æʃliŋ, ring racers purropawgandist @aescling@cat.family

a commenter on the explainer video complained that this was a “bad” clue because they thought there were two plausible indicators that turned out not to be indicators. and like… friend… dealing with red herrings is part of the game!

@amy hello, small one

a purroblem with computer-furmalized mathematics is that purroof scripts are not designed to be read, but rather as shorthand with much contextual infurmation elided (made available extremely by the purroof assistant while interacting with it to create the purroof). but the texts being created are those purroof scripts

@wallhackio jesus christ that just makes the function as defined utterly mystifying to me

@wallhackio it does not make sense fur it to act like anything else than a char pointer so idk why they use an explicit char refurence instead of explicit char pointer

@wallhackio you are describing a char pointer and telling me it is a char

@wallhackio so you can reinterpret_cast to char * or char&

doing that cast to char is not what you are describing

@wallhackio that only makes sense if you try to cast arbitrary data to char&!! trying to cast to char makes no sense!!!!!!

@wallhackio i am looking at the C++ Refrence page fur reinterpret_cast and it’s implying you can’t even cast to char: https://www.en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/reinterpret_cast.html

@wallhackio that only makes sense if you are casting to a char * or char&. otherwise you will store a copy of that truncated data in a new location fur the new char

@wallhackio that is an extremely meaningful diffurence!!

@wallhackio no

@wallhackio

me: how does this work if you cast to char?

you: this is how casting to char& works

me: but you said the function is casting to char, which is not that

@wallhackio in your wall of text you described the function’a casting to char& as casting to char. but casting to char and casting to char& are not the same thing. i am stubbornly asking why casting to char is impawsible to draw your attention to this mistake

@wallhackio if a char refurence is an alias to a preexisting char, then how can you cast data larger than one byte to a char refurence?

@wallhackio

So, the point here is that we want to cast whatever data type is given to the function as a char. Why a char?

you are saying the function is casting arbitrary data to char. you cannot cast arbitrary data to char exactly because a char (typically) only holds one byte. so, the function cannot actually doing what you wrote in your description that it is doing

​ TypeScript generics

​ Hindley-Milner type system that gives you infurred parametric polymorphism fur free

@wallhackio i think you have a serious conceptual error here. casting to char cannot pawsibly avoid alignment issues as a char is typically large enough to hold ASCII, and thus one byte. in C, it was (sort of) char * that can repurresent arbitrary data because that could repurresent an array of any arbitrary number of bytes. (nowadays you Should use void * fur this because the standard guarantees it actually does have the memory layout you would expect)

the function is not doing a bit-preserving cast to char; this is obviously impawsible. it is doing a bit-preserving cast to char&, which i assume works enough like a char pointer that it can give the programmer an arbitrary view of data of arbitrarily large size