Abridged. Below. On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 6:36 AM, Dale Schumacher <[email protected]>wrote:
> > Just to be clear. The ? symbol represents "undefined". The NIL > symbol is semantically equivalent to (), the empty tuple/list. And > finally, the _ symbol represents the wildcard pattern with no implied > binding. See the Humus Overview > (http://www.dalnefre.com/wp/humus/humus-overview/) for details. > Oh, heh! I stand corrected. This one is always sticky because there's been so much variation in different languages. IIRC even Lisp and Scheme differ slightly on this one, right? This reminds me of one of the funniest things that I ever saw at work. This architect, who's identity I will protect (I mean, nice smart ambitious guy usually) wanted to roll his own cross platform RPC. I kicked and screamed and pointed at things like THRIFT because I really didn't want to end up owning another unnecessary proprietary RPC mechanism, but I lost that argument and it got built and we deployed it. You should have seen me nearly fall out of my chair laughing when someone hit the first bug, which I had a feeling would be in there. I can't claim that I found it myself (I was juggling a lot at the time,) but I was two cubes away and heard the howling expletive emitted by the guy who did. I had a plan to go looking for that problem. I was kinda robbed;) Ruby and Perl (the two languages of central interest at the time) differ slightly with regard to the truth value of the number 0. Ruby wants to say, "yeah, zero is an object and it isn't nil." Meanwhile, Perl programmers regularly use zero as a shorthand for falsehood. CC FONC because it's a funny story about ill-advised use of language. The poor Perl folks ended up having to write FALSE, or 'FALSE', if I remember right (BCC'd someone who was there, maybe his recollection about that is better than mine.) They were sooooooo mad. Fortunately, I wasn't working on the Perl parts much, because if I had been, I probably would have led the revolt. -- Casey Ransberger
_______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
