David Wakeling writes
|Yes, Certainly. Here at York we have a small electrical hoist in one of the
|Departmental stairwells which is used for lifting expensive and delicate
|equipment onto the upper floor of the building. As part of an experiment in
|real time functional programming, I wrote a Haskell program to control this
|hoist. It proved to be a tricky exercise: the hoist is controlled by a number
|of registers, and reading and writing these registers in the correct order
|with the correct values proved to be a royal pain. Indeed, . . .

When someone in the UK uses a phrase like this, I'm never sure whether
the usage is literal or figurative.  Tell me , Dave,  is this because
your lift project has some connection with H.M. royal shaft I heard about
a couple of years ago?  (It seems to me the phrase was used in connection
with the proposed poll tax---I mean "Community Charge"---but I never was
able to work out what this had to do with lifts.)

--Joe

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