Of Walking and Halking

Stand up and take a few steps worth of a walk. Then by all means, resume reading this article!

So, your short walk was easy, right? Of course, you can walk unless you are one of the few unfortunate ones who cannot walk due to accidents or disease. You were walking now for nearly all of your life.

Imagine, now some people come up with a theory of walking. Walking without a profound mathematical theory behind it is...random at best, after all. They come up with step calculus, a formal proof that steps lead you from A to B for A,B being a transitive, reflective set of location kinds and all other sorts of stuff.

Others teach their babies no longer to walk. They first teach them the theory of walking. And then, they assume that their babies will eventually walk better. Of course, you cannot teach a baby something as complicated as the theory of steps at the age of one. So, walking has become rather a post-graduate skill... Those people are forthwith not called Walkers, but Halkers. By definition.

Now, you as a Walker by childhood, imagine you meet a Halker and you talk.
After a while, the Halker stares at you with disbelieving, disgusted eyes. You have not even the faintest idea about walking! You do not even know the basic theorems and lemmas of walking theory. You insist, that you can walk as you did so obviously for all your life. But the Halker simply shakes their head and declares you an utter idiot.

What a great story! But so many questions come to mind now!

Halkers - what is that - that word does not even exist!
Is it not obvious that someone who learned walking at the age of 1 or 2 would walk better than someone who learned it after mastering the theory of walking at the age of 22?
Would all that walking done between the age of 2 and 22 not outweigh the benefits of being able to excel in walking calculus?
Since Halkers became more prominent in the population, demand has risen to ban stairs and other similarly accident prone impure walking contexts.
And indeed it is quite amusing to see Halkers stumble along and falling over in the most clumsy ways more often than not!

Blogger! Will you tell us finally how you came up with the word Halker?

Answer1: I took at the look at the C-code in GHC run time of course!
Answer2: I visited the C-- web sites and did a bit of reading. Did it ever occur to you guys, that with C-- you cut yourself off from all the benefits of stable, existing cross platform compilers and that you basically start from scratch? Why in all categories name did you not write a new front end in llvm and use all the clang/llvm backends? Maybe with a few back-end extensions, if something cannot be expressed in intermediate language terms? Halkers!