Re: Whither use English?
On Mon, Apr 11, 2005 at 03:42:25PM -0400, Aaron Sherman wrote: I don't think you can say (as Larry has) that you want to be able to fully re-define the language from within itself and still impose the constraint that it can't confuse people who don't know anything about my module. You might argue that Language::Dutch should never ship with the core... that's a valid opinion, but SOMEONE is going to write it. It'd be a kind of strange form of censorship for CPAN not to accept it. After all, there's more than one way to say it... isn't there? While it may be possible to do it, and while it may be an interesting exercise to implement it, that doesn't mean that anyone *using* it for anything other than a joke isn't a blithering idiot. I'm not even sure I like the *possibility* of using non-ascii letters in identifiers, even. I think we already have Latin-1 in identifiers... more's the pity. Let's see about UTF-8 pugs my $??? = 1; undef pugs $???; 1 I see a sequence of three question marks, there's no funny foreign characters there. I have to confess to being surprised that $??? is legal. -- David Cantrell | Benevolent Dictator Of The World May your blessings always outweigh your blotches! -- Dianne van Dulken, in alt.2eggs...
Re: Whither use English?
On Tue, Apr 12, 2005 at 02:38:01PM +0200, Juerd wrote: Thomas Yandell skribis 2005-04-12 13:13 (+0100): According to Wikipedia there are around 400 million native English speakers and 600 million people who have English as a second language. Should the remaining ~5.5 billion humans be exluded from writing perl code just so that we English speakers can understand all the code that is written? But your numbers are utterly useless, as they are counts of humans, not programmers. I think that the number of programmers who don't understand English is very small. They know English because historically, the programmer's world has been English. There's another issue that he didn't address. OK, let's allow identifiers in (say) Urdu. That's great for the three people in the entire world who speak Urdu, right up to the moment that they want their English, or Russian, or German, or Japanese users to submit patches. -- David Cantrell | London Perl Mongers Deputy Chief Heretic It's my experience that neither users nor customers can articulate what it is they want, nor can they evaluate it when they see it -- Alan Cooper
Re: Novice
On Wed, Feb 16, 2005 at 01:32:32PM -0600, Jonathan Scott Duff wrote: On Wed, Feb 16, 2005 at 03:09:24PM -0300, LOGGOS TI wrote: Please, where may i download this version ? Is there an usable version Greetings Roberto! You've stumbled upon the mailing list for the design of the Perl 6 language. Unfortunately an implementation does not yet exist, but we're working on it. Well, Autrijus is working on it :-) -- David Cantrell | Hero of the Information Age It doesn't matter to me if someone else's computer is faster because I know my system could smash theirs flat if it fell over on it. -- (with apologies to Brian Chase)
Re: FW: Periodic Table of the Operators
On Tue, Jun 08, 2004 at 11:30:51AM +0100, Tim Bunce wrote: On Mon, Jun 07, 2004 at 10:52:32PM +0100, David Cantrell wrote: But when I'm using a terminal session, I have found that the only practical way of getting consistent behaviour wherever I am is to use TERM=vt100. Windows is, of course, the main culprit in forcing me to vt100 emulation. I can recommend PuTTY for windows. Secure, small[1], fast, featureful and free: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ I'm using it now to ssh from a windows laptop to read email using mutt in screen. I can get it working with a Windows client, or a Mac client, or a $other_client, but I could never find any combination of voodoo that would work with *all* clients, so that I can disconnect (while leaving mutt running) then reconnect some random time later on some other platform and have it Just Work and have odd characters show up correctly. TERM=vt100 was the only way to get consistent results. Yes, I tried putty. I also tried cygwin/xfree86/xterm/openssh, to no avail. -- Lord Protector David Cantrell | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david Lefties are usually well-intentioned at least, and possess a far greater command of grammar and spelling. -- Noel, in soc.history.what-if
Re: FW: Periodic Table of the Operators
On Tue, Jun 01, 2004 at 04:21:14PM -0400, Mark J. Reed wrote: Since you've added ? and ? to the list above, I'll add them as well: What's so hard to type about the question mark? And what's so significant that you added it twice? OK, so I know that you really meant to type some bizarre character and some other bizarre character. This is what is so wrong about allowing unicode operators - yes, I don't need to write them, but if some other programmer writes one I have to be able to read it. And I can't. -- David Cantrell | Reprobate | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life -- Samuel Johnson
Re: FW: Periodic Table of the Operators
Mark J. Reed wrote: On 2004-06-07 at 21:33:03, David Cantrell wrote: This is what is so wrong about allowing unicode operators - yes, I don't need to write them, but if some other programmer writes one I have to be able to read it. And I can't. Well, for one thing, just because your email program doesn't let you display them, that doesn't mean you can't see them in your text editor. If I sent you a Perl program as an attachment I'm sure the bizarre characters would come through fine. The data in the file would, of course, be preserved, but that doesn't mean I could read it. Like when I was writing my earlier mail. And for another thing, what bizarre email system are you using that in 2004 can't even handle Latin-1? My console can be any of several platforms - in the last couple of weeks it has been a Linux box, a Windows PC, a Mac, a Sun workstation, and a real vt320 attached to a Sun. My mail sits on a hosted Linux box. To read it, I sometimes ssh in to the machine and read it using mutt in screen. At other times I read it using Mozilla Thunderbird over IMAP. In Thunderbird, the odd characters show up. But when I'm using a terminal session, I have found that the only practical way of getting consistent behaviour wherever I am is to use TERM=vt100. Windows is, of course, the main culprit in forcing me to vt100 emulation. -- David Cantrell | Failed to find witty sig
Compatibility with perl 5
A few days ago I briefly discussed with Nicholas Clark (current perl 5.8 pumpking) about making perl5 code forward-compatible with perl6. A quick look through the mailing list archives didn't turn up anything obvious, and I don't recall any mechanism being presented in any of the Apocalypses, so ... Perl 6, we are promised, will try to run legacy code unchanged. How will it spot such legacy code? Doing this reliably is a hard problem, but we can make it easier. I suggest that people put: use perl5; near the top of their perl programs, scripts and modules. This would be a clear indicator to the perl6 compiler that this is a perl5 program without it having to do any complicated and error-prone heuristics. And it could be implemented really easily in perl5 with no changes to the core at all: package perl5; i don't do anything yet; If such a null-op pragma were to go into the next perl 5.8.x release people could start preparing their existing code for perl 6 right now. Which is surely a Good Thing. And of course if the pragma were to also be available to download seperately from the CPAN people still using older 5.x releases could still use it. -- David Cantrell
Re: Compatibility with perl 5
On Tue, Apr 13, 2004 at 02:27:08PM +0200, Juerd wrote: David Cantrell skribis 2004-04-13 13:16 (+0100): Perl 6, we are promised, will try to run legacy code unchanged. How will it spot such legacy code? Doing this reliably is a hard problem, but we can make it easier. I suggest that people put: use perl5; Why change what already works? use 5; no 6; But no VERSION does not work, at least in 5.8.3: [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ cat foo use 5; no 6; print version 5, not version 6\n; [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ perl foo syntax error at foo line 2, near no 6; Execution of foo aborted due to compilation errors. and my discussion with Nicholas didn't lead me to believe that it would work in the upcoming 5.8.4 either. -- David Cantrell | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david All principles of gravity are negated by fear -- Cartoon Law V
Re: Compatibility with perl 5
On Tue, Apr 13, 2004 at 09:16:21AM -0600, Thomas A. Boyer wrote: The original question was how do I label my code as Perl 5? The correct answer, according to Apocalypse 1, is to start your source with package. If you didn't want to put your code in a package, then start it with package main. This is something that should be brought to a wider audience cos then you won't get more people like me wandering in and asking silly questions. I shall write something up for perlmonks tomorrow. -- David Cantrell | Official London Perl Mongers Bad Influence
Re: Why shouldn't sleep(0.5) DWIM?
On Wed, Jan 31, 2001 at 04:43:38PM -0500, Dan Sugalski wrote: The core's going to look big, but be small What, like am inside-out TARDIS? -- David Cantrell | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david/ Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced ** I read encrypted mail first, so encrypt if your message is important ** PGP signature
Re: [FWP] sorting text in human-order
On Fri, Jan 05, 2001 at 09:42:12PM -0500, Brian Finney wrote: generally speaking when you look a number and convert it into text you go through some simble steps say we start with this number 123,456,789 ... then we convert to words (((one*hundred)+(twenty+three))*million)+(((four*hundred)+(fifty+six))*thousand)+((seven*hundred)+(eighty+nine)) now we replace math with spaces except the + between the tens and ones producing one hundred twenty-three million four hundred fifty-six thousand seven hundred eighty-nine You are making the common mistake of assuming that your dialect of English is correct for all English speakers. It most obviously isn't. -- David Cantrell | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david The voices said it's a good day to clean my weapons.
Re: [FWP] sorting text in human-order
On Thu, Jan 04, 2001 at 09:28:26AM +, Piers Cawley wrote: And for 'proper' library type sorting (assuming all works are in English) we should really be doing something like: require Lingua::EN::Numbers; s/(\d+(?:\.\d+))/Lingua::EN::Numbers-($1)-get_string/eg; since in a library numbers get sorted based on how they are spoken based on the language of the work in whose title they appear. IME they're sorted according to a mixture of the numeric value and how the librarian would speak the number. For example, 4 is always sorted before 5, despite coming later in the dictionary. Maybe I've only been exposed to incompetent librarians who do it 'wrong', but I doubt it. And in any case, I can think of three different ways of saying 1821 in English alone. One thousand eight hundred and twenty one One thousand eight hundred twenty one Eighteen hundred and twenty one As far as *I* am concerned, the middle one is wrong (although I believe it is considered correct in some parts of the world), and whether to use the first or the thrid form would depend on context. -- David Cantrell | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david The voices said it's a good day to clean my weapons.
