and worth a lot more to you personally.
When i learned to program I hated "if" statements and I tried to make everything table driven: You could tweak values in the tables to fine tune results and these days i thnk AI neural networks are indeed table driven.
At a lecture i explained to some IBM engineers my idea for 8 bit to 10 bit look up table for DC balance on magnetic media. They disappeared very excited and later patenting 8b/10b coding!
I particularly liked using tables of function pointers in Fortran 4. This was back in the late 70's. I think I stumbled on polymorphism before Stroustrup did, but my tutor said i should be programming in Pascal and lining up my begins and ends. He said function pointers were an abomination and "unstructured". He wasn't even trying to hear what i was saying. I lost interest and dropped out of university.
Today i think AI neural networks are mostly table driven with automatic tweaking of the table values.