RE: flex perl mess

[Garrett Goebel]

Piers Cawley writes:
: If currying magic works in subroutine parameter strings then you can
: just do 
: 
: sub assert_with_func (^sub is constant, $^expected is constant,
:   $^got, $message)
: {
: ^sub($expected, $got) or die $message || $default_message;
: }
: 
: Here's hoping it will work.

That's my intention.

Larry

RE: flex perl mess

[Garrett Goebel]

Piers Cawley writes:
: Damian Conway [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
:  Of course, that's not to say that the particular Cundef that's returned on
:  failure-to-numerify mightn't have a property set that indicates the problem 
:  was not-a-numeric in nature.
: 
: Having more than one 'undef' value sounds like a recipe for internals
: madness. Or is the undef that gets slung around actually going to be a
: reference to the 'real' undef? 

NaN is merely the floating-point representation of undef when your
variable is stored in a bare num.  And if you declare a variable as
int, there may well be no representation for undef at all!  Similarly,
it may be impossible to taint an int or a num, unless we can figure
out a way to stuff such information into 0 bits.  But I'd like an
array of int or num to be compact.

Larry

Re: Rebinding can change type? [was: Static Values and Variable Bindings]

[Larry Wall]

On Tue, Oct 23, 2001 at 03:41:27AM -0400, Michael G Schwern wrote:
 Some of you may remember (and some wish we could forget) a ramble I
 posted about six months back about traffic lights and language design
 and all the weird ways we get meaning out of such a small # of
 symbols.  One of the things I'd pondered was using color for syntax.
 
 Well, somebody else did.  I just stumbled on colorForth!  
 
 In Forth, a new word is defined by a preceeding colon, words inside a
 definition are compiled, outside are executed. In colorForth a new
 word is red, green words are compiled, yellow executed. This use of
 color further reduces the syntax, or punctuation, needed.
 
 http://www.colorforth.com/cf.html

delurk/

The issue with colorForth is that it's Chuck Moore's language.  Not that
Chuck Moore is a good/bad language designer, but his school of design
is that *you* should create the tools that help *you* program efficiently.
So, colorForth fits his grey matter, but not necessarily anyone elses.
(Or, rather: matter gray yours not colorForth fits)

If you look more deeply into colorForth, the editing environment is an
integral part of the langauge.  In effect, using the colorForth editor,
you are pre-compiling the source using colors to make the Forth interpreter
smaller.

 Red, green and yellow!  It's the language of traffic lights!

Perhaps.  But it's running against many of the ideals of Perl.  Perhaps
that just means that Perl[6] should never be syntax highlighted.  :-)

Z.