September 13 is "Programmer's Day," for non-leap years - an informal celebration of the 256th day of the year. According to Wikipedia, "traditions include: drinking, behaving silly, coding silly programs, mini computer games, playing with old computers, etc."

TSS says: fie! 256 is a power of two. (2^8=256, of course.) It's the point after an 8-bit unsigned byte has rolled over. What's so great about that?

Nobody uses 8-bit computers anymore. (Yes, Your Humble Editor is ignoring people who use microcontrollers.) Even the four people who do still use eight-bit processors standardized on 16-bit words recently - meaning "sometime in 1977." Eight bits are nothing - and 256 is a nine-bit number.

So if you're not on a Unisys E-series, well, welcome to After-Eight-Bit-Rollover Day - which doesn't make much sense to this old-timer (who has, by the way, worked on the Unisys E-Series. I refuse to admit this in any other context.)

However... I'd suggest that we replace this single, not-entirely-appropriate Programmer's Day with something else.

For one thing, let's replace this with "Rollover Day." Let's celebrate integral limits!

Then, let's follow Peter van der Linden's lead, and add October 31, and December 25 to our days! In addition to being cultural holidays - in which we won't be stared at for being overfed drunkards writing "Hello, World" on our Apple ][+ machines - they're also significant to our profession: Octal 31 is the same as Decimal 25.

(Your Humble Editor had this pointed out to him courtesy of a van der Linden book, Expert C Programming, which remains one of his favorite computer-related books, along with Charles Petzold's "Code" - a recent addition - and Peopleware, by DeMarco and Lister, lent to him many years ago by Paul Parks and subsequently lost through the lending of said book to a manager who really needed the information.)

"TSS says: fie! 256 is a power of two. (2^8=256, of course.) It's the point after an 8-bit unsigned byte has rolled over. What's so great about that?"

A byte holds 256 unique values, the first being zero.

The byte is still a datatype in Java, and used heavily in the java.io package.

I think the idea of September 13th being programmers day is a cool thing.

"TSS says: fie! 256 is a power of two. (2^8=256, of course.) It's the point after an 8-bit unsigned byte has rolled over. What's so great about that?"

A byte holds 256 unique values, the first being zero.

The byte is still a datatype in Java, and used heavily in the java.io package.

I think the idea of September 13th being programmers day is a cool thing.

But the celebration is over the VALUE 256, not the fact that the byte holds 256 values... and sure, bytes still exist, they have to. But they're no longer in the position of primacy.

I think Sept 13 is a cool thing, just not as "Programmer's Day."

Just wanted to point out that 8 bits can represent 256 different values, starting from 0. Someone fell for the off-by-one trap, no?

Our "Humble editor" is drunk.
:-)

Our "Humble editor" is drunk.
:-)

I wish! Actually, I'm a teetotaller - I don't drink alcohol at all. :)

Our "Humble editor" is drunk.
:-)

I wish! Actually, I'm a teetotaller - I don't drink alcohol at all. :)

Stomach ulcer? :o)

Our "Humble editor" is drunk.
:-)

I wish! Actually, I'm a teetotaller - I don't drink alcohol at all. :)

Stomach ulcer? :o)

Nope. Quite honestly, it's none of your business, but it's fairly well-known to the people who keep offering to buy me beer at various events, in the hopes of making me do nice things for 'em. :)

It seems the article was recently deleted "Because Wikipedia is not the place to promote new ideas."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Programmer%27s_day

Due to (somewhat) popular demand, WhatIs.com, a sister site of TheServerSide.COM, has put together a little definition of Programmer's Day. Much credit must go to Our Humble Editor.
http://searchvb.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,290660,sid8_gci1272110,00.html

Jan 1st is day 0000 0000, so the 255th day is 1111 1111. The programmer's day is 12 September.

We could change it to 32 bits (or 31, to avoid sign) in order to match with Java's int type. But I guess that this number will be higher than the 365 days usually available in a year :)

Since 256 means overflow for a byte, unsigned of coz, so we could also name it as "Overflow Day", which should make more sense.

Since 256 means overflow for a byte, unsigned of coz, so we could also name it as "Overflow Day", which should make more sense.

programmers should take care of the potential overflow problem, since the primitive data types are still sized and will keep being that for sometime.

Ever notice the bug in the following?

c = (a + b) / 2

Joshua Bloch has blogged [1] about the broken search algorithm in JDK, simply caused by the above single line of code.

[1] http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all-about-it-nearly.html