IIRC, Canada had at least some period of time where while change provided was rounded to the nearest nickel, the penny was still legal tender. (Prices / totals were not rounded; non-cash payments were still denominated / accurate to the penny.)
And, yes, it would be better to get congress and the executive together and have an actual plan for discontinuing the penny and the nickel (and maybe the dime or quarter?). I think on this issue, the executive acting alone is better than doing nothing / maintaining the status quo.
I think this is the way. And, in memoriam of the quarter and to celebrate the massive increase in half-dollar production, we open with a 50cents for 50states where we produce half-dollars with 50 alternative "tails", one for each state.
I doubt it'll happen in this administration, but at least we are getting rid of the penny, finally.
Here in Arkansas, I don't know any "trash" that you can pick up for a deposit. I think when I was a small child in the 80s you could do glass bottles, but when plastic came in that ended. As a teen, and up to maybe a decade ago, you could get paid for aluminum scrap (by weight), but both of the metal recycling places in my county (Polk) do not pay for aluminum anymore (they will accept it, but not pay for it).
Bad People will do Bad Things, but religion gets Good People to do Bad Things. because they believe they are good.
Sincere but incorrect belief can do that without anything we might recognize as religion, tho.
Still I think Optimistic Nihilism CAN replace all the things people think they get from religion. And, it doesn't require fervent belief in anything without evidence. (Sometimes the optimism feels tenuous, tho.)
Michael: See, the trolley problem forces you to choose between two versions of letting other people die. And the actual solution is very simple. Sacrifice yourself.
The run time still has to assign a semantics to it, even if that semantics is a fatal error. In a compiled language, you can prevent the run time from having to assign any semantics by eliminating the error condition at compile time.
Absolutely. It might be the janitorial work of "the academy" but that work is important.
I'm actually not sure if the problem right now is funding that work or the unfortunate fact that there's rarely any accolades for it. And "publish or perish" is still too true.
Not having a separate compilation step absolutely affects error handling. With a compilation step, you can have errors that will only be seen by and must be address by a developer prior to run time. Without one, the run time system, must assign some semantics to the source code, no matter how erroneous it is.
No matter what advisory "signature" you imagine for a function, JS has to assign some run time semantics to that function being called incorrectly. Compiled languages do not have to provide a run time semantics to for signatures that can be statically checked.
All functions built with function name(args) { body } syntax have a length based on the form of args. Other ways to create functions might set length (I'm not sure). Most of the functions provided by the runtime environment do have a length, usually based on the number of "required" arguments.
So, the language isn't compiled (or wasn't originally) so they couldn't make min() be an error that only a developer saw, it has to be something that the runtime on the end-user system dealt with. So, it had to be assigned some value. Under those restrictions, it is the most mathematically sound value. It makes miniumum-exactly-2(x, min(<...>)) be exactly the same as min(x, <...>), even when the "<...>" has no values.
As a developer, I see a lot of value in static analysis, including refusing to generate output for sufficiently erroneous results of static analysis, so I don't like using JS, and the language that I tinker with will definitely have a separate compilation step and reject the equivalent of min(). But, if I HAD to assign something like that a value, it probably would be a representation of infinity, if we had one (probably will due to IEEE floats).
Oh, I may have violated distancing protocols then. My personal delay device doesn't have sub-microsecond accuracy. Should I will have gotten a test for time-invariant COVID ?
IIRC, Canada had at least some period of time where while change provided was rounded to the nearest nickel, the penny was still legal tender. (Prices / totals were not rounded; non-cash payments were still denominated / accurate to the penny.)
And, yes, it would be better to get congress and the executive together and have an actual plan for discontinuing the penny and the nickel (and maybe the dime or quarter?). I think on this issue, the executive acting alone is better than doing nothing / maintaining the status quo.