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Though I'll admit readability suffers slightly...
Larry Wall
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Dan Smith: I've tried (in vi) 'g/[a-z]\n[a-z]/s//_/'...but that doesn't cut it. Any ideas? (I take it that it may be a two-pass sort of solution).Larry Wall: In the first pass, install perl.
Larry Wall
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I'm afraid my gut level reaction is basically, proceed is cute, but cute doesn't cut it in the emergency room.
Larry Wall
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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
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In general, if you think something isn't in Perl, try it out, because it usually is.
Larry Wall
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Would you trust the linguistic intuitions of someone who has been studying Latin or Greek for three days?
Larry Wall
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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
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I don't like this official/unofficial distinction. It sound, er, officious.
Larry Wall
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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.
Larry Wall
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Perl has a long tradition of working around compilers.
Larry Wall
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The code also assumes that it's difficult to misspell 'a' or 'b'.
Larry Wall
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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
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Maybe we should take a clue from FTP and put in an option like 'print hash marks on every 1024 iterations'.
Larry Wall
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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
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I don't know if it's what you want, but it's what you get.
Larry Wall
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I'm sure a mathematician would claim that 0 and 1 are both very interesting numbers.
Larry Wall
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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
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How do you type it? With your keyboard.
Larry Wall
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…I also discovered Larry's First Law of Language Redesign: Everyone wants the colon.
Larry Wall
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And other operators aren't so special syntactically, but weird in other ways, like 'scalar', and 'goto'.
Larry Wall
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It's hard to tune heavily tuned code.
Larry Wall
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... an initial underscore already conveys strong feelings of magicalness to a C programmer.
Larry Wall
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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.
Larry Wall
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Randal said it would be tough to do in sed. He didn't say he didn't understand sed. Randal understands sed quite well. Which is why he uses Perl.
Larry Wall
