Assuming you're a native English speaker, why is "whiskers" unfamiliar?

If not referring to the beard as a whole, how else would you reference the facial hair - whiskers is less of a mouthful than any other term.

What is the problem with that paragraph, other than the long sentence with many comma separated phrases?

The only 'non modern' bits are 'Michaelmas' (which I know is a Christianity related date), and 'undistinguishable' where I'd use 'indistinguishable'. So the note about the student being quizzed to translate to 'modern English' seems moot as it is modern English.

However, I'm English, so a number of the terms are immediately obvious.

I obvious know who the Lord Chancellor is (as the role still exists); as do the Inns of Court, being where Barristers receive their initial training. So I would suggest it is more a case of needing specific cultural knowledge, than needing enhanced language skills.

Bleak House: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1023/1023-h/1023-h.htm

As to the rest of the initial 7 paragraphs.

In P2, I had to look up "aits" (islands); otherwise they are all of no issue other than the length of the sentences, occasionally requiring me to reread a few phrases.

Basically Dickens is modern English, with a few archaic words being used.

Was that not just to avoid other legal complications?

i.e. possibly Intel having some protection (copyright?) over its assembly mnemonics and register names.

The documentation for FlexOS 1.2/1.3 is available on Bitsavers. So someone could re-implement it.

The build kit for CDOS-68k 1.2 (aka FlexOS 68k) is available ob Gaby's site.

I worked for an OEM in the 90s, and we used FlexOS 286 (and 386) ver 2.2/2.3 on some custom systems, including an ePOS system.

That's interesting. I left DRI just before Novell bought it, and wasn't aware of anybody besides IBM using it.

Covid affecting my sense of smell had an impact on this.

Apart from not being able to taste coffee, I also could not taste freshly ground black pepper, fresh spicy peppers, nor Tabasco sauce.

I could only feel the effects of the capsaicin at the back of my throat after having swallowed.

I think that back-of-the-throat feeling is what I’m talking about actually. Pain vs flavour. I feel like this guy supposedly saying he could eat VERY spicy curries and not notice means that either 1) burning from spicy food uses the same mechanism as taste, so the gum restoring it makes sense or 2) they’re separate but the gum works on both pathways.

I’m thinking that burning feeling has a different route to get to your brain vs taste/scent, so I guess this gum does more than I thought originally. Though based on other accounts here, it sounds like how connected pain and flavour are varies quite a bit!

The flaw with that article, it being the Beeb showing their bias, is that it mainly applies to the English Home Counties.

So it is a southern English habit, not a British one. The other parts of England are more direct, and will use more obvious phrasing. Similarly the other parts of Britain will be more direct.

Indeed. I've lived in the UK my entire life, and I've only ever heard "sorry" used to mean "excuse me, can I get past please?" in and around London. It still sounds weird to me. Where I come from (further from London), you'd just say "excuse me".

Not quite. If you had to get off a packed bus with a large rucksack I'd certainly be saying sorry and I'm from Yorkshire.

Glaswegian here, I would use sorry as an "can I get past" also.

I understand it works _if_ you declare p as being volatile, or explicitly tag it as _Atomic.

i.e., either of these forms:

    foo * volatile p;
    foo * _Atomic p;

Or at least it did when I was performing a similar experiment.

Sure. Or use a mutex, or use any of the other zillion concurrency-safe constructs out there. Still, Fil-C is memory-safe only up to data-race freedom. This bound is still a plenty useful, but Pizlo shouldn't be going around saying Fil-C is memory-safe in general when it ain't.

A section? All of Northumberland, as Wallsend is in Tyne and Wear.

The task of walking (or measuring) the whole of England's coastline is made a bit more difficult by the existence of various islands classed as part of England.

e.g. Isle of Wight, St. Mary's Island, Coquet Island, Lindisfarne, the other Farne islands, etc.

The volume of UK and US fluid ounces being different also doesn't help.

The UK pint is 568ml, apparently a US pint is 473 ml.

Attribute (qualifier), or storage class?

https://www.airs.com/blog/archives/428

The use of 'const' in C is very much a mixed blessing; I certainly have experience of the 'const poisoning' issue. Possibly it would have been better as a storage class.

For bool, yes it was a useful addition. Especially for the cases where old code would have something like:

    #define FLAG_A 1u
    #define FLAG_B 2u
    int has_flag_B (something *some) { return some->field & FLAG_B; }

and that was then combined with logic expecting 'true' to be 1; which could sneak in over time.