Nowadays we seem to be plagued with a surplus of code that almost no
one understands how to use.

For myself, my wrists have recovered (you've seen how much text I dump
on the lists here) but I spend most of my coding time trying to
connect the dots - coding possibilities I see with [hopefully] useful
results for other people.

Put differently, one "virtue" of a good coder is "do not repeat
yourself" but there are two related virtues: "repeat yourself" and "do
not do it at all". Needless to say, this can get confusing to reason
about - if you try to do that in isolation - but they are all
worthwhile approaches, when used judiciously.

Thanks,

-- 
Raul


On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 9:15 AM, Roger Hui <[email protected]> wrote:
> Arthur Whitney was talking about a common colleague one time.  "E can
> program faster than I can type!"  (E is probably not anybody any of you
> would know.)
>
>
> On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 5:58 AM, Raul Miller <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> I've dabbled in elisp - I wrote a minor mode for APL back in the '90s.
>> It was a fun challenge, but physically painful, and I had to give up
>> emacs.
>>
>> See... a problem with emacs is the keyboard chording system - if you
>> are typing alt-shift A, control-P, ... or whatever, and are going 80
>> words per minute, and your posture isn't the greatest? I was doing
>> something like that and my wrists started hurting terribly. I was
>> afraid I would not be able to type at all.
>>
>> So I switched to vi, and switched my coding style from being prolific
>> to thinking a lot and typing just a bit. This gave me a lot of
>> appreciation to "old school style" and also gave my wrists a chance to
>> recover. You can do a lot with small bits of shell script (or other
>> coding), some careful thought, and working with people.
>>
>> So that is my signature, nowadays - I do not code a lot, and I put a
>> lot of thought (perhaps too much thought) into the code I do write. My
>> wrists thank me (usually - sometimes they still grumble), though
>> sometimes I envy people who can comfortably crank out tons of code.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> --
>> Raul
>>
>> On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 7:01 AM, David Lambert <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>> > I have a quarter million lines of FORTRAN written over the years in the
>> > various versions.  Mostly f77 using ! comments, but not entirely.  My
>> goal:
>> > convert the entire code to f2008.  Parts A, B, and C are continuation
>> mark,
>> > code, and comment.  At this stage I'm addressing various forms of
>> > continuation lines, an example:
>> >
>> >       call s( ! comment maybe
>> >                    ! intervening remarks
>> >      *arg)
>> >       character*8 a=/'hi'/  ! or whatever
>> >
>> > becomes
>> >
>> >      call s& ! comment maybe
>> > ! intervening remarks
>> > &arg)
>> >       character(len=8) :: a = (/'hi'/)  ! fixed with sed
>> >
>> > Later I'll have emacs reindent the whole thing.  Such transformations
>> ignore
>> > replacing common blocks with modules.  A build with gfortran will catch
>> > problems that our current compiler does not.  Transforming the code with
>> j
>> > makes my job fun, whereas becoming an elisp expert hasn't ever grabbed my
>> > attention.
>> >
>> > On 01/28/2014 07:00 AM, [email protected] wrote:
>> > Message: 1
>> > Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2014 22:30:14 -0500
>> > From: David Lambert <[email protected]>
>> > To: chat <[email protected]>
>> > Subject: [Jchat] FSM enhancement proposal
>> > Message-ID: <[email protected]>
>> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>> >
>> >
>> > I have information of the forms ABC, AB, BC, AC, A, B, C which I'd like
>> > to separate into 3 boxes.  If a part is missing the box should be
>> > empty.  I think it is impossible with the current FSM implementation
>> > because it must read a character to yield output.  With only one
>> > character on input I cannot obtain '';'';C as output, or any three
>> > boxes. I haven't investigated emit vector but I don't see how it will
>> > help.  The 3 boxes preserve the classification work that's already been
>> > accomplished, and I can use _3&([\) to generate a useful array.
>> >
>> > We could enhance the FSM retaining backward compatibility.  I'd prefer
>> > to pass a gerund as an additional part of x, have the Function code
>> > specify to use it as an agenda determined by the output code. The agenda
>> > would monadically process the matched items.  It seems to me that such a
>> > j FSM would have the full capability of the gnu flex program, excepting
>> > the automatic generation of the state table.
>> >
>> > Perhaps a new output code to emit something ( ace if F is 0 otherwise
>> > i.0 ? ) and change state without reading the next input item would be a
>> > simpler solution to treat the case I've presented.
>> >
>> > Or this may be far too complicated and I need to write my own function.
>> > It would surprise me if the gerund concept were not part of the original
>> > implementation debate.  And it would surprise me to learn that I
>> > understand the FSM.  For now I'll use a flex bison program.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > ------------------------------
>> >
>> > Message: 2
>> > Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2014 22:39:23 -0500
>> > From: Raul Miller <[email protected]>
>> > To: Chat forum <[email protected]>
>> > Subject: Re: [Jchat] FSM enhancement proposal
>> > Message-ID:
>> > <CAD2jOU_tfv6mDdU0o_E5nteCf0k9=v1x_isiaph1omscsud...@mail.gmail.com>
>> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>> >
>> >
>> > I am having trouble understanding your specification.
>> >
>> > Do you mean that you have a sequence of letters, such as:
>> >
>> > BBBCCCACBBBCBBAAAAABAABACACACC
>> >
>> > And you want to separate them into boxes whose letters are lexically
>> > increasing?
>> >
>> > I'd not bother with ;: for that, I'd do something like this:
>> >
>> >     (] <;.1~ 1 , 2 >:/\ 'ABC' i. ]) 'BBBCCCACBBBCBBAAAAABAABACACACC'
>> >
>> > Though if you prefer gnu flex and bison, I'm sure you can do it that
>> > way too, with a little time and effort.
>> >
>> > Thanks,
>> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>> > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
>>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
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