Perl Wisdom

All language designers are arrogant. Goes with the territory... :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]

Although the Perl Slogan is There's More Than One Way to Do It, I hesitate to make 10 ways to do something. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

And don't tell me there isn't one bit of difference between null and space, because that's exactly how much difference there is. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

"And I don't like doing silly things (except on purpose)."

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

: And it goes against the grain of building small tools. Innocent, Your Honor. Perl users build small tools all day long.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

/* And you'll never guess what the dog had */ /* in its mouth... */

— Larry Wall in stab.c from the perl source code

Because . doesn't match \n. [\0-\377] is the most efficient way to match everything currently. Maybe \e should match everything. And \E would of course match nothing. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Be consistent.

— Larry Wall in the perl man page

Besides, including <std_ice_cubes.h> is a fatal error on machines that don't have it yet. Bad language design, there... :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Besides, it's good to force C programmers to use the toolbox occasionally. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Besides, REAL computers have a rename() system call. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

break; /* don't do magic till later */

— Larry Wall in stab.c from the perl source code

But you have to allow a little for the desire to evangelize when you think you have good news.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

/* dbmrefcnt--; */ /* doesn't work, rats */

— Larry Wall in hash.c from the perl source code

#define NULL 0 /* silly thing is, we don't even use this */

— Larry Wall in perl.c from the perl source code

#define SIGILL 6 /* blech */

— Larry Wall in perl.c from the perl source code

Does the same as the system call of that name. If you don't know what it does, don't worry about it.

— Larry Wall in the perl man page regarding chroot(2)

double value; /* or your money back! */ short changed; /* so triple your money back! */

— Larry Wall in cons.c from the perl source code

Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

echo "Congratulations. You aren't running Eunice."

— Larry Wall in Configure from the perl distribution

echo "Hmmm...you don't have Berkeley networking in libc.a..." echo "but the Wollongong group seems to have hacked it in."

— Larry Wall in Configure from the perl distribution

echo "ICK, NOTHING WORKED!!! You may have to diddle the includes.";;

— Larry Wall in Configure from the perl distribution

echo $package has manual pages available in source form. echo "However, you don't have nroff, so they're probably useless to you."

— Larry Wall in Configure from the perl distribution

echo "Your stdio isn't very std."

— Larry Wall in Configure from the perl distribution

#else /* !STDSTDIO */ /* The big, slow, and stupid way */

— Larry Wall in str.c from the perl source code

[End of diatribe. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming...]

— Larry Wall in Configure from the perl distribution

Hey, I had to let awk be better at *something*... :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>1

I already have too much problem with people thinking the efficiency of a perl construct is related to its length. On the other hand, I'm perfectly capable of changing my mind next week... :-) --lwall

I don't know if it's what you want, but it's what you get. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

I dunno, I dream in Perl sometimes...

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

If I allowed "next $label" then I'd also have to allow "goto $label", and I don't think you really want that... :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

If I don't document something, it's usually either for a good reason, or a bad reason. In this case it's a good reason. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

"I find this a nice feature but it is not according to the documentation. Or is it a BUG?" "Let's call it an accidental feature. :-)"

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

if (instr(buf,sys_errlist[errno])) /* you don't see this */

— Larry Wall in eval.c from the perl source code

if (rsfp = mypopen("/bin/mail root","w")) { /* heh, heh */

— Larry Wall in perl.c from the perl source code

If you consistently take an antagonistic approach, however, people are going to start thinking you're from New York. :-)

— Larry Wall to Dan Bernstein in <[email protected]>

If you want to program in C, program in C. It's a nice language. I use it occasionally... :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

If you want to see useful Perl examples, we can certainly arrange to have comp.lang.misc flooded with them, but I don't think that would help the advance of civilization. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

If you want your program to be readable, consider supplying the argument.

— Larry Wall in the perl man page

I know it's weird, but it does make it easier to write poetry in perl. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

I'll say it again for the logic impaired.

— Larry Wall

I might be able to shoehorn a reference count in on top of the numeric value by disallowing multiple references on scalars with a numeric value, but it wouldn't be as clean. I do occasionally worry about that. --lwall

I'm sure that that could be indented more readably, but I'm scared of the awk parser.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

In general, if you think something isn't in Perl, try it out, because it usually is. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

In general, they do what you want, unless you want consistency.

— Larry Wall in the perl man page

Interestingly enough, since subroutine declarations can come anywhere, you wouldn't have to put BEGIN {} at the beginning, nor END {} at the end. Interesting, no? I wonder if Henry would like it. :-) --lwall

I think it's a new feature. Don't tell anyone it was an accident. :-)

— Larry Wall on s/foo/bar/eieio in <[email protected]>

"It is easier to port a shell than a shell script."

— Larry Wall

It's all magic. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

It's documented in The Book, somewhere...

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

> (It's sorta like sed, but not. It's sorta like awk, but not. etc.) Guilty as charged. Perl is happily ugly, and happily derivative.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

It's there as a sop to former Ada programmers. :-)

— Larry Wall regarding 10_000_000 in <[email protected]>

It won't be covered in the book. The source code has to be useful for something, after all... :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Just don't compare it with a real language, or you'll be unhappy... :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Just don't create a file called -rf. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Let's say the docs present a simplified view of reality... :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Let us be charitable, and call it a misleading feature :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Lispers are among the best grads of the Sweep-It-Under-Someone-Else's-Carpet School of Simulated Simplicity. [Was that sufficiently incendiary? :-)]

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]

No, I'm not going to explain it. If you can't figure it out, you didn't want to know anyway... :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

/* now make a new head in the exact same spot */

— Larry Wall in cons.c from the perl source code

OK, enough hype.

— Larry Wall in the perl man page

OOPS! You naughty creature! You didn't run Configure with sh! I will attempt to remedy the situation by running sh for you...

— Larry Wall in Configure from the perl distribution

Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one.

— Larry Wall in the perl man page

Perl itself is usually pretty good about telling you what you shouldn't do. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Perl programming is an *empirical* science!

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

pos += screamnext[pos] /* does this goof up anywhere? */

— Larry Wall in util.c from the perl source code

Q. Why is this so clumsy? A. The trick is to use Perl's strengths rather than its weaknesses.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Remember though that THERE IS NO GENERAL RULE FOR CONVERTING A LIST INTO A SCALAR.

— Larry Wall in the perl man page

s = (char*)(long)retval; /* ouch */

— Larry Wall in doio.c from the perl source code

signal(i, SIG_DFL); /* crunch, crunch, crunch */

— Larry Wall in doarg.c from the perl source code

Sorry. My testing organization is either too small, or too large, depending on how you look at it. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

stab_val(stab)->str_nok = 1; /* what a wonderful hack! */

— Larry Wall in stab.c from the perl source code

Tactical? TACTICAL!?!? Hey, buddy, we went from kilotons to megatons several minutes ago. We don't need no stinkin' tactical nukes. (By the way, do you have change for 10 million people?) --lwall

That means I'll have to use $ans to suppress newlines now. Life is ridiculous.

— Larry Wall in Configure from the perl distribution

The autodecrement is not magical.

— Larry Wall in the perl man page

The only disadvantage I see is that it would force everyone to get Perl. Horrors. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

There ain't nothin' in this world that's worth being a snot over.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

There are many times when you want it to ignore the rest of the string just like atof() does. Oddly enough, Perl calls atof(). How convenient. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

There are probably better ways to do that, but it would make the parser more complex. I do, occasionally, struggle feebly against complexity... :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

There are still some other things to do, so don't think if I didn't fix your favorite bug that your bug report is in the bit bucket. (It may be, but don't think it. :-) Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

There is, however, a strange, musty smell in the air that reminds me of something...hmm...yes...I've got it...there's a VMS nearby, or I'm a Blit.

— Larry Wall in Configure from the perl distribution

"The road to hell is paved with melting snowballs."

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

/* This bit of chicanery makes a unary function followed by a parenthesis into a function with one argument, highest precedence. */

— Larry Wall in toke.c from the perl source code

"...this does not mean that some of us should not want, in a rather dispassionate sort of way, to put a bullet through csh's head." Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Though I'll admit readability suffers slightly...

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

tmps_base = tmps_max; /* protect our mortal string */

— Larry Wall in stab.c from the perl source code

Unix is like a toll road on which you have to stop every 50 feet to pay another nickel. But hey! You only feel 5 cents poorer each time.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

"We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise."

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

/* we have tried to make this normal case as abnormal as possible */

— Larry Wall in cmd.c from the perl source code

What about WRITING it first and rationalizing it afterwords? :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

: 1. What is the possibility of this being added in the future? In the near future, the probability is close to zero. In the distant future, I'll be dead, and posterity can do whatever they like... :-) --lwall

"What is the sound of Perl? Is it not the sound of a wall that people have stopped banging their heads against?"

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the \% key in vi.

— Larry Wall in the perl man page

"You can't have filenames longer than 14 chars. You can't even think about them!"

— Larry Wall in Configure from the perl distribution

You have to admit that it's difficult to misplace the Perl sources. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

You want it in one line? Does it have to fit in 80 columns? :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Well, enough clowning around. Perl is, in intent, a cleaned up and summarized version of that wonderful semi-natural language known as "Unix".

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Anyway, there's plenty of room for doubt. It might seem easy enough, but computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

I want to see people using Perl to glue things together creatively, not just technically but also socially.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

The whole history of computers is rampant with cheerleading at best and bigotry at worst.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Unix weanies are as bad at this as anyone.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

If someone stinks, view it as a reason to help them, not a reason to avoid them.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

As usual, I'm overstating the case to knock a few neurons loose, but the truth is usually somewhere in the muddle, uh, middle.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Odd that we think definitions are definitive. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

: But for some things, Perl just isn't the optimal choice. (yet) :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

I don't like this official/unofficial distinction. It sound, er, officious.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

If you write something wrong enough, I'll be glad to make up a new witticism just for you.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Perl 5 introduced everything else, including the ability to introduce everything else.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

So far we've managed to avoid turning Perl into APL. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Not that I have anything much against redundancy. But I said that already.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

They can always run stderr through uniq. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

I'd put my money where my mouth is, but my mouth keeps moving.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Of course, I reserve the right to make wholly stupid changes to Perl if I think they improve the language. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Call me bored, but don't call me boring.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

I think $[ is more like a coelacanth than a mastadon.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

: I used to think that this was just another demonstration of Larry's : enormous skill at pulling off what other people would fail or balk at. Well, everyone else knew it was impossible, so they didn't try. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

We question most of the mantras around here periodically, in case you hadn't noticed. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

(Presuming for the sake of argument that it's even *possible* to design better code in Perl than in C. :-)

— Larry Wall on core code vs. module code design

: The hierarchy is excessive. So is the anarchy. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

That could certainly be done, but I don't want to fall into the Forth trap, where every running Forth implementation is really a different language.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Tcl long ago fell into the Forth trap, and is now trying desperately to extricate itself (with some help from Sun's marketing department).

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

The core is not frozen, but slushy.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

The whole intent of Perl 5's module system was to encourage the growth of Perl culture rather than the Perl core.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Randal can write one-liners again. Everyone is happy, and peace spreads over the whole Earth.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Life gets boring, someone invents another necessity, and once again we turn the crank on the screwjack of progress hoping that nobody gets screwed.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

No prisoner's dilemma here. Over the long term, symbiosis is more useful than parasitism. More fun, too. Ask any mitochondria.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Obviously I was either onto something, or on something.

— Larry Wall on the creation of Perl

It's the Magic that counts.

— Larry Wall on Perl's apparent ugliness

May you do Good Magic with Perl.

— Larry Wall's blessing

P.S. Perl's master plan (or what passes for one) is to take over the world like English did. Er, *as* English did...

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

You can prove anything by mentioning another computer language. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

I think you didn't get a reply because you used the terms "correct" and "proper", neither of which has much meaning in Perl culture. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

I'm sure a mathematician would claim that 0 and 1 are both very interesting numbers. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

True, it returns "" for false, but "" is an even more interesting number than 0.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Any false value is gonna be fairly boring in Perl, mathematicians notwithstanding.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

We didn't put in ^^ because then we'd have to keep telling people what it means, and then we'd have to keep telling them why it doesn't short circuit. :-/

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Anybody want a binary telemetry frame editor written in Perl?

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Most places distinguish them merely by using the appropriate value. Hooray for context...

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

But then it's a bit odd to think that declaring something int could actually slow down the program, if it ended up forcing more conversions back to string.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

It's possible that I'm just an idiot, and don't recognize a sleepy slavemaster when I see one.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Perhaps I'm missing the gene for making enemies. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Perl has a long tradition of working around compilers.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Personally, I like to defiantly split my infinitives. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Real theology is always rather shocking to people who already think they know what they think. I'm still shocked myself. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

But maybe we don't really need that...

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

The computer should be doing the hard work. That's what it's paid to do, after all.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

The following two statements are usually both true: There's not enough documentation. There's too much documentation.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

I don't think I'm gonna agree with that. Way too much visual confusion...

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

There's certainly precedent for that already too. (Not claiming it's *good* precedent, mind you. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Of course, this being Perl, we could always take both approaches. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

For the run-time caching, I was going to suggest "cached" (doh!), but perhaps "once" is more meaningful to ordinary people.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

The random quantum fluctuations of my brain are historical accidents that happen to have decided that the concepts of dynamic scoping and lexical scoping are orthogonal and should remain that way.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

At many levels, Perl is a "diagonal" language.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

I'm serious about thinking through all the possibilities before we settle on anything. All things have the advantages of their disadvantages, and vice versa.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Part of language design is purturbing the proposed feature in various directions to see how it might generalize in the future.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Sometimes we choose the generalization. Sometimes we don't.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

I wouldn't ever write the full sentence myself, but then, I never use goto either.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

It's appositival, if it's there. And it doesn't have to be there. And it's really obvious that it's there when it's there.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Oh, get ahold of yourself. Nobody's proposing that we parse English.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

As with all the other proposals, it's basically just a list of words. You can deal with that... :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

I hope I'm not getting so famous that I can't think out load [sic] anymore.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

It would be possible to optimize some forms of goto, but I haven't bothered.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

A "goto" in Perl falls into the category of hard things that should be possible, not easy things that should be easy.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

How do Crays and Alphas handle the POSIX problem?

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

One of the reasons Perl is faster than certain other unnamed interpreted languages is that it binds variable names to a particular package (or scope) at compile time rather than at run time.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Well, that's more-or-less what I was saying, though obviously addition is a little more cosmic than the bitwise operators.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

You tell it that it's indicative by appending $!. That's why we made $! such a short variable name, after all. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

The choice of approaches could be made the responsibility of the programmer.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

As someone pointed out, you could have an attribute that says "optimize the heck out of this routine", and your definition of heck would be a parameter to the optimizer.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

I guess what I'm saying is that the croak in question is requiring agreement (in the linguistic sense) that isn't buying us anything.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

If you're going to define a shortcut, then make it the base [sic] darn shortcut you can.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

It is my job in life to travel all roads, so that some may take the road less travelled, and others the road more travelled, and all have a pleasant day.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

It's getting harder and harder to think out loud. One of these days someone's gonna go off and kill Thomas a'Becket for me...

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

I was about to say, "Avoid fame like the plague," but you know, they can cure the plague with penicillin these days.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

But the possibility of abuse may be a good reason for leaving capabilities out of other computer languages, it's not a good reason for leaving capabilities out of Perl.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Oh, wait, that was Randal...nevermind...

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

:-) your own self.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

P.S. I suppose I really should be nicer to people today, considering I'll be singing in Billy Graham's choir tonight... :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Magically turning people's old scalar contexts into list contexts is a recipe for several kinds of disaster.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

: The following (relative to AutoSplit 1.03) attempts to please everyone : and perhaps pleases no one: I think that's way cool.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

And we can always supply them with a program that makes identical files into links to a single file.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

I wasn't recommending that we make the links for them, only provide them with the tools to do so if they want to take the gamble (or the gambol).

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

This has been planned for some time. I guess we'll just have to find someone with an exceptionally round tuit.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

switch (ref $@) { OverflowError => warn "Dam needs to be drained"; DomainError => warn "King needs to be trained"; NuclearWarError => die; }

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

I surely do hope that's a syntax error.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Soitainly. I was assuming that came with the OO-ness of it.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Because the demand for it is low enough that it would be best handled as an XSUB, and the demand for it is low enough that nobody has bothered to write it as an XSUB.

— Larry Wall on in-place Perl sorting

But that looks a little too much like a declaration for my tastes, when in fact it isn't one. So forget I mentioned it.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

I'm not sure whether that's actually useful...

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Anyway, my money is still on use strict vars . . .

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

By rule #1, 5.005 should always allow localization of lexical @_ . . .

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

I *know* it's weird, but strict vars already comes very, very close to partitioning the crowd into those who can deal with local lexicals and those who can't.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

If you remove stricture from a large Perl program currently, you're just installing delayed bugs, whereas with this feature, you're installing an instant bug that's easily fixed. Whoopee.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

The reason I like hitching a ride on strict vars is that it cuts down the number of rarely used pragmas people have to remember, yet provides a way to get to the point where we might, just maybe, someday, make local lexicals the default for everyone, without having useless pragmas wandering around various programs, or using up another bit in $^H.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

I don't think it's worth washing hogs over.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

It's certainly easy to calculate the average attendance for Perl conferences.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Tcl tends to get ported to weird places like routers.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Historically Tcl has always stored all intermediate results as strings. (With 8.0 they're rethinking that. Of course, Perl rethought that from the start.)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

I knew I'd hate COBOL the moment I saw they'd used "perform" instead of "do".

— Larry Wall on a not-so-popular programming language

Just don't make the '9' format pack/unpack numbers... :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

I think that's easier to read. Pardon me. Less difficult to read.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

That wouldn't be good enough.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

To ordinary folks, conversion is not always automatic. It's something that may or may not require explicit assistance. See Billy Graham. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

The prayer of serenity applies here. To both of us. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Well, you can implement a Perl peek() with unpack('P',...). Once you have that, there's only security through obscurity. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

It may be possible to get this condition from within Perl if a signal handler runs at just the wrong moment. Another point for Chip... :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

As pointed out in a followup, Real Perl Programmers prefer things to be visually distinct.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

The Harvard Law states: Under controlled conditions of light, temperature, humidity, and nutrition, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

That should probably be written: no !@#$\%^&*:@!semicolon

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

That gets us out of deciding how to spell Reg[eE]xp?|RE . . . Of course, then we have to decide what ref $re returns... :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Depends on how you define "always". :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

'Course, that doesn't work when 'a' contains parentheses.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

I was trying not to mention backtracking. Which, of course, means that yours is "righter" than mine, in a theoretical sense.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Not that I'm against sneaking some notions into people's heads upon occasion. (Or blasting them in outright.)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

(To the extent that anyone but a Prolog programmer can understand \X totally. (And to the extent that a Prolog programmer can understand "cut". :-))

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

But you'll notice Perl has a goto.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Suppose you're working on an optimizer to render \X unnecessary (or rather, redundant, which isn't the same thing in my book).

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Wow, I'm being shot at from both sides. That means I *must* be right. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

You don't have to wait--you can have it in 5.004_54 or so. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

There's something to be said for returning the whole syntax tree.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

It's not really a rule--it's more like a trend.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Double *sigh*. _04 is going onto thousands of CDs even as we speak, so to speak.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

The code also assumes that it's difficult to misspell "a" or "b". :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Well, hey, let's just make everything into a closure, and then we'll have our general garbage collector, installed by "use less memory".

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

No, that'd be silly.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

People who understand context would be steamed to have someone else dictating how they can call it.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

For the sake of argument I'll ignore all your fighting words.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Think of prototypes as a funny markup language--the interpretation is left up to the rendering engine.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Either approach may give birth to various sorts of monstrosities.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

The way these things go, there are probably 6 or 8 kludgey ways to do it, and a better way that involves rethinking something that hasn't been rethunk yet.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Obviously your filters are throwing away mail from Randal. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Beauty? What's that?

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Oh yeah. Forgot about those. Getting senile, I guess...

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

'Course, I haven't weighed in yet. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

I'm afraid my gut level reaction is basically, "'proceed' is cute, but cute doesn't cut it in the emergency room."

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

I suppose one could claim that an undocumented feature has no semantics. :-(

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

: How would you disambiguate these situations? By shooting the person who did the latter.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Yes, we have consensus that we need 64 bit support. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

: - cut in regexps I don't think we reached consensus on that. We're still backtracking...

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Maybe it's time to break that.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Boss: You forgot to assign the result of your map! Hacker: Dang, I'm always forgetting my assignations... Boss: And what's that "goto" doing there?!? Hacker: Er, I guess my finger slipped when I was typing "getservbyport"... Boss: Ah well, accidents will happen. Maybe we should have picked APL.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Perhaps they will have to outlaw sending random lists of words. fee fie foe foo [sic]

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Hey, if pi == 3, and three == 0, does that make pi == 0? :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

I think you're letting your knowledge of internals interfere with your linguistic judgement here.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

(Never thought I'd be telling Malcolm and Ilya the same thing... :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

And other operators aren't so special syntactically, but weird in other ways, like "scalar", and "goto".

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Portability should be the default.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Actually, it also looks like we should optimize (13,2,42,8,'hike') into a pp_padav copy as well.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

If this were Ada, I suppose we'd just constant fold 1/0 into die "Illegal division by zero"

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Are you perchance running on a 64-bit machine?

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Almost nothing in Perl serves a single purpose.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

There's some entertainment value in watching people juggle nitroglycerin.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Reserve your abuse for your true friends.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Er, Tom, I hate to be the one to point this out, but your fix list is starting to resemble a feature list. You must be human or something.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

It's hard to tune heavily tuned code. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Perl will always provide the null.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

It's easy to solve the halting problem with a shotgun. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

Well, I think Perl should run faster than C. :-)

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>

To Perl, or not to Perl, that is the kvetching.

— Larry Wall in <[email protected]>