Larry Wall
Programmer, best known as the creator of the Perl programming language.
Not that I have anything much against redundancy. But I said that already.
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...
The problem with being consistent is that there are lots of ways to be consistent, and they're all inconsistent with each other.
> (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.
(Never thought I'd be telling Malcolm and Ilya the same thing... :-)
: No comment, since this is still hovering (see Larry's reply).
Flutter, flutter.
If there's a particular problem that Perl is trying to solve, it's the basic fact that all programming languages suck. Sort of the concept of original sin, applied to programming languages.
Hey, I had to let awk be better at *something*... :-)
echo 'Hmmm...you don't have Berkeley networking in libc.a...'
echo 'but the Wollongong group seems to have hacked it in.
A 'goto' in Perl falls into the category of hard things that should be possible, not easy things that should be easy.
Perl will always provide the null.
It's certainly easy to calculate the average attendance for Perl conferences.
How do Crays and Alphas handle the POSIX problem?
It won't be covered in the book. The source code has to be useful for something, after all... :-)
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... :-)
Life gets boring, someone invents another necessity, and once again we turn the crank on the screwjack of progress hoping that nobody gets screwed.
And other operators aren't so special syntactically, but weird in other ways, like 'scalar', and 'goto'.
There's something to be said for returning the whole syntax tree.
Tcl long ago fell into the Forth trap, and is now trying desperately to extricate itself (with some help from Sun's marketing department).
What about WRITING it first and rationalizing it afterwards? :-)