[30497] in Perl-Users-Digest
Perl-Users Digest, Issue: 1740 Volume: 11
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Perl-Users Digest)
Tue Jul 22 16:14:24 2008
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:14:16 -0700 (PDT)
From: Perl-Users Digest <Perl-Users-Request@ruby.OCE.ORST.EDU>
To: Perl-Users@ruby.OCE.ORST.EDU (Perl-Users Digest)
Perl-Users Digest Tue, 22 Jul 2008 Volume: 11 Number: 1740
Today's topics:
Re: proliferation of computer languages <szrRE@szromanMO.comVE>
Re: proliferation of computer languages <cartercc@gmail.com>
Re: The Importance of Terminology's Quality <com.lewscanon@lew>
Re: The Importance of Terminology's Quality <steve@fenestra.com>
Re: The Importance of Terminology's Quality <grante@visi.com>
Re: The Importance of Terminology's Quality <jwkenne@attglobal.net>
Re: The Importance of Terminology's Quality <jwkenne@attglobal.net>
Win32 Socket Timeout woes dmcglynn@gmail.com
Digest Administrivia (Last modified: 6 Apr 01) (Perl-Users-Digest Admin)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2008 11:49:34 -0700
From: "szr" <szrRE@szromanMO.comVE>
Subject: Re: proliferation of computer languages
Message-Id: <g65a3u0d11@news4.newsguy.com>
Jürgen Exner wrote:
> Chris Rathman <Chris.Rathman@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I can't say that I see any particular point to the essay.
>
> You must be new here. There never is any particular point to Xah
> Lee's rantings except to cross-post borderline topics to borderline
> relevant NGs and then lay back and enjoy the ensuing slaughter.
Admittedly, I'm not all too familiar with his postings, but on a general
note, isn't it possible that someone else might not see it the same as
you do? I really didn't see anything really sinister about the posting
or it's content. It may very well be someone attempting to create a
conversation, someone who may not be generally well received a lot of
the time I gather.
Also, if have such a distaste for his postings, you are free to ignore
them as well. That said, I am all for alerting someone of something
which may be a complete waste of their time, but in this case it feels
like you are projecting your own dislike for the OP. Unless the OP
really is deserving of such branding (in which case I'd stand
corrected), I don't think it is reason enough to tell others not to read
of his work just because you aren't particularly fond of it.
Perhaps citing an actual example illustrating a reason to avoid him like
the plague would of helped :-)
--
szr
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:56:39 -0700 (PDT)
From: cartercc <cartercc@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: proliferation of computer languages
Message-Id: <a4f04617-8040-4db6-a64f-f7c1519639b8@e53g2000hsa.googlegroups.com>
On Jul 18, 1:17 pm, "xah...@gmail.com" <xah...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Today, i took sometime to list some major or talked-about langs that
> arose in recent years.
You missed PowerShell and ActionScript.
Languages are just tools. It may have escaped your notice, but it's a
remarkable fact that no two languages are alike! It's not the language
that we should focus on, but the task at hand. Personally, I feel that
we can gain a lot more by studying the different kinds of problems we
can solve by computing and relate the language to the job, rather than
learning a language and then trying to find a fit with a particular
class of problems.
If you look at TIOBE and the like, you will note that the top four
language categories (Java/JavaScript, C/C++, Basic, and Perl/Python/
Ruby) account for around eighty percent of the language usage (not
counting PHP), and all the other languages quickly fall off. No. 13 on
the TIOBE rating was PL/SQL at 0.073 percent. If you read the
employment ads (Dice, etc.) the percentage is even greater for the big
languages. To me, this indicates that we have several mainstream
languages that account for the vast majority of work and a vast number
of task specific languages for special purposes.
CC
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2008 09:54:06 -0400
From: Lew <com.lewscanon@lew>
Subject: Re: The Importance of Terminology's Quality
Message-Id: <PqadnenupInjexjVnZ2dnUVZ_rGdnZ2d@comcast.com>
Rob Warnock wrote:
> Martin Gregorie <martin@see_sig_for_address.invalid> wrote:
> +---------------
> | John W Kennedy wrote:
> | > No, the "thunks" were necessary at the machine-language level to
> | > /implement/ ALGOL 60, but they could not be expressed /in/ ALGOL.
> |
> | Are you sure about that?
> +---------------
>
> I don't know if John is, but *I* am! ;-}
At this point we are so far off topic for clj.programmer, but still impinging
on functional programming issues with the discussion of closures, et al., that
I respectfully request that you all exclude clj.programmer from followups to
this thread.
(f-u set to comp.lang.functional)
--
Lew
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:29:40 -0400
From: Steve Schafer <steve@fenestra.com>
Subject: Re: The Importance of Terminology's Quality
Message-Id: <kg2c84d8i5rfq6kd20nhh6reab7m59b9cm@4ax.com>
On Tue, 22 Jul 2008 10:21:50 +0100, Martin Gregorie
<martin@see_sig_for_address.invalid> wrote:
>The first time I ran across the term "thunking" was when Windows 3
>introduced the Win32S shim and hence the need to switch addressing between
>16 bit and 32 bit modes across call interfaces. That was called "thunking"
>by Microsoft and even they would surely admit it was a kludge.
Win32s thunks are a completely different beast from the original Algol
60 thunks. As far as I know, the first published description of thunks
was:
Ingerman PZ (1961) Thunks: A way of compiling procedure statements with
some comments on procedure declarations, CACM 4:55-58.
Steve Schafer
Fenestra Technologies Corp.
http://www.fenestra.com/
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:17:10 -0500
From: Grant Edwards <grante@visi.com>
Subject: Re: The Importance of Terminology's Quality
Message-Id: <vuWdnVXuSN27uRvVnZ2dnUVZ_jydnZ2d@posted.visi>
On 2008-07-22, Steve Schafer <steve@fenestra.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Jul 2008 10:21:50 +0100, Martin Gregorie
><martin@see_sig_for_address.invalid> wrote:
>
>>The first time I ran across the term "thunking" was when Windows 3
>>introduced the Win32S shim and hence the need to switch addressing between
>>16 bit and 32 bit modes across call interfaces. That was called "thunking"
>>by Microsoft and even they would surely admit it was a kludge.
What?! Microsoft took a technical term and used it to mean
something completely different than the widely used meaning?
Never.
> Win32s thunks are a completely different beast from the
> original Algol 60 thunks. As far as I know, the first
> published description of thunks was:
>
> Ingerman PZ (1961) Thunks: A way of compiling procedure statements with
> some comments on procedure declarations, CACM 4:55-58.
The Algol usage is certainly what we were taught back in the
late 70's. I wasn't even aware that Microsoft had hijacked it
to mean something else.
--
Grant Edwards grante Yow! My polyvinyl cowboy
at wallet was made in Hong
visi.com Kong by Montgomery Clift!
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:54:05 -0400
From: John W Kennedy <jwkenne@attglobal.net>
Subject: Re: The Importance of Terminology's Quality
Message-Id: <48863add$0$5013$607ed4bc@cv.net>
Martin Gregorie wrote:
> I used Algol 60 on an Elliott 503 and the ICL 1900 series back when it was
> a current language. The term "thunking" did not appear in either compiler
> manual nor in any Algol 60 language definition I've seen.
It doesn't have to; Algol 60 thunks are not part of the language.
However, practical implementation of Algol 60 call by name means that
thunks are created by every Algol 60 compiler, and the word "thunk" was
coined in 1961 to designate them.
> A60 could pass
> values by name or value and procedures by name. That was it. Call by name
> is what is now referred to as reference passing.
Either you misunderstood (because in many simple cases the semantics of
call-by-reference and call-by-name cannot be distinguished) or the
compiler you used implemented non-standard Algol (which was fairly
common in compilers meant for day-to-day practical work). Algol
call-by-name was a unique form that subsequent language designers have
recoiled from in horror.
(Historically, "call-by-name" has sometimes been used in non-Algol
contexts to mean "call-by-reference".)
> Algol 60 did not have 'functions'. It had procedures which could be
> declared to return values or not. A procedure that returned a value was
> equivalent to a function but the term 'function' was not used.
This is simply wrong. You are accurately describing the language syntax,
which used (as PL/I does) the keyword "procedure" for both functions
and subroutines, but Algol documentation nevertheless referred to
"functions".
> Similarly
> it did not have a mechanism for declaring anonymous procedures. That, like
> the incorporation of machine code inserts, would have been a
> compiler-specific extension, so it is a terminological mistake to refer to
> it without specifying the implementing compiler.
Standards-conforming Algol compilers had a limited ability to create
de-facto anonymous functions in the call-by-name implementation.
--
John W. Kennedy
"Information is light. Information, in itself, about anything, is light."
-- Tom Stoppard. "Night and Day"
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:57:21 -0400
From: John W Kennedy <jwkenne@attglobal.net>
Subject: Re: The Importance of Terminology's Quality
Message-Id: <48863ba1$0$5000$607ed4bc@cv.net>
Rob Warnock wrote:
> Thunks were something used by Algol 60
> *compiler writers* in the code generated by their compilers to
> implement the semantics of Algol 60 call-by-name, but were not
> visible to users at all [except that they allowed call-by-name
> to "work right"].
...unless you were a system programmer and had to write Algol-friendly
assembler.
--
John W. Kennedy
"Give up vows and dogmas, and fixed things, and you may grow like
That. ...you may come to think a blow bad, because it hurts, and not
because it humiliates. You may come to think murder wrong, because it
is violent, and not because it is unjust."
-- G. K. Chesterton. "The Ball and the Cross"
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2008 07:32:02 -0700 (PDT)
From: dmcglynn@gmail.com
Subject: Win32 Socket Timeout woes
Message-Id: <54bffb8c-b03f-4847-9dee-84739bffce26@c65g2000hsa.googlegroups.com>
Hello.
A question to all the win32 perl-ers out there.. . .
I searched google quite a bit yesterday, searched this group, and was
not able to figure out a solution to this problem.
Is it true you cannot change the 'connect' timeout of a socket in
win32? I assume you can't, so I tried using the alarm signal as shown
on a few different pages here and there to timeout the socket, yet
could not get it to work.
It's as if a socket-call locks up the entire script, such that it
doesn't even respond to the alarm-signal. The script will timeout if I
lock it up with a while (1==1) loop, but if I replace that with a
socket-connect, it doesn't work at all.
I then noticed how simple this solution is on a linux box. . . the
"timeout" parameter actually works in the socket creation.
I can post code, but it's just more of a general question, .. is it
possible to change the timeout of the socket in win32?
I love perl, but don't know much of it, so go easy on me.
------------------------------
Date: 6 Apr 2001 21:33:47 GMT (Last modified)
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Subject: Digest Administrivia (Last modified: 6 Apr 01)
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End of Perl-Users Digest V11 Issue 1740
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