[6673] in Perl-Users-Digest
Perl-Users Digest, Issue: 299 Volume: 8
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Perl-Users Digest)
Mon Apr 14 14:08:03 1997
Date: Mon, 14 Apr 97 11:01:47 -0700
From: Perl-Users Digest <Perl-Users-Request@ruby.OCE.ORST.EDU>
To: Perl-Users@ruby.OCE.ORST.EDU (Perl-Users Digest)
Perl-Users Digest Mon, 14 Apr 1997 Volume: 8 Number: 299
Today's topics:
print question <lipp@tunix.mathematik.uni-stuttgart.de>
Re: Reply to Ousterhout's reply (was Re: Ousterhout and (Alaric B. Williams)
Re: Reply to Ousterhout's reply (was Re: Ousterhout and (Alaric B. Williams)
Re: Reply to Ousterhout's reply (was Re: Ousterhout and (Alaric B. Williams)
Re: Unix and ease of use (WAS: Who makes more ...) (Kaz Kylheku)
Re: Use of Tcl without Tk <dalke@ks.uiuc.edu>
Why is $Line=~ s///; erasing = (Kevin Swope)
Re: Windows95 and Perl for Win32s (Petr Prikryl)
Digest Administrivia (Last modified: 8 Mar 97) (Perl-Users-Digest Admin)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 14 Apr 1997 18:10:06 +0200
From: Johannes Lipp <lipp@tunix.mathematik.uni-stuttgart.de>
Subject: print question
Message-Id: <335256DE.41C6@tunix.mathematik.uni-stuttgart.de>
Hello,
I have the following problem:
the script
#! /usr/bin/perl -w
print STDOUT ("whats\n",
"that?\n");
produces no warning output,
but the script
#! /usr/bin/perl -w
print ("whats\n",
"that?\n");
produces a warning about print interpreted as a function.
Now I think this is aesthetically unpleasant.
Can anybody explain this to me?
Oh, all that happens with the perl from the RedHat 4.0 Linux
distribution.
Please reply to the email address below.
thanks in advance,
Johannes
--
Johannes Lipp |
lipp@tunix.mathematik.uni-stuttgart.de
Universitaet Stuttgart |
Mathematisches Institut B |
Abteilung fuer Kisten & Zahlen |
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 14 Apr 1997 17:13:29 GMT
From: alaric@abwillms.demon.co.uk (Alaric B. Williams)
Subject: Re: Reply to Ousterhout's reply (was Re: Ousterhout and Tcl ...)
Message-Id: <3352600e.2927159@news.demon.co.uk>
On 13 Apr 1997 20:53:25 GMT, ouster@tcl.eng.sun.com (John Ousterhout)
wrote:
>|> You know, if I didn't know any better I'd say you were avoiding
>|> the other posts. I wonder why?
>I would be delighted to debate this topic in a moderated forum where we can
>keep the discussion on track, such as a conference panel discussion.
I'd be delighted if people tried to ignore the possibilities of
personal faults, no matter how blatant or subtle they are... because
sometimes people have bad days and post an answer to something that
is, perhaps, less full than it could be because they're tired, and
then everyone goes "Hey, he's a jerk, he won't even answer questions
properly!". My point here is that noone can ever be sure that somebody
else has "something wrong with them". It's usually more productive to
assume the opposite, rather than just say "Hah, his arguments mean
nothing, he's a power-mad Nazi sycophantic devil worshipper". Maybe
John Ousterhout /is/ a "jerk" of some kind. But what business is that
of mine? And more to the point, what has it do to with TCL? There is a
chance that a language designed by a jerk may be flawed because of
that, but it may also be flawed by something the designer didn't think
through properly, and a "jerk" may accidentally stumble accross a
stunning language. Anyway, I've blabbed too long about that... but,
lads, let's just give each other the benefit of the doubt! Not just
JO, but all the people whose languages we love to hate :-)
>Unfortunately, it isn't really possible to sustain a coherent debate on
>a hot topic via unmoderated newsgroups. The discussion very quickly fragments
>into dozens of sub-topics that drift off the main thread of discussion.
Yeah, and moderated NGs often are too slow for really "interesting"
debate. This debate would have swamped a moderator and, thus, stopped
cold before long... perhaps we need a mailing list where you have to
submit an essay proving your worthiness and objectivety before being
allowed to join :-)
>Witness your message, where you put forth a corporate conspiracy theory
>instead of a technical argument, and this message, where we're arguing about
>whether I've responded enough, rather than the technical issues. I am reading
>all the messages, though, and I'll try to respond to some of the arguments
>when I revise the white paper over the next couple of weeks.
Sounds fine to me! I'm wondering if I should be regretting bringing
this to your attention in the first place, JO, but I guess I had to.
And it's spilled into c.l.tcl anyway, so I suppose it'd have got to
you... oh, well, what's done is done, for better or for worse!
>Or, look at it this way: if I don't respond then you get the last word :-)
;-)
Good luck folks,
ABW
--
"Plug and Play support: WfEWAD will autodetect any installed
Nuclear Arsenals, Laser Satellites, Battlefield Control Networks,
Radar Installations, Fighter Squadrons, and other WfEWAD compliant
devices, including the new Macrosoft Unnatural Keyboard, with
full support for the now-famous Big Red Buttom(tm)."
(Windows for Early Warning and Defence User's manual P26)
Alaric B. Williams Internet : alaric@abwillms.demon.co.uk
<A HREF="http://www.abwillms.demon.co.uk/">Hello :-)</A>
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 14 Apr 1997 17:13:23 GMT
From: alaric@abwillms.demon.co.uk (Alaric B. Williams)
Subject: Re: Reply to Ousterhout's reply (was Re: Ousterhout and Tcl ...)
Message-Id: <33525826.903639@news.demon.co.uk>
On 13 Apr 1997 17:20:12 -0500, wilson@cs.utexas.edu (Paul Wilson)
wrote:
>I'm not sure what to make of either of these postings.
I agree. Arguing is hard... too often, the people on either side
of the argument see things in different ways, so can't see each
other's points - and end up thinking "This guy is mad!"
>I think it's important to separate the notion of Lisp per se from
>the associated technologies, implementation strategies, and culture
>that have grown up around Lisp.
Which is hard to do for a non-Lisper, who will have seen a snapshot
or two of a Lisp system, and not know exactly which is which.
For what might perhaps be called the core of Lisp, read R4RS, the
Scheme standard. It's on the web in various places, I seem to
remember.
OTOH, for the penultimate extension of LISP, look at Common LISP and
Emacs!
>There are two very different ideas here, with very different implications,
>and I think some of the miscommunication about scripting language
>design is because it's easy to conflate Lisp with Common Lisp plus emacs
>plus a browser etc. etc. etc.
Especially for somebody who doesn't know LISP particularily well.
>(Sort of off the point, it's probably good point out that Lisp
>can have a "normal-looking" syntax, like Pop, and early Lisps often
>provided this. Conventional syntax pretty much fell by the wayside
>because it wasn't standardized and most serious Lisp programmers didn't
>feel the need for it. If you're trying to design a scripting langauge
>from scratch, as Tcl and Perl were, and you're trying not to alienate the
>parenthophobes, you can easily make something with most of the virtues
>of Lisp that looks pretty much like anything you want. You can even make
>it look like ML :-) )
Hmmm, are there any online documents about this kind of thing? I'd
like to attempt a nice syntax, but I'm not sure how to completely
encode the flexibility of parenthesis without constraining my new
syntax.
Eg, as a start, it'd be nice to define infix operators that go to
parenthesis notation, fine:
1 * 2 + 3 * 4 -> (+ (* 1 2) (* 3 4))
Then put starts and ends to control structures:
if <x> then <y>; -> (if <x> <y>)
begin <a>; <b>; <c>; end -> (begin <a> <b> <c>)
And prefixed function calls:
<x>(<y> <z>) -> (<x> <y> <z>)
But in most languages, we have a strong notion of context
("expression", "statement", "declaration", etc) which is a little
harder to make solid in LISP!
>Lisp fans in this thread have sometimes been derided as "Lisp bigots"
>but I don't see a lot of that. Most of us are just pointing out that
>even if you find parentheses scary, or are afraid your customers
>will, there are some aspects of Lisp (and especially Scheme) that are
>very appealing for scripting languages as well as general purpose
>programming. Many of the things that motivate scripting languages
>motivated the design of Lisp and Scheme.
I do sense a slight bitterness in some of us when we start to talk
about C++'s success, though, to be perfectly honest. It does seem a
bit unfair, when we see the wonderful thing we have in LISP, and see
that C++, which fails in all the areas LISP excells in, has succeeded,
it's hard not to be a little peeved :-(
Then again, the C++ people reading this (not that anyone hasn't set
their reader up to killfile immense crossposts!) will, no doubt, think
"What a jerk! What's Lisp ever done for the world?"
Well, that's hard to define. What is "better" about Lisp? It's mostly
subjective, due to the lack of programming language theory; sure, Lisp
is Turing complete, but that's about all we can formally say for
"goodness". Us LISP people can point to studies of how much
faster/reliabler LISP development was than C development, but there
are a hell of a lot of successful C products out there, so people
think C is "normal". When told that LISP development is faster, they
think "Faster than normal?", look at all the nests of parentheses
(invariably with most functions ending in "))))))))))" where all the
nested subexpressions unnest!) and think "Yeah - right!".
>I think it's probably best to regard Lisp as a family of languages,
>with McCarthy's Lisp as the progenitor of Common Lisp, Scheme, etc.,
>in much the same way that Algol-60 was the progenitor of Pascal,
>C, etc. Railing agianst Lisp because you don't like Common Lisp
>hypesters is like railing against Algol-60 because you don't like C++
>hypesters.
I'd call Lisp a philosophy of language design, with some strong
traditions (cons, for example!).
>You don't have to like Lisp, but any good language designer must
>learn from it, as the designers of many languages (e.g., Smalltalk,
>ML, Java) have done.
That's a wise statement IMHO.
>And even if you don't like Common Lisp in particular, you can still learn
>from it. For example, it appears that many scripting language advocates
>were surprised to learn that Common Lisp has keyword arguments, which
>lets you do terse scripting if you pick short identifiers---just like
>Tcl, "only better" (in most Lisper's views).
ABW
--
"Plug and Play support: WfEWAD will autodetect any installed
Nuclear Arsenals, Laser Satellites, Battlefield Control Networks,
Radar Installations, Fighter Squadrons, and other WfEWAD compliant
devices, including the new Macrosoft Unnatural Keyboard, with
full support for the now-famous Big Red Buttom(tm)."
(Windows for Early Warning and Defence User's manual P26)
Alaric B. Williams Internet : alaric@abwillms.demon.co.uk
<A HREF="http://www.abwillms.demon.co.uk/">Hello :-)</A>
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 14 Apr 1997 17:13:27 GMT
From: alaric@abwillms.demon.co.uk (Alaric B. Williams)
Subject: Re: Reply to Ousterhout's reply (was Re: Ousterhout and Tcl ...)
Message-Id: <33525e2e.2447859@news.demon.co.uk>
On Mon, 14 Apr 1997 12:07:53 +0100,
cyber_surfer@gubbish.wildcard.demon.co.uk (Cyber Surfer) wrote:
>> But the nice thing is that the author writes the book with the dummy
>> in mind. Take Stroustrup's book on C++. For a long time, I've said
>> it's not a good book for dummies, but I hadn't seen the book in a long
>> time, so I had forgotten what kind of things is said. Having reread
>> just the first few pages recently, he makes comments that only an
>> experienced programmer would understand.
>I fully agree with you about this. Most programming books make this
>mistake, IMHO. I've been very impressed by the functional programming
>tutorials that I've read. I guess it's because they start from the
>absolute basics, assuming no prior programming knowledge and
>experience.
Yes, when I got a copy of SICP last Xmas, I felt I was humouring the
book a bit to start at the beginning, where it tells you to add
numbers and the like. I was hoping to be gently brought into parens
syntax. However, it was only when I read (somewhere in chapter 3?)
about the horrors of assignment that I realised I'd been unknowingly
reading code in a vastly different coding style to what I was used to
(procedural code). It struck me that, without even knowing it, I'd
finally found out what the idea of functional programming was...
phrases such as "oh, programming without assignment" had only led me
to think "What? How is that /possible/?"!
>There are some Lisp books that go to the other extreme, but I think
>that SICP's only failing in this respect is that it covers a heck of a
>lot of material, and moves _very_ fast. Too fast for "dummies", I bet.
Smart but "uneducated" people, IYSWIM, will have a field day with
SICP!
>How about an HTML search engine,
>complete with the socket code for fetching objects from a web server,
>or even a web server, complete with CGI meta-language, stats
>processing and reporting, etc. That should demonstrate many of the
>same techniques, but it would be _presented_ from an angle that most
>programmers will at least recognise, even if they _might_ have trouble
>understanding the code.
Yeah. We're all sick of factorials and figuring out how many salesmen
make more than 20 000 bucks a day of sales...
ABW
--
"Plug and Play support: WfEWAD will autodetect any installed
Nuclear Arsenals, Laser Satellites, Battlefield Control Networks,
Radar Installations, Fighter Squadrons, and other WfEWAD compliant
devices, including the new Macrosoft Unnatural Keyboard, with
full support for the now-famous Big Red Buttom(tm)."
(Windows for Early Warning and Defence User's manual P26)
Alaric B. Williams Internet : alaric@abwillms.demon.co.uk
<A HREF="http://www.abwillms.demon.co.uk/">Hello :-)</A>
------------------------------
Date: 14 Apr 1997 15:25:13 GMT
From: kaz@vision.crest.nt.com (Kaz Kylheku)
Subject: Re: Unix and ease of use (WAS: Who makes more ...)
Message-Id: <5iti8p$sg7@bcrkh13.bnr.ca>
In article <860981230snz@genesis.demon.co.uk>,
Lawrence Kirby <fred@genesis.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>In article <01bc4838$3b0234a0$87ee6fce@timpent.a-sis.com>
> tim@a-sis.com "Tim Behrendsen" writes:
>
>...
>
>>> However, as the industry matures, this does show signs of changing.
>>> Compression is a user-level function, and I think gzip is at least as good
>>> as just about any commercial compression utility I've seen.
>>
>>Hm; compare PKZIP and gzip (PKZIP includes the gzip algorithm, I
>>believe). PKZIP includes support for multiple files, spanning
>>multiple floppies, and a zillion other features.
>
>This is comparing apples and oranges. gzip is a file compressor or
>filter intended to be used on single files or in conjunction with archivers
>like tar. The PKZIP reqivalent is called zip. zip uses different algorithms
>to PKZIP (PKWare's are patented) but produces archive files compatible with
>PKUNZIP. gzip uses the same compression algorithm as zip but doesn't
>create a PKZIP format archive.
Imho, different jobs should be done by different programs. Gzip does
compression, and it does it very well. Tar is a great file archiver. Files
that are ``tarred and gziped'' are usually smaller than archives produced by
PKZIP. For one thing, gzip can take advantage of global redundancies across
the whole archive file.
Having small tools as separate processes also lets you take advantage of
a multi-processor architecture. I can have tar running on one of my processors,
and compress on the other. *ZIP doesn't do this.
And, incidentally, GNU tar lets you use gzip transparently. Just add the 'z'
flag, as in:
tar czf <archive_name> <files>
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 14 Apr 1997 10:52:56 -0500
From: Andrew Dalke <dalke@ks.uiuc.edu>
Subject: Re: Use of Tcl without Tk
Message-Id: <335252D8.794B@ks.uiuc.edu>
Mike Hopkirk wrote:
>
> In article <5ilbk6$f85$2@news.du.etx.ericsson.se> rv@erix.ericsson.se (Robert Virding) writes:
>
> >who would use Tcl if it DIDN'T have such a
> >integrated interface to Tk?
>
> Probably the same subset that are *currently* using Tcl without Tk
> Close by examples I can point to (that I know of) are three groups here:
> System admin, Software Installation, Network configuration
Or if you use something else for the GUI -- our code uses XForms
for the GUI and Tcl for the embedded scripting language. It
is a molecular visualization program and doesn't fit under the
listed categories.
Why did we use Tcl? Because it was like a scripting language
were were thinking of writing, only MUCH better.
Andrew
------------------------------
Date: 14 Apr 1997 16:32:32 GMT
From: obsidian@shore.net (Kevin Swope)
Subject: Why is $Line=~ s///; erasing =
Message-Id: <5itm70$ee5@fridge-nf0.shore.net>
hello,
why does:
$Blank_var="";
$Tag=~ s/$Blank_var//;
occasionally erase the = from variable $Tag when it contains a =
the line:
$Tag=~ s///;
does the same thing.
I'm using perl5003 and irix 5.3
any ideas.
thanks.
------------------------------
Date: 14 Apr 1997 14:31:30 GMT
From: prikryl@dcse.fee.vutbr.cz (Petr Prikryl)
Subject: Re: Windows95 and Perl for Win32s
Message-Id: <5itf42$3ng$5@boco.fee.vutbr.cz>
Steve Morris (steve@laverstoke.demon.co.uk) wrote:
>I need some help with the installation of Perl5 for Win32s into PWS on
>Windows95.
[...problems described...]
This may not be the answer, but you can read the description of instalation
of Ilya Zakharevich's port of 5.004beta for DOS, Win3.1, and Win95 at
http://www.fee.vutbr.cz/~prikryl/ilya5004.txt
... step-by-step until it really works.
Petr (the satisfied user of IlyaZ's port of Perl)
--
Petr Prikryl (prikryl@dcse.fee.vutbr.cz) http://www.fee.vutbr.cz/~prikryl/
TU of Brno, Dept. of Computer Sci. & Engineering; tel. +420-(0)5-7275 218
------------------------------
Date: 8 Mar 97 21:33:47 GMT (Last modified)
From: Perl-Request@ruby.oce.orst.edu (Perl-Users-Digest Admin)
Subject: Digest Administrivia (Last modified: 8 Mar 97)
Message-Id: <null>
Administrivia:
The Perl-Users Digest is a retransmission of the USENET newsgroup
comp.lang.perl.misc. For subscription or unsubscription requests, send
the single line:
subscribe perl-users
or:
unsubscribe perl-users
to almanac@ruby.oce.orst.edu.
To submit articles to comp.lang.perl.misc (and this Digest), send your
article to perl-users@ruby.oce.orst.edu.
To submit articles to comp.lang.perl.announce, send your article to
clpa@perl.com.
To request back copies (available for a week or so), send your request
to almanac@ruby.oce.orst.edu with the command "send perl-users x.y",
where x is the volume number and y is the issue number.
The Meta-FAQ, an article containing information about the FAQ, is
available by requesting "send perl-users meta-faq". The real FAQ, as it
appeared last in the newsgroup, can be retrieved with the request "send
perl-users FAQ". Due to their sizes, neither the Meta-FAQ nor the FAQ
are included in the digest.
The "mini-FAQ", which is an updated version of the Meta-FAQ, is
available by requesting "send perl-users mini-faq". It appears twice
weekly in the group, but is not distributed in the digest.
For other requests pertaining to the digest, send mail to
perl-users-request@ruby.oce.orst.edu. Do not waste your time or mine
sending perl questions to the -request address, I don't have time to
answer them even if I did know the answer.
------------------------------
End of Perl-Users Digest V8 Issue 299
*************************************
