Programming with Candand
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A bit of spam that somehow got past all my filters this morning suggests that Barnes & Noble is generating its unsolicited commercial emails by means of a process that 1) involves some fairly dumb rewriting rules (here turning "++" into "andand") and 2) does not involve any sentient editorial oversight:
(As usual, click for a larger image.)
In gratitude for B & N's careful treatment of this message, let me point out that Amazon has the book for $6 less.
john riemann soong said,
July 1, 2008 @ 8:09 am
Candand sounds like a dandy sweet programming language.
Karen Kay said,
July 1, 2008 @ 8:28 am
I would expect Candand to be a spellchecker mistake, rather than a text generation error. But I'm not sure that there's a way to tell.
Virgil Ikari said,
July 1, 2008 @ 11:42 am
You can read about opting out of Barnes & Noble emails here: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/help/cds2.asp?PID=8104
Also, it seems a bit much do request sentient oversight on a program that probably sends two-hundred thousand of those emails a day.
It is strange, though, that Barnes & Noble has some sort of algorithm in place to swap "and" for "+" when "&" is in their title. You would think they would be particularly wary of such an automated substitution.
Josh Millard said,
July 1, 2008 @ 12:33 pm
There's a tempatation here to run a babelfish-and-back sort of game on this and start documenting some fictional C&& language. Perhaps it could be some weird lovechild of C and LISP, swapping out parentheses in favor of ampersands.
But yes, interesting regardless. Treating "+" as unambiguously meaning "and" is itself a strange decision.
Meep said,
July 1, 2008 @ 12:41 pm
That sounds disgusting.
So if you looked at a book about C#, would it be Cpound?
Bruce H. said,
July 1, 2008 @ 1:54 pm
>> So if you looked at a book about C#, would it be Cpound?
Yep.
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/5_years_C-pound_experience.aspx
dr pepper said,
July 1, 2008 @ 2:02 pm
Opt out is only an exceptable approach if you do by branding the spammers on the forhead with the word "remove".
Richard Sabey said,
July 1, 2008 @ 2:18 pm
> So if you looked at a book about C#, would it be Cpound?
C# would be either Csharp or Chash. C£ would be Cpound.
Karen said,
July 1, 2008 @ 2:32 pm
You know, some of us like those notices.
Bailey said,
July 1, 2008 @ 2:43 pm
Could your ++ have been in the title of, "The C++ Programming Language", which is written by the same author as the advertized book?
[(myl): No, it was in the title of "Programming Principles and Practices Using C++", which *was* the advertised book.
Note by the way that the generating program also interpolated a colon after "Programming"…]
Mark Liberman said,
July 1, 2008 @ 3:11 pm
Karen: You know, some of us like those notices.
Usually, I don't mind. And I got a chuckle out of this one.
But over the past week I've been dealing with email over slow and erratic internet connections, and under those circumstances, I'm more unhappy about having to delete the hundred or so inventive spams that leak through my layers of filters on a given day.
Virgil Ikari said,
July 1, 2008 @ 3:12 pm
> Opt out is only an exceptable approach if you do by branding the spammers on the forhead with the word "remove".
Yeah, but this is different. I'm going to bet he has a Barnes & Noble account.
Nathan Myers said,
July 1, 2008 @ 3:29 pm
Hey, I didn't know he had a new book coming out!
Stroustrup is always worth reading, if you care about the subject. Don't skim. Unlike the typical programming-shelf book, in his writing every word counts. I find it helps to read it with a Danish accent.
Neil Dolinger said,
July 1, 2008 @ 4:22 pm
Can I buy C+yland for my kid there?
C# is really Ctic-tac-toe
Rubrick said,
July 1, 2008 @ 8:13 pm
Pity it wasn't Coctothorpeoctothorpe
Nathan said,
July 1, 2008 @ 8:39 pm
+ is a quadrathorpe.
Boris Blagojević said,
July 1, 2008 @ 8:56 pm
Fascinating. I had read the whole post, and still there I was, wondering what kind of a programming language Cand+ is. An oblique substitution indeed.
I wonder though, has anybody seen & or + used as a replacement for the string "and"? As in c&y? C+y looks just wrong, but who knows.
And what does – stand for then? Less? As in "werth-"? Or am I taking this too far, and asking too many questions?
400guy said,
July 1, 2008 @ 11:05 pm
Richard Sabey said, C# would be either Csharp or Chash.
Myself, I'm partial to Coctotherpe.
Richard Sabey said,
July 2, 2008 @ 4:20 pm
Boris Blagojević asked if anybody had seen & or + used as a replacement for the string "and". An example of the reverse: one of the brands of clothing retailer C & A is Canda.
I wonder how many would have understood the + here, seeing the message containing it without the context of the book cover:
http://www.booksunlimited.ie/bookcover/9780224061759/Yeats-Is-Dead!.jpg
parkrrrr said,
July 3, 2008 @ 12:33 pm
Another place + has used to replace the string 'and' is the 1996 movie "Romeo + Juliet": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117509/
Benjamin Zimmer said,
July 3, 2008 @ 1:25 pm
For a bit more on "Romeo + Juliet" see my 2005 LL post "Stereotypography" and this post on Abecedaria.
frymaster said,
July 4, 2008 @ 10:50 am
on an unrelated topic, not all of us have super-fast computers. The "click here to enlarge" thing slowed my computer down to a crawl for 5 seconds while it laboriously rendered every frame of the animation, and did the same when I dismissed the enlarged image.
And by typing this comment, I've discovered the "auto-preview-as-you-type" gadget is doing the same thing…
Using javascript to create dynamic webpages like google maps is good. Over-using it for that kind of thing is bad.
(My work computer has 2 1GHz pentium 3s by the way. For pure CPU gunt it matches a 2.2GHz pentium 4, although the memory speed is much slower)