KernelTrap notes the announcement of
KernelTrap
notes the announcement of a new threading library for Linux, developed primarily by Red Hat's
Ulrich Drepper. The library looks really good -- it changes getpid() to return the same value for all threads in a process, changes SIGSTOP (and presumably SIGCONT) to apply process-wide rather than per-thread, and is designed to give Linux a long-overdue modern threading library.
I do see one potential drawback, though. I can't figure out how to suspend threads in the new library. Linux has historically supported thread suspension by using per-thread signals to send a SIGSTOP to the thread in question, but the new library breaks that (correctly, in my opinion). FreeBSD supports pthread_suspend_np, Darwin uses thread_suspend, and Solaris has thr_suspend, but Linux doesn't have any of those and the new library doesn't seem to add any of them. I hope they provide a thread suspension API before they merge the library with the main glibc source, because if they don't, a number of applications (including mine) are likely to break and won't have an easy fix.
Eugene Volokh makes a good
Eugene Volokh makes a good
argument for the silliness of prescriptivist grammar. I completely agree. Language is defined as it's used, not as books say it should be used. I became thoroughly convinced of that point of view after taking "History of the English Language" from
George Brown at Stanford a few years ago. It was a wonderful class, and it helped me develop a perspective on language and usage that I wouldn't otherwise have.
That's not to say that I support the behavior
described in the New York Times this week, though. That story's about students who are starting to use IM chat terms --
"u" for "you", "l8r" for "later", and so on -- in their papers in school. I don't have a problem with anyone using those terms in informal writing; I choose not to use them, but the language can and will change around me regardless of my views. But there is always a difference between formal and informal writing, and as long as these terms are informal they aren't appropriate in formal writing. That's what those students should be taught...not that their language is wrong, but rather that there is a proper place for it, and that place does not include their papers.