Dice

Dice (singular die or dice; from Old French dé; from Latin datum "something which is given or played";) are small throwable objects with multiple resting positions, used for generating random numbers. Dice are suitable as gambling devices for games like craps and are also used in non-gambling tabletop games.

A traditional die is a rounded cube, with each of its six faces showing a different number of dots (pips) from 1 to 6. When thrown or rolled, the die comes to rest showing on its upper surface a random integer from one to six, each value being equally likely. A variety of similar devices are also described as dice; such specialized dice may have polyhedral or irregular shapes and may have faces marked with symbols instead of numbers. They may be used to produce results other than one through six. Loaded and crooked dice are designed to favor some results over others for purposes of cheating or amusement.

A dice tray, a tray used to contain thrown dice, is sometimes used for gambling or board games, in particular to allow dice throws which do not interfere with other game pieces.

Horae

In Greek mythology the Horae (/ˈhɔːriː/ or /ˈhɔːraɪ/) or Hours (Greek: Ὧραι, Hōrai, pronounced [hɔ̂ːraj], "seasons") were the goddesses of the seasons and the natural portions of time. They were originally the personifications of nature in its different seasonal aspects, but in later times they were regarded as goddesses of order in general and natural justice. "They bring and bestow ripeness, they come and go in accordance with the firm law of the periodicities of nature and of life", Karl Kerenyi observed: "Hora means 'the correct moment'." Traditionally, they guarded the gates of Olympus, promoted the fertility of the earth, and rallied the stars and constellations.

The course of the seasons was also symbolically described as the dance of the Horae, and they were accordingly given the attributes of spring flowers, fragrance and graceful freshness. For example, in Hesiod's Works and Days, the fair-haired Horai, together with the Charites and Peitho crown Pandora—she of "all gifts"—with garlands of flowers. Similarly Aphrodite, emerging from the sea and coming ashore at Cyprus, is dressed and adorned by the Horai, and, according to a surviving fragment of the epic Cypria, Aphrodite wore clothing made for her by the Charites and Horai, dyed with spring flowers, such as the Horai themselves wear.

Dice (programming language)

Dice is a general purpose, object-oriented programming language. The principal is simplicity, pulling many themes of the language from Java. Dice is a high level language that utilizes LLVM IR to abstract away hardware implementation of code. Utilizing the LLVM as a backend allows for automatic garbage collection of variables as well. Dice is a strongly typed programming language, meaning that at compile time the language will be type-checked, thus preventing runtime errors of type.

Types

There are two kinds of types in the Dice programming language: primitive types and non-primitive types. There are, correspondingly, two kinds of data values that can be stored in variables, passed as arguments, returned by methods, and operated on: primitive values and non-primitive values.

There is also a special null type, the type of the expression null, which has no name. Because the null type has no name, it is impossible to declare a variable of the null type. The null reference is the only possible value of an expression of null type. The null reference can always undergo a widening reference conversion to any reference type. In practice, the programmer can ignore the null type and just pretend that null is merely a special literal that can be of any reference type.