Larry Wall
Programmer, best known as the creator of the Perl programming language.
Part of language design is perturbing the proposed feature in various directions to see how it might generalize in the future.
You tell it that it's indicative by appending $!. That's why we made $! such a short variable name, after all. :-)
In Clintonese, that would be 'You are free to infer that I was saying that.' :-)
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.
echo 'Your stdio isn't very std.'
The Harvard Law states: Under controlled conditions of light, temperature, humidity, and nutrition, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.
Well, hey, let's just make everything into a closure, and then we'll have our general garbage collector, installed by 'use less memory'.
Wow, I'm being shot at from both sides. That means I *must* be right. :-)
One thing I do understand is that people get scared when I start thinking out loud. :-)
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. :-)
If this were Ada, we'd simply doc it as 'erroneous'.
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.
And C was good at something I like to call manipulexity, that is the manipulation of complex things. While shell was good at something else which I call whipuptitude, the aptitude for whipping things up.
Almost nothing in Perl serves a single purpose.
I'm reminded of the day my daughter came in, looked over my shoulder at some Perl 4 code, and said, 'What is that, swearing?
It's hard to tune heavily tuned code. :-)
I want to see people using Perl to glue things together creatively, not just technically but also socially.
That gets us out of deciding how to spell Reg[eE]xp?|RE . . . Of course, then we have to decide what ref $re returns... :-)
It would be possible to optimize some forms of goto, but I haven't bothered.