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never write "PERL", because perl is not an acronym

It most certainly is, according to Larry Wall no less. PERL = Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister.

http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/perl3/lperl/ch01_02.htm

It's actually a retronym, not an acronym. That is, Larry came up with the name first, and the expansion later. That's why "Perl" isn't in all caps.

This "real programming" won't ever completely move outside of Office.

From a pure engineering perspective doing so is the only thing that makes sense. But what engineers don't get are the logistics, the corporate politics, everything that isn't at all about engineering that surrounds engineering efforts.

Business logic in Excel sheets abounds because it bypasses all that internal company overhead. It bypasses the budgets, the turf wars, the compliance checks, the transfer of domain knowledge, all of it. Programming Perl declared that, "A Perl script is 'correct' if it gets the job done before your boss fires you.". Excel et al are the business's version of Perl. Much like the Camel, it wasn't built to be pretty; It was built to survive in hostile environments.

Sorry I expected more than you prompted with the quote.

Running perl -Dx (perl must have been compiled with -DDEBUGGING ) dumps the Perl op code tree that perl compiles the script into. There is some discussion of the architecture, some discussion of the tree, a example walkthru and some documentation of the facility, as well as work using the system.

But it looks like (especially in the last several years) more "Perl call graph" work focuses on lexically parsing the Perl source. Which to me seems a great waste of this fascinating facility. Even though the graph is of a stack machine, not dataflow exactly, it seems like an interesting facility to target with a graph editor.

Crazy rules for var? Like every child object of the object in which var is declared has access to that variable?

No, the fact that it's always function-scoped rather than block-scoped, while the syntax still permits you to write it inside a block. This breaks the established rule for all C-family languages out there - in every other case, either in-block declarations are scoped to the block (C99, C++, C#, Java, D, ...), or else you can only declare variables at the outermost block in function body (classic C).

Using "let" instead of "var" is a workaround that Mozilla provides, but it's a non-standard extension which only they currently support (albeit slated for inclusion in EcmaScript Harmony).

It does.

From Chapter 2.3.4. Garbage Collection in Orelly'S Programming PHP:

PHP uses reference counting and copy-on-write to manage memory. Copy-on-write ensures that memory isn't wasted when you copy values between variables, and reference counting ensures that memory is returned to the operating system when it is no longer needed.

To understand memory management in PHP, you must first understand the idea of a symbol table . There are two parts to a variable--its name (e.g., $name), and its value (e.g., "Fred"). A symbol table is an array that maps variable names to the positions of their values in memory.

When you copy a value from one variable to another, PHP doesn't get more memory for a copy of the value. Instead, it updates the symbol table to say "both of these variables are names for the same chunk of memory." So the following code doesn't actually create a new array:

$worker = array("Fred", 35, "Wilma");
$other = $worker; // array isn't copied

[... snip ...]

http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/webprog/php/ch02_03.htm

(It's like NFS getting a bad reputation--especially locking--because Linux's implementation sucked for so many years.)

Huh?

fcntl/lockf works fine over NFS so long as both sides are either using NFS4 or both sides are running NLM (the NFS locking daemon -- i.e. rpc.statd)

Dot-locking also works over NFS, though open(..., O_EXCL|O_CREAT) does not work, nor does flock. Have these worked on other systems, or started working under Linux?

But the thing is, HTML was/is *designed* so that companies can extend it! (That's why HTML ignores tags it doesn't understand, for example.)

The extensibility you are referring to is for XHTML (the 'X' actually stands for eXtensible). That's an important distinction, because when a company extends XHTML, they do it using XML, which must be valid and well-formed.

I am nearly certain that microsoft.com is not being marked incompatible because of valid, well-formed XHTML extensions. I know for certain that google.com. is not.

With reference to ActiveX - the issue has always been security, not validity. Valid or not, ActiveX is a security hole you can drive a sandworm through.

HTH, HAND