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Is LISP a candidate for a scripting language? While you can certainly write things rapidly in it, I cannot in good conscience call LISP a scripting language. By policy, LISP has never really catered to mere mortals... And, of course, mere mortals have never really forgiven LISP for not catering to them.
Larry Wall
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There are a lotta computer languages out there doing drugs.
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But you could do extreme programming. In fact, I had a college buddy I did pair programming with. We took a compiler writing class together and studied all that fancy stuff from the dragon book. Then of course the professor announced we would be implementing our own language, called PL/0. After thinking about it a while, we announced that we were going to do our project in BASIC. The professor looked at us like we were insane. Nobody else in the class was using BASIC. And you know what? Nobody else in the class finished their compiler either. We not only finished but added I/O extensions, and called it PL 0.5. That's rapid prototyping.
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Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one.
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End of diatribe. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming...
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One operator is no big deal. That can be fixed in a jiffy.
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Well, sure, I explicitly mentioned 'vtables' last time I brought this up. But a single pointer is fairly paltry, as tables go.
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Well, you can implement a Perl peek() with unpack('P',...). Once you have that, there's only security through obscurity.
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Piet Van Oostrum:
I find this a nice feature but it is not according to the documentation. Or is it a BUG?
Larry Wall:
Let's call it an accidental feature.
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And besides, if Perl really takes off in the Windows space, I think the rest of us would just as soon have a double-agent within ActiveState.
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In Clintonese, that would be 'You are free to infer that I was saying that.'
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I was trying not to mention backtracking. Which, of course, means that yours is 'righter' than mine, in a theoretical sense.
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Lispers are among the best grads of the Sweep-It-Under-Someone-Else's-Carpet School of Simulated Simplicity. [Was that sufficiently incendiary?]
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You want it in one line? Does it have to fit in 80 columns?
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: No comment, since this is still hovering (see Larry's reply).
Flutter, flutter.
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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...
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You can't have filenames longer than 14 chars. You can't even think about them!
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: I could understand principles of Perl source in 2-3 days [...]
Gee, it took me about eleven years.
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If someone stinks, view it as a reason to help them, not a reason to avoid them.
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Remember though that
THERE IS NO GENERAL RULE FOR CONVERTING A LIST INTO A SCALAR.
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Besides, including <std_ice_cubes. h> is a fatal error on machines that don't have it yet. Bad language design, there...
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I think I'm happier with that. $rubyometer += 0.3 or so.
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I was about to say, 'Avoid fame like the plague,' but you know, they can cure the plague with penicillin these days.
Larry Wall
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Just put in another goto, and then it'll be readable.
Larry Wall
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The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris.
Larry Wall
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Quote of the day
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
George Santayana
Larry Wall
Creative Commons
Born:
September 27, 1954
(age 69)
Bio:
Larry Wall is a computer programmer and author, most widely known as the creator of the Perl programming language.
Known for:
Programming Perl (1991)
Black Perl (1999)
O'Reilly Perl Toolkit (1999)
Most used words:
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course
reason
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lisp
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