begin quoting Andrew Lentvorski as of Wed, Oct 19, 2005 at 11:24:48AM -0700: > Stewart Stremler wrote: [snip] > >It's not the memorization that folks have a problem with. It's the > >concepts. But then, to me, regex are just a compact form of a DFA. > > I actually like the original camel book for Perl better (ie. the magenta > one rather than the cyan one). It had the regex description and the > recipes for using them in the same book. Now, you have to have the Perl > book *and* the Perl Cookbook to get that.
Good for the publishers, at least. > >I found that taking a formal languages course resulted in sendmail.cf > >making sense; worse, not just sense, but it was *obvious*. > > And then you put that sendmail.cf in use--and it fails in very > nonobvious ways. Most folks don't immerse themselves in formal language notation before writing sendmail.cf files. And, like I said about regex... they're tricky. > Actually, sendmail.cf files are pretty easy nowadays. Stick with the > normal addresses and trash everything else. Heh. And now they're mostly generated for you. > Now, back when your sendmail.cf had to deal with Bitnet, UUCP, DECNET, > JANET((?) the original standard for Britain which had the host and name > parts *backwards*) and a whole host of other networks and standards, > reading and editing sendmail.cf was torture. Heh. If you could twist your brain around, it wasn't torture. Aside from the twisting your brain around part, that is. I found the experience to be much like working with scheme; and like scheme, I didn't want to *stay* there, even though it was kinda neat. > Haven't seen an email bangpath in years, I liked bangpaths. Which probably says a lot about the natural twist to my brain, come to think of it. -Stewart "Corkscrew" Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
