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Perl uses those line-noise characters as shorthand. It's syntax is mutable, however, so you cane tradeoff readability for verbosity.
See Lingua::Romana::Perligata for Perl-with-latin-syntax, for example. And be afraid. (It's available for download from CPAN).

reveals you as a blatant troll.

And yet you feel obliged to respond to my argument. Perhaps it has a modicum of truth after all.

Mountain, heavy are the mountains
But that changes, with the passage of time
Sky, blue sky, what your eyes can't see, what your eyes can see
The sun, one, only one
Water, it is agreeable, Commander Ikari
Flowers, so many the same, so many without purpose
Sky, sky of red, red the color, the color I hate
Liquid flows, it drips, ripples, and pours
Blood, scent of blood, woman who does not bleed
From the red soil the humans come
Humans made by man and woman
City, a human creation
Eva, a human creation as well
What are humans?
Are they creations of God?
Humans, that which is created by humans
This is that which is mine
My life, my heart
I am a vessel for my thoughts
The entry plug, the throne of the soul
Who is this? This is me
Who am I? What am I? What am I? What am I?
I am I.
This object that is, is myself
That which forms me
This is the self that can be seen, and yet this is not like that which is myself
A strange feeling
My body feels as if it is melting
I can no longer see myself
My form, my shape fades from view
Awareness dawns of someone who is not me
Who is here? There? Beyond me, here
Shinji
This person I know, Major Katsuragi
Dr. Akagi
People, my classmates
The pilot of Unit Two
Commander Ikari
Who are you? Who are you? Who are you?

What would you consider the most remarkable feature of the Fulcrum ?
The most remarkable feature of the Fulcrum is its helmet mounted sight and the R-73 (NATO code AA-11 Archer) infra red homing missile. This combination is a very deadly system in a close in fight. No western jet has this combination of quick high off-boresight designation and highly manoeuvrable dog fight missile. This gives us an edge versus every other fighter since our opponents have to deal with missiles coming at them, whilst they have to manoeuvre to bring their gun to bear

How does the Mig-29 perform compared to other fighters ?
The results of those mock fights clearly show that an AMRAAM equipped western fighter is far superior to the MiG in the BVR arena if tactically and operationally correctly employed. It is Our job to exploit and punish any mistakes that Our partners make in those training fights and help them not make the same mistakes in real combat. We show them that the MiG-29 is very dangerous at the merge, if they screw up their search plan, their targeting or sorting and we get close to them. To make live difficult for Our training partners, we have developed some sophisticated decoy and resolution tactics, against which our partners have to be very disciplined in their radarplans, if they don't want to lose some of their flight members. In the dog fight arena, BFM so to speak, the MiG-29 is on a par with any western fighter. The F-16C block 30, 50 and 52 can develop a slightly better turnrate than the MiG, but only when flying without pods and few weapons. In normal combat configuration the MiG is better. Many times American F-16 squadrons had the impression that they can outmanoeuvre us, forgetting that they flew a completely clean jet while ours were carrying a centreline tank and the engines were tuned down. During one detachement did we also take down our tanks and flew with the engines in the normal power regime. That was a very bloody time for the F-16s during the BFM sorties. But not only does the MiG manoeuvre very well it also has a big trump up it's sleeve in form of the helmet sight and the AA-11 Archer. This combination gives us firing opportunities in close in situations where other pilots never think of shooting anything. This scares many NATO pilots. But all this manoeuvring and weapon potential in dog fights doesn't help much if you don't see your opponent. And here do the western fighters have the clear advantage with their superior avionics that help the pilot find his target

Pardonez-moi did I hear you right? Can Soviet planes kick American ass when they get in close? Let's see if the Mig-29 or SU-27 Flanker can

SU-27: The Flanker is equipped with a single internal 30 mm gun carrying over 200 rounds of ammunition, which given its rate of fire is a reasonable figure if Soviet statements concerning the accuracy of the infrared/laser fire control are correct.

Mig29: The IRST/LR and radar are slaved such that the inactive sensor tracks the boresight of the active sensor, this allows radar silent IR stalking of targets under VFR conditions with automatic switchover to radar if infrared lock is lost eg by cloud cover. Soviet engineers claim the IRST/LR is extremely accurate providing more precise gun solutions than the radar in visual engagements. What is not stated is that this arrangement can defeat jamming of the fire control radar, by switching to IRST/LR to complete the engagement

Sure I'm sure? Let's see

The helmet-mounted target designator, used on the MiG-29 fighter to rapidly lock on air targets visually detected through the cockpit glazing, makes it possible within 1 s to deliver a target designation command to the infra-red search/track sensor or directly to a missile homing head with an accuracy sufficient to effectively use the weapon.

In terms of close air combat, the MiG-29 has some superiority over the USAF F-15C fighter, outperforms the USAF F-16 fighter by 15%, and French Mirage-2000 by 40%.
In terms of long-range air combat, the MiG-29 outperforms the Mirage-2000 fighter by approximately 20% and enjoys overwhelming superiority over the USAF F-16A aircraft (without medium-range missiles).

And there's Tom Cruise sitting there in Top Gun with his targetting computer going beep-beep-beep and the Mig-29 instead locks him up in - what was that, 1 second? Nice.

If you want scalability, might I suggest Circle. Runs on Linux and Windows, open source, no hidden gotchas, and really scalable.

--
Paul Harrison

For all you people who thought the plot of Sneakers (1992) was just silly and impossible... well, not so silly now is it?

perl has the concept of barewords. They are just like a normal variable but they don't have the $ in front. A STDIO is a common one that appears in many programs. With the right module, you can redefine perl to look like just about anything for example Perligata which changes the parsing rules to a latin form where the subject of the verb is defined by its suffix.

A few days ago /. had a story about many odd languages. While some (most?) of them seem quite useless, if writing a program in them opens your mind, it can make you a better coder. For example brainf*ck is a pure turing language with 8 instructions -- risc taken all the way down. Hardware desgined to run brainf*ck could be clocked at the several hundred Ghz and could be piplined like mad.

Q3 uses a format called RoQ, which I guess was developed in-house at id. Some weekend project for Carmack, I suppose. "Hmm. Next item on my to-do list, 'develop video codec from scratch'."

IPv6 will never take off because it still has many of the drawbacks of IPv4

- requires configuration
- requires an allocated address

Neither of these are really necessary. For an example of how to do away with them, see the second last page of this pdf.

--
Paul Harrison

I can't see those pics of his case, but I have made
(and still making) an custom case of my own.
Not totally made from scratch, The backplane was
scavenged from another case, because I wasn't
sure if I could make it to the proper measurements
but some pics are up, mind you, I have done a bit
more work on it since I put up those images. New
ones will go up when I get around to it.
Tekgno's Case

I think that Clément Ader was the first to make a flight (only a few meters yes), at least if some people are not agree with this word, it is certainly the first take off !
Nevertheless, everyone is agree that the Eole and the Wrights brothers'plane have nothing to compare : http://www.ctie.monash.edu.au/hargrave/ader.html (scroll down to see the pictures).

Real, massively scalable P2P, here and now!... and its open source :-)

Damion Conway was a professor, who took a sabbatical to do his perl thing this year.

Damion Conway was a professor, who took a sabbatical to do his perl thing this year.

I've also kicked around the idea of a programming language based on Latin based on Chris' thoughts on using inflection in a programming language, but it's not one of those things that seems to come together easily...

From the README:

NOMEN

Lingua::Romana::Perligata -- Perl in Latin

DESCRIPTIO

The Lingua::Romana::Perligata makes it possible to write Perl programs in Latin. (If you have to ask "Why?", then the answer probably won't make any sense to you either.)

The linguistic principles behind Perligata are described in:

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/ Perligata.html

The module is `use'd at the start of the program, and installs a filter which allows the rest of the program to be written in (modified) Latin, as described in the accompanying documentation.

(...)

I've also kicked around the idea of a programming language based on Latin based on Chris' thoughts on using inflection in a programming language, but it's not one of those things that seems to come together easily...

From the README:

NOMEN

Lingua::Romana::Perligata -- Perl in Latin

DESCRIPTIO

The Lingua::Romana::Perligata makes it possible to write Perl programs in Latin. (If you have to ask "Why?", then the answer probably won't make any sense to you either.)

The linguistic principles behind Perligata are described in:

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/ Perligata.html

The module is `use'd at the start of the program, and installs a filter which allows the rest of the program to be written in (modified) Latin, as described in the accompanying documentation.

(...)

There already is a Latin variant of Perl, in which the meaning of reserved words is given by the ending, thus allowing you to vary your word order :-)

The module is Lingua::Romana::Perligata.

See...Perl could get worse.

De duobus malis, minus est semper eligendum
Of two evils, the lesser must always be chosen

a good overview of different p2p architectures is over here at openp2p.com.

One system the author fails to mention is Circle, which uses a decentralized hashtable system., more about it at his system is in a pdf slideshow he'll be giving at linux.conf.au

My favorite quote from his page: "FastTrack (aka Kazza/Morpheus) is kind of like trying to optimize a bublesort", which leads me to believe he has a regular quicksort at hand. (actually he does claim O(n log n) seachs, so its about right)

Also to note are Chord and GISP which seem to use simular schemes, where Chord is pure acadamia (someones masters thesis). GISP is an implementation of something from JXTA, suns p2p framework.

a good overview of different p2p architectures is over here at openp2p.com.

One system the author fails to mention is Circle, which uses a decentralized hashtable system., more about it at his system is in a pdf slideshow he'll be giving at linux.conf.au

My favorite quote from his page: "FastTrack (aka Kazza/Morpheus) is kind of like trying to optimize a bublesort", which leads me to believe he has a regular quicksort at hand. (actually he does claim O(n log n) seachs, so its about right)

Also to note are Chord and GISP which seem to use simular schemes, where Chord is pure acadamia (someones masters thesis). GISP is an implementation of something from JXTA, suns p2p framework.

What I find most interesting are the kinds of projects that have sprung up in Gnutella's wake. Many of these started out as attempts to improve Gnutella, and have since moved on (the Gnutella Next Generation working group never really materialized into anything)

We had napster and one extreme, gnutella at the other, and in the middle a re a number of partially centralized systems with super peers like Fast Track, such as:
Open FT
JXTA Search
GNet
NEShare

and many others...

Then there are the alternative projects that use an entirely different mechanism. For example, social discovery as implemented in:
NeuroGrid
ALPINE

Or distributed keyword hash indexes like:
Chord
Circle
GISP
JXTA Distributed Indexing

And many others as well.

The coming year(s) will see a lot of maturity in these areas, and searching large peer networks will become ever more efficient over time. Gnutella showed us the possibilities of a fully decentralized model, and refinements of its underlying architecture can produce vastly better solutions.

2002 will be an interesting year for peer networking applications...

I stand corrected; thanks, yerricde. It is indeed possible to mess with your Perl during the compilation process. You can define your own little language. But if I'm reading the man page you referenced correctly, this module includes its own custom parser and translator. At the end of the parsing-translating process it spits out a string of text.

That is a psychotic, albeit powerful, approach to extending a language's syntax. And it is not a macro system. Wouldn't you agree?

One of the funnier myths perceived to be true is that 'Microsoft's technical support is the best in the industry and is superior to that offered by the Linux community.'

I think I have an idea why that is thought to be true . . .

Here at the Damian Conway Memorial University, Computer Science is just one part of the bigger IT Faculty. While we have a focus on Linux (Red Hat 6 is what's installed) we're severely among minority. Pretty much the rest of the University uses Windows, because it's good enough for their needs.

So why the perception I quoted above, which runs rife among CS students who "have to" use Linux? Because their perception of tech support comes from Helpdesk, which I've seen manned by second-year students, whom I teach and thus know can't debug their way out of a paper bag (and certainly can't solve someone else's computer problem). (*) Anything more difficult than "I need to change my password" and you're largely on your own.

Naturally, Helpdesk is far more interested in supporting Windows than they are in supporting Linux, because that's what their customers (most of the University) want. Thus almost everything about the Univeristy's computer networks is optimized for Windows. It's no surprise that the computers work better running Windows than they do running Linux.

As a result, students get more problems running Linux than they do with Windows. And they go to Helpdesk with the problem, get no appreciable help, and come away with the notion that their problem is that they're running Linux, and if they just switched to Windows everything would work fine and dandy.

This attitude is rampant among my students (not the ones here who read slashdot, but many of the others, who complain to me about being made to use Linux). It's not surprising that they take their Helpdesk experience away with them and extrapolate it to Linux support in general.

I realize that there's a circular argument there. But logic isn't a prerequisite for justifying a University department's choices.

(*) Yes, not all of Helpdesk is like that. I happen to know that some very talented people support Linux on a measly University salary here. But they're far removed from Helpdesk, so students don't see them.

English, is by its nature, extremely poorly suited for an exercise such as this. A large portion of the meaning of an English statement is derived from context and the order of words in a statement, while the meaning of a C, Pascal or Fortran expression is almost purely a matter of syntax. I believe that it would be extremely difficult to write a compiler or interpreter that could process nature-looking English into computer code.

OTOH, there is already a "natural-language" programming language available for a project such as this ... Perl! Don't laugh yet.

Damian Conway's paper, Lingua::Romana::Perligata -- Perl for the XXI-imum Century demonstrates that "natural language" programming IS possible in a quasi-grammatical way, while also pointing out WHY English really just doesn't fit the needs of a programming language. The "Latin" code that results from using Lingua::Romana::Perligata is "sort of" grammatically correct, quite readable, although somewhat "forced", to those with a grounding in the Classics (which many judges have), and lacking a LOT of the special characters that make most programming languages look mysterious to non-techies.

You'll have to read the paper to see the effect of using the module ... the lameness filter stopped me from including any of Conway's examples.

I don't claim to be enough of a Perl hacker to even begin trying to convert one of the perl versions of DeCSS to a Perligata script, but I feel I know enough linguistics to consider an attempt to create an English-based "natural language programming language" that would come CLOSE to being grammatically correct and comprehensible to non-programmers to be quixotic.

mpg123 -s http://icecast.msfc.nasa.gov:8000/forward-scat | synaesthesia pipe 22050

You mean, like Lingua::Romana::Perligata, an interface that lets you write Perl programs in Latin?

W2k Magazine has an article about the resemblence.
They are very similar. But why it was called "New Technology" is not written there, although its a major design difference.
The VMS has a monolithic layered kernel, whereas NT has (or better had) a microkernel, almost like Mach. Take a look at your favourite OS book or here.

The name of the contributor of the original article? Damian Whitworth. That's right. DAMIAN. *Now* I've got the heebie-jeebies...

So fscking what? My name is Damian Yerrick. Lingua::Romana::Perligata was invented by another Damian. Don't let bad dreams from watching the "Cartman's birthday" episode of South Park influence how you perceive a name, and don't let a name affect how you perceive a person.

I just love these funny languages. Nobody will ever use them, but after reading this, you don't feel like programming any more. The C language looks so crude, so cryptic, so non-human friendly after that...
There's a similar project for Perl called Lingua::Romana::Perligata . This is an awesome module written by Damian Conway, that let you program in Latin. Totally crazy.

The fact that the Turing Test is probably still the only widely recognized test for artificial intelligence says more about our pathetic understanding of the nature of intelligence than the validity and usefulness of the test.

I agree wholeheartedly. But not only the test is crude and primitive, so are the programs designed to beat it! Has it never occured to anyone writing such programs that maybe we cannot simply regard language ability in isolation?

Language is merely a tool humans use in order to communicate. Motivation and meaning; i.e., why I say or write something, and what it refers to, go beyond language, but language cannot exist without them. An interesting read for anyone interested in the matter might be Meaning and speech acts.

If Perl or Python were controlled by a single entity (as is the case with C#, and even to some extent Java.

Um wrong. Java is controlled totally by sun. You can't make any extensions to Java (look at the trouble microsoft got into).

C# on the other hand is totally open. Just look at the ECMA submissions:

Monash University
Microsoft

Better luck bashing Microsoft next time.

There is a huge difference between checking whether a port is open and actively trying to exploit a security hole. You are trying to blur the distinction between the two.

"Multiple dispatch is one of the most powerful and elegant features of Dylan."

It's been implemented in Perl.

It might be implemented as a Python module, without sullying the language itself.

Multiple Dispatch as Dispatch on Tuples

Many popular object-oriented programming languages, such as C++, Smalltalk-80, Java, and Eiffel, do not support multiple dispatch. Yet without multiple dispatch, programmers find it difficult to express binary methods and design patterns such as the ``visitor'' pattern. We describe a new, simple, and orthogonal way to add multimethods to single-dispatch object-oriented languages, without affecting existing code. The new mechanism also clarifies many differences between single and multiple dispatch.

Go to town!

-Don

I have a mirror taken from another mirror. Someone please mod up the article that announced the original mirror.
--

I think that a "graphical pipe" would be one of the greatest things that could happen to GUIs. I imagine arrows that I can draw between various widgets. E.g. xterm might provide, say, 8 slots. I connect slot 2 to my xmms playlist widget. Now I can type something like this:

ls *.mp3 | gpipe2

to add some files to my playlist. Then again, xmms might provide a slot that I can connect to synaesthesia, sox, etc.

As someone else pointed out, you can download the Japanese IME for Windows 98 from Microsoft. It only allows you to input japanese text on web pages though, so it probably is of little use to you. (Information on the Windows Global IME
I've had the best luck using Windows 2000 - when you install the system, you can install a Japanese IME. If you then set your regional settings for Japan, it is also really easy to copy/cut/paste kanji, ICQ works right, etc. etc. It is pretty nice.
Of course, if you don't want to bother with getting IME input to work right at the OS level, you can get multibyte support for ntemacs up and running, which does have its own Japanese (and Chinese, Korean, Thai, etc.) IME.
If you are interested in reading Japanese web pages, then you will probably love www.rikai.com. The site uses a server side script to load in edict readings for each kanji which pops up on mouseover.
That's about all I have to say about that.
BTW, if you are interested, I'm currently translating the Great Teacher Onidzuka manga using a Win2k system with Japanese input (along with a Java client / server thing)

For western Win32 versions before win2k, i think you are limited to things like this hack from MS for IE5, which allows CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) input in IE5, Word2000, and Outlook, or to using apps which handle the language on their own.

For X (should apply to most versions/most *nix variants), you need fonts (included with XFree86, possibly in one of the optional font packages), an Input Method (IM) like kinput2 and a kana-kanji conversion server like Canna or WNN. You probably also will need localized variants of many apps, kterm for xterm, jvim for vi/vim, etc. Recent Emacs should work, look for 'International Character Set Support' in the emacs info pages for details. Mozilla handles display fairly well, though i haven't messed with setting it up for input yet. XJDIC (or a variant) rounds out the list of things to get, providing a nice Japanese-English and English-Japanese dictionary.

Kon2 handles using CJK from the linux console (also possibly BSD and others), haven't used it in a while though, so don't really remember how well it worked.

For western Win32 versions before win2k, i think you are limited to things like this hack from MS for IE5, which allows CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) input in IE5, Word2000, and Outlook, or to using apps which handle the language on their own.

For X (should apply to most versions/most *nix variants), you need fonts (included with XFree86, possibly in one of the optional font packages), an Input Method (IM) like kinput2 and a kana-kanji conversion server like Canna or WNN. You probably also will need localized variants of many apps, kterm for xterm, jvim for vi/vim, etc. Recent Emacs should work, look for 'International Character Set Support' in the emacs info pages for details. Mozilla handles display fairly well, though i haven't messed with setting it up for input yet. XJDIC (or a variant) rounds out the list of things to get, providing a nice Japanese-English and English-Japanese dictionary.

Kon2 handles using CJK from the linux console (also possibly BSD and others), haven't used it in a while though, so don't really remember how well it worked.

For western Win32 versions before win2k, i think you are limited to things like this hack from MS for IE5, which allows CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) input in IE5, Word2000, and Outlook, or to using apps which handle the language on their own.

For X (should apply to most versions/most *nix variants), you need fonts (included with XFree86, possibly in one of the optional font packages), an Input Method (IM) like kinput2 and a kana-kanji conversion server like Canna or WNN. You probably also will need localized variants of many apps, kterm for xterm, jvim for vi/vim, etc. Recent Emacs should work, look for 'International Character Set Support' in the emacs info pages for details. Mozilla handles display fairly well, though i haven't messed with setting it up for input yet. XJDIC (or a variant) rounds out the list of things to get, providing a nice Japanese-English and English-Japanese dictionary.

Kon2 handles using CJK from the linux console (also possibly BSD and others), haven't used it in a while though, so don't really remember how well it worked.

I've heard of Zephyr, though never used it myself. The multiple-namespaces concept seemed pretty doovy.

An IM system I 'grew up' with (it has been around
since 1992 or so, possibly earlier) is
goofey. UNIX command-line client (I think it was developed on ULTRIX originally), central server, unique user names, stored messages. No peer-to-peer file transfer capabilities, but it does have a large fortune database and a Jargon File lookup utility...

It was mostly used by people at or from Monash University, though there are users across the Net.

I've always felt that the solution to all the language wars would be if people learned different programming languages preferrably from different programming paradigms. A Perl bigot wouldn't go on and on about how truly OO Perl was if he knew about SmallTalk and neither would a C bigot rhapsodize about C's text-handling abilities if given Perl.

I'm all for people learning different kinds of languages, but not (just) to prevent them from saying silly things. Silly people will say silly things no matter how well-informed they are. (OK, so the subject of their silliness may move around a bit.) And it's certainly not to educate them about why language X, which they used productively for some time, is inferior to language Y in some regard (although that sounds a bit more like your argument). People should try different things because new experiences teach them about new problems and new ways to solve problems old and new. Even if they continue to use their favorite tools rather than the ones that a first principles analysis might suggest.

So, along the lines of this particular thread, it's a bit amusing to note that one of the best books on object-oriented programming I have ever seen is Damian Conway's Object-oriented Perl book. And the reason for this is not because it's a perl book or even a book on OO, but because it's a book that shows you a mind-bogglingly large number of ways to look at problems in ways that can be usefully construed as being "object-oriented". And, from that, you get a much better idea about what objects really are. And it's fun. It turns out that the author, a CS professor who does research and teaching on OO things, found perl to be useful for this book due to its chameleonality. Yes, a person who knows more about Smalltalk and C++ and Self and Python and the rest of it than do most of us found that a good language to talk about all of these things was Perl, although it may well have been not the "best" language to use for any of them.

________________________________

NOMEN

Lingua::Romana::Perligata -- Perl in Latin

DESCRIPTIO

The Lingua::Romana::Perligata module makes it makes it possible to write Perl programs in Latin. (If you have to ask "Why?", then the answer probably won't make any sense to you either.)

The linguistic principles behind Perligata are described in: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/ Perligata.html

The module is used at the start of the program, and installs a filter which allows the rest of the program to be written in (modified) Latin, as described in the accompanying documentation.

EXEMPLUM

#! /usr/bin/perl -w
use Lingua::Romana::Perligata;

adnota Illud Cribrum Eratothenis

maximum tum val inquementum tum biguttam tum stadium egresso scribe.
vestibulo perlegementum da meo maximo.
maximum tum novumversum egresso scribe.
da II tum maximum conscribementa meis listis.
dum damentum nexto listis decapitamentum fac sic
lista sic hoc tum nextum recidementum cis vannementa da listis.
next tum biguttam tum stadium tum nextum tum novumversum
scribe egresso.

SCRIPTOR

Damian Conway (damian@conway.org)

IUS TRANSCRIBENDI

Copyright (c) 2000, Damian Conway. All Rights Reserved.

This module is free software. It may be used, redistributed and/or modified under the terms of the Perl Artistic License (see http://www.perl.com/perl/misc/Artistic.html)

MUTATIONES IN EDITIO 0.01

Initial release.

ADITUS

Lingua::Romana::Perligata has been uploaded to the CPAN and is also available from:

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/CPAN/Lingua- Romana-Perligata.tar.gz _____________________

There you go. Isn't that a much saner, much more legible language? :-)

________________________________

NOMEN

Lingua::Romana::Perligata -- Perl in Latin

DESCRIPTIO

The Lingua::Romana::Perligata module makes it makes it possible to write Perl programs in Latin. (If you have to ask "Why?", then the answer probably won't make any sense to you either.)

The linguistic principles behind Perligata are described in: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/ Perligata.html

The module is used at the start of the program, and installs a filter which allows the rest of the program to be written in (modified) Latin, as described in the accompanying documentation.

EXEMPLUM

#! /usr/bin/perl -w
use Lingua::Romana::Perligata;

adnota Illud Cribrum Eratothenis

maximum tum val inquementum tum biguttam tum stadium egresso scribe.
vestibulo perlegementum da meo maximo.
maximum tum novumversum egresso scribe.
da II tum maximum conscribementa meis listis.
dum damentum nexto listis decapitamentum fac sic
lista sic hoc tum nextum recidementum cis vannementa da listis.
next tum biguttam tum stadium tum nextum tum novumversum
scribe egresso.

SCRIPTOR

Damian Conway (damian@conway.org)

IUS TRANSCRIBENDI

Copyright (c) 2000, Damian Conway. All Rights Reserved.

This module is free software. It may be used, redistributed and/or modified under the terms of the Perl Artistic License (see http://www.perl.com/perl/misc/Artistic.html)

MUTATIONES IN EDITIO 0.01

Initial release.

ADITUS

Lingua::Romana::Perligata has been uploaded to the CPAN and is also available from:

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/CPAN/Lingua- Romana-Perligata.tar.gz _____________________

There you go. Isn't that a much saner, much more legible language? :-)

________________________________

NOMEN

Lingua::Romana::Perligata -- Perl in Latin

DESCRIPTIO

The Lingua::Romana::Perligata module makes it makes it possible to write Perl programs in Latin. (If you have to ask "Why?", then the answer probably won't make any sense to you either.)

The linguistic principles behind Perligata are described in: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/ Perligata.html

The module is used at the start of the program, and installs a filter which allows the rest of the program to be written in (modified) Latin, as described in the accompanying documentation.

EXEMPLUM

#! /usr/bin/perl -w
use Lingua::Romana::Perligata;

adnota Illud Cribrum Eratothenis

maximum tum val inquementum tum biguttam tum stadium egresso scribe.
vestibulo perlegementum da meo maximo.
maximum tum novumversum egresso scribe.
da II tum maximum conscribementa meis listis.
dum damentum nexto listis decapitamentum fac sic
lista sic hoc tum nextum recidementum cis vannementa da listis.
next tum biguttam tum stadium tum nextum tum novumversum
scribe egresso.

SCRIPTOR

Damian Conway (damian@conway.org)

IUS TRANSCRIBENDI

Copyright (c) 2000, Damian Conway. All Rights Reserved.

This module is free software. It may be used, redistributed and/or modified under the terms of the Perl Artistic License (see http://www.perl.com/perl/misc/Artistic.html)

MUTATIONES IN EDITIO 0.01

Initial release.

ADITUS

Lingua::Romana::Perligata has been uploaded to the CPAN and is also available from:

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/CPAN/Lingua- Romana-Perligata.tar.gz _____________________

There you go. Isn't that a much saner, much more legible language? :-)

________________________________

NOMEN

Lingua::Romana::Perligata -- Perl in Latin

DESCRIPTIO

The Lingua::Romana::Perligata module makes it makes it possible to write Perl programs in Latin. (If you have to ask "Why?", then the answer probably won't make any sense to you either.)

The linguistic principles behind Perligata are described in: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/ Perligata.html

The module is used at the start of the program, and installs a filter which allows the rest of the program to be written in (modified) Latin, as described in the accompanying documentation.

EXEMPLUM

#! /usr/bin/perl -w
use Lingua::Romana::Perligata;

adnota Illud Cribrum Eratothenis

maximum tum val inquementum tum biguttam tum stadium egresso scribe.
vestibulo perlegementum da meo maximo.
maximum tum novumversum egresso scribe.
da II tum maximum conscribementa meis listis.
dum damentum nexto listis decapitamentum fac sic
lista sic hoc tum nextum recidementum cis vannementa da listis.
next tum biguttam tum stadium tum nextum tum novumversum
scribe egresso.

SCRIPTOR

Damian Conway (damian@conway.org)

IUS TRANSCRIBENDI

Copyright (c) 2000, Damian Conway. All Rights Reserved.

This module is free software. It may be used, redistributed and/or modified under the terms of the Perl Artistic License (see http://www.perl.com/perl/misc/Artistic.html)

MUTATIONES IN EDITIO 0.01

Initial release.

ADITUS

Lingua::Romana::Perligata has been uploaded to the CPAN and is also available from:

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/CPAN/Lingua- Romana-Perligata.tar.gz _____________________

There you go. Isn't that a much saner, much more legible language? :-)

I have read and re-read ENM and the follow-up, Shadows of the Mind. I understand Penrose is what is known as a Platonist. My take is that the whole edifice he constructs is a smokescreen for the Platonist -belief- (almost an axiom) he holds, that somehow consciousness is an ideal that really is too cute to be merely the product of a machine (and of evolution). Hence construct a smokescreen to shore up said belief, garnish with big words, etc. You can read for and against reviews of his books all over the WWW: for example

Dodn't Penrose do something to do with tiling the plane?

check it out here

Abstract

This paper describes a Perl module -- Lingua::Romana::Perligata -- that makes it possible to write Perl programs in Latin. A plausible rationale for wanting to do such a thing is provided, along with a comprehensive overview of the syntax and semantics of Latinized Perl. The paper also explains the special source filtering and parsing techniques required to efficiently interpret a programming language in which the syntax is (largely) non-positional.

It has been done. You can now write perl in Latin.

And this we owe that to the great Damian Conway. This is the Perl God who teaches CS in Australia, and who defied the skeptics (uh, that would be me) by soliciting and getting enough donors next year to hack perl rather than slay undergraduates. (Whoops! I meant "teach undergraduates"; guess I'm just projecting or something...) The note I got from Professor Conway thanking me for my contribution to his rescue^H^H^H^H^H^Hresearch leave would have been suitable for framing, except that it was sent via email.

It has been done. You can now write perl in Latin.

The nanobacteria subject is fascinating but it's another example of a story that is sometimes associated with extra-terrestrial life - probably to gain publicity.

Hmmmm... interesting take, but I don't follow the logic. Robert Folk ruined his reputation with the original "nannobacteria" proposals, and has only recently been supported somewhat by McKay et al. with the "martian fossils", Kajander and his collegues with nanobacteria as a cause for kidney stones, Miller-Hjelle and her collegues with nanobacteria as a cause for polycystic kidney disease, Uwi ns and her findings on nanobes growing on Triassic and Jurassic sandstones collected from petroleum exploration boreholes offshore Western Australia. The American Society for Microbiology has paid serious attention to the controversy, as might be expected. All in all, it's only been recently that "nanobacteria" findings have provided any good publicity at all; mostly, it's been the ruin of the discoverer (in fact, Folk has been described as "coming out of the closet" with his first papers, some 20 years ago -- strong prejudice exists!).

But now things are changing: there are more findings, and more support for the concept. This might even be a scientific paradigm change... and this was my earlier point, that "common sense" arguments are inherently flawed, because the universe is stranger than we imagine.

When was the tectonic plate theory accepted? They must have been interesting times. Certainly my father thinks it's a lot of nonsense...

Alfre d Wegener proposed the theory in 1912, but it didn't receive much support (in the U.S., at least) until post-WWII. My college geology text has a chapter written in '65, which concludes "Although the subject is now a respectable one in scientific circles of the Northern Hemisphere, the question is still far from settled." (Physical Geology, Leet and Judson, 3rd Edition; Prentice-Hall, NJ, 1965)

Wilson, a Canadian geologist, brought everything together around '65 with his model of seafloor spreading, which happened to explain the Pacific seafloor magnetic anomalies found in '61 by Raff and Mason (these are reversed-magnetic-polarity stripes, which are embedded in the newly-created seafloor by the Earth's magnetic field, which periodically reverses -- creating alternating stripes which aren't explainable except by tectonic plate theory). This all but cinched it, but it took years for general acceptance to happen -- in '67, my geology prof wasn't yet convinced, and spent a lecture period arguing against it (the students, OTOH, tended to see the light right away, based on the evidence presented). In '68, Pinchon worked out the plate positions, and by the mid-70's, plate tectonic theory was accepted as correct by all but a few lingering die-hards. (It's interesting that similar remnant-field reversals have been discovered on Mars, isn't it?)

Yes, they were interesting times. Overthrow of "established scientific fact" is always interesting, yet it happens often... that's how science progresses, after all. Only some of the time do the revolutionaries get burned at the stake; the rest of the time, they are merely ridiculed in print and reviled in person.

I guess it is the weakest point. When weighing up evidence like this I guess we rely on our own experiences and yours are different from mine. Having worked in string theory related stuff for a few years I know what it is like to have a sceptical audience. But I generally tend to make guarded statements like "Assuming string theory is a good model then...". I would never make a statement like the following from the NASA press release:

METEORITE YIELDS EVIDENCE OF PRIMITIVE LIFE ON EARLY MARS
A NASA research team of scientists at the Johnson Space Center and at Stanford University has found evidence that strongly suggests primitive life may have existed on Mars more than 3.6 billion years ago. (My italics)

I guess that's the difference between your opinion and theirs: they figured they had good evidence, and you figure they don't. Dave McKay (of NASA) still sticks pretty much by the findings, and Kathie Thomas-Keprta (Lockheed Martin) very strongly supports them; time will tell who is right. My point is that science never advances without people going out on a limb with their conviction that a new interpretation is correct, rather than the conventional wisdom. This is not the equivalent of perpetrating a hoax! -- even if they are subsequently proven wrong.

Given the doubt over the interpretation of 'nanobacteria' fossils it seems to me that the most reasonable interpretation of part of this 'evidence' is that it is a demonstration that such 'fossils' can be produced by inorganic processes in a sterile environment but of course you don't get big bucks for a finding like this.

On the contrary: some people are getting funding to disprove the "martian fossil" findings. The ASM link quotes some of them. With any discovery, confirmation or refutation of the findings is critical to its acceptance, and the controversy is the process through which the findings on all sides are integrated by the scientific community; Mari on Anderson's lecture is a good summary of this particular controversy, and concludes (correctly, in my opinion) "The main drawback to this story is the media focus on such sensational news. Media hype may increase public awareness of science, but the problem is that the complexities get lost in the glare of the spotlights." Her last couple of sections are well worth reading.

I think the jury's still out, and I think you're prematurely making up your mind. But, hey, it's your mind -- do with it what you will.

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