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So few words, so much ignorance...

String -> '(' String ')' | ...

try doing that with a regex

Try doing that with an NFA, dumbass. An NFA cannot detect matching parentheses. A pushdown automaton can. This should be pretty obvious since your example is a grammar production of the context-free grammar style. PDAs are related to CFGs like NFAs/DFAs are related to regexes (though the relationship isn't as clean in the former case).

Regexes aren't NFAs but regexes can be used to describe any regular language (and only regular languages) and NFAs can recognize any regular language (and only regular languages). They are "equivalent" in terms of theoretical computational power (the traditional definitions state that regexes generate languages and NFAs recognize them). Also, DFAs can recognize all and only the regular languages.

However, I still don't understand why the grandparent poster said:

I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code.

If "linear code" means non-branching code, then I guess that that's true. What I don't get is how he/she is restricted to linear code. Regular code is turing-complete and therefore much more powerful than regular expressions. Regular expressions are more compact and map better to certain problems, but they are provably less "flexible".

As a side note, I think that Larry Wall suggested calling them "patterns" instead of "regexes" because they are more powerful than regular expressions (though I'm sure the old terminology will still be used). This is fully described here.

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thank you very much).

The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.

Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. To put it bluntly, Perl scripts will still look less beautiful than our friend Mr Goatse. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD ^H^H^H^H Perl is dying. Larry is buggering it up the ass without lubricants, just like Shoeboy is doing to Larry's daughter.

It's always surprised me when I see intelligent people write "PERL" when they refer to Larry Wall's programming language.

From the Perl FAQ, General Questions About Perl:

What's the difference between "perl" and "Perl"?
One bit. Oh, you weren't talking ASCII? :-) Larry now uses ``Perl'' to signify the language proper and ``perl'' the implementation of it, i.e. the current interpreter. Hence Tom's quip that ``Nothing but perl can parse Perl.'' You may or may not choose to follow this usage. For example, parallelism means ``awk and perl'' and ``Python and Perl'' look ok, while ``awk and Perl'' and ``Python and perl'' do not. But never write ``PERL'', because perl isn't really an acronym, aprocryphal folklore and post-facto expansions notwithstanding.

You can read the entire FAQ if you like.

While the O'Reilly Net Article is interesting, the Perl Design Patterns page is worth a read too as it provides *far* (read 860Kb of text) more than the two page document at O'Reilly.

Better just read the O'Reilly net article about perl design patterns here

To be fair, I'm young as well (I'm 20). Minus a year for college, I've been working as a programmer at my company since the summer of 2000 (with a lot of recreational programming before that).

For the last year, I've been working as a "Software Analyst". I get bug reports that our setup folks can't solve and I solve them. This often requires a lot of code hunting. We've got everything from extremely junky Fortran 77 (no whitespace, no variable names over 6 characters -- and Fortran at that) for our legacy app, and some CGI programs written in spaghetti-code C (with a good mix of HTML templating and javascript thrown in)! Even better, this all runs on HP-UX. Needless to say, I get plenty of practice fielding bad code and weird issues. =)

Our development team is comprised of 12 developers total, and only in the last 4 years has it grown past a four man team. The company is now around 50 heads total, and a QA department is in sight (the Software Analysts will eventually be QA).

Anyway, our newer products are all based on open source tools. PostgreSQL, Apache, Linux, Perl, Mason, ORBit, etc. The source code, mailing lists, IRC, etc. and the open attitude have made things a breeze, not to mention these tools have saved us a very large sum of money in licensing costs.

This is quite possibly the exception to the rule, I have no problem admitting that. Somehow, though, from what I hear of other companies, this isn't all too uncommon.

Cheers

Why do people insist on using the term virii? The last time I checked, the only plural to virus is viruses. I wonder how he would spell the plural of jesus or venus?

"Censii" cannot possibly be correct. A good article at perl.com explains why. The declension you must be thinking is -us -> -i. There is no declension that is -us -> -ii.

there would be much closer to 30% of a share of virii

You mean 'viruses'. Look here

I have just now written a version of readline() that:

(1) conforms to the standard GNU readline() API
(2) in fact actually uses the standard GNU readline() function
(3) does *NOT* poison your code with the GPL

Because we now have the existence proof that there somewhere exists a
non-infective version of the library API ,this means that readline()
is now safe for anyone to link against without any viral contamination.

Enjoy!

Of even greater interest is that my small proof-of-concept example is
not specific to readline(). All GPL'd library code can be effectively
purged of the virus.

Freedline can be obtained Here

Rejoice!

I have just now written a version of readline() that:

(1) conforms to the standard GNU readline() API
(2) in fact actually uses the standard GNU readline() function
(3) does *NOT* poison your code with the GPL

Because we now have the existence proof that there somewhere exists a
non-infective version of the library API ,this means that readline()
is now safe for anyone to link against without any viral contamination.

Enjoy!

Of even greater interest is that my small proof-of-concept example is
not specific to readline(). All GPL'd library code can be effectively
purged of the virus.

Freedline can be obtained Here

Rejoice!

Perl isn't GPL; it's under the Artistic License.

And before you ask, no, Apache isn't GPL either...

Says who?

Though www.ebcvg.com may get the technical details right, I consider What's the Plural of `Virus'? more authorative.

At least I spell it that way in my Virus Writing HOWTO.

The word you're looking for is "viruses".

Why don't you take a leaf out of your own book and stop making yourself look like an absolute idiot?

http://www.perl.com/language/misc/virus.html

You appear to have misspelt "warnings" as "Safe". There's no point using Safe unless you're doing stuff that needs it.

These days, you should be using 'our' rather than 'use vars'. Plus, you say to avoid globals, but you 'use vars'?

You should learn Perl rather than rely on English.

You should not use Java like variable and function names, except where it matches with perlstyle.

As with most languages, the best way to understand code written in the language is to learn the language. Make use of its features and its strengths. Get involved in the community. Read books, read articles and more articles. Contribute to code repositories. etc.

The plural of virus is neither viri nor virii, nor even vira nor virora. It is quite simply viruses, irrespective of context. Here's why.

-- Steven N. Severinghaus

Like Java and Lisp -- and unlike Perl -- Python has exception handling.

Perl has exception handling with die/eval. Here is an article about it.

I would chalk this one up to personal preference - don't think I've ever noticed the absence of named parameters in perl (my experience is about equal parts perl and java, but mostly perl lately), but I guess it's important to some people.

VIRUSES, GOD DAMNIT.

What you're looking for is perl.

"Viruses" is the plural of "virus." "Virii" is a h4x0r term that does not follow any English or Latin declension.

As for evolutionary advantage, there must be some since this virus exists, but there are also tiny viruses. I think it's better to consider ecological niches. More DNA allows for more functions, but it is also burdensome. It takes more energy to reproduce that DNA, and there are more chances that for maladaptive mistakes. Different organisms end up with different adaptations, including genome size.

Woah. perl.com is running an article about this exact same problem. This article describes how to use SOAP::Lite to talk to a .NET Server. Well, mostly. I just glanced through it, since I don't do any XML work :)

Learn more.

Oh really? How do you think your Perl code gets executed? By little gnomes?

In any case, I was merely comparing the speed of the interpreters anyway.

2. I really oughta learn Python. I can write straightforward stuff in Perl, but I don't suss the arcana. Just reading the Perl Apocalypse issue mentioned in the recent /. article and I realized I don't know squat about Perl. Maybe Python will give me another crack at language uber-mastery.

3. If you have a local retailer, you may still be in business, unless that retailer gets his stuff from his distibutor by air...

But a higher level scripting language should be as close to english (or another human language) as possible.

I certainly don't look forward to COBOLScript.

Human languages are an ambigious mess. Computers only want unambigious constructs. Having programmed in COBOL and and a few so called "fourth generation languages", let me say that writing in something that is close to English is really irritating. It's never quire English enough to allow me to express myself. You end up having to learn a specialized language that isn't really quite English. If I'm going to learn a specialized language, I might as well learn something that is easy to type and easy to scan visually.

Perl is a big, complex language, yes. But like real languages, you can learn it with very simple steps. You can get complex, productive things done with a just a quick introduction. If you want more power, it will take more learning, but it's available. Perl 6 aims to accomplish this evem better tham Perl 5.

Yes, the example given in the article are a bit convoluted. The entire point of the article is to explore all of Perl 6, not just the commonly used bits. In fact, one of main goals of Perl 6 is to make the common case and the introductory case less confusing than in Perl 5. Really. And everything revealed so far has supported this, it's just that Larry doesn't make it too clear.

Take for example expressing that a function takes three arguments in Perl 5. The best you can do is:

sub my_function($$$) {
....my($arg1, $arg2, $arg3) = @_;
}

(The "...." represents spaces because Slashdot's code filter is crap.)

In this example, Perl will not check that callers do the right thing. In Perl 6, you get this:

sub my_fuction($arg1, $arg2, $arg3) {
}

A clear improvement, and Perl will actually verify that callers do the right thing when calling you, usually catching an error at compile time!

In general Lary's Apocalypses have been a bit obscure. He's focusing on the big picture and the little details. Damien's Exegesis's is generally alot easier to read for people less interested in deep thought and more interested in concrete details. Wait a week or two for Exegesis 6 and give that a read. I think you'll find that the common case is slightly simplier and more obvious than in Perl 5, while the system also allows for more complex expressions that weren't well supported in the Perl 5.

"why don't you just write a script that tells amazon it is browser X, then pull down the price?"

If anyone wants to try, you'll need WWW::Mechanize. Sourceforge will probably host it for you, and there'll be plenty of interest.

[dhcp1i174:~] pcassidy% perl -v

This is perl, v5.6.0 built for darwin

Copyright 1987-2000, Larry Wall
[blah snipped]

There was recently a discussion on the perl6 list (laugh but all your bases will belong to parrot real soon now) about what keys could be used to represent some new functions people might like to add if there were some reasonable one to three character symbols that could be made out of them. As long as they're going to change the concatenation operator anything goes right?

All which I would not have known if it were not for the wonderful summaries of the discussions on perl.com.

I'm thinking it might be useful if you could buy extra usb keyboardlets - like numeric keypads - with keys that would make your programming more powerful (otherwise you have to spell things out in english phrases). No danger of APL-ness since the system will be able to translate between the idioms effortlessly. Doubtlessly emacs scripts and something wierd for vi would be possible.

But something tells me the future of computing is going to have more to do with being able to get a heck of a lot done with a lot less typing, either because of a plethora of great snap together libraries, semi-intelligent self-programming programs, or just plain telling the thing what you mean in english (or interlingua) and having a system that will just do it. It is not critical that we add more cryptic things to our programming prose, but I'd certainly welcome more powerful idioms and innovative input solutions that don't penalize their adopters. (I certainly will check out the Kinesis keyboard, earlier poster.. thanks.)

FYI:

this article: unicode operators, supercommas, french quotation marks.. shades of APL

.. and squiggle operators

The plural of "virus" is "viruses". Aside from that, Latin plurals end in "i", not "ii". For example, "magus" becomes "magi", not "magii". The notion of Latin plurals ending in "ii" probably comes from such words as "radii" (plural of "radius"). The reason "radii" has two "i"s is because "radi-us-" becomes "radi-i-".

"In antiquity the word virus had not yet acquired, of course, its current scientific meaning; rather it denoted something like toxicity, venom, a poisonous, deleterious, or unpleasant agent or principle, or poison in the abstract or general sense. [...] Nouns denoting entities that are countable pluralize (book, books); nouns denoting noncountable entities do not (except under special circumstances) pluralize (air, mood, valor). The term virus in antiquity appears to have belonged to the latter category, hence the nonexistence of plural forms." (taken from here) Also, "viri" is Latin for "men", so that's not it either. The word is "viruses".

I know i'm coming off like a jerk here, and normally i don't post just to criticise someone's spelling, but "virii" is a plague. It's because of mistakes like this that we have two words for "disc", and the bizarre spelling of "Thames" (i.e. people trying to make English correspond to its Latin/Greek roots). Anyway, i just thought i'd point that out. That word really bothers me (which i guess is somewhat sad).

Sources:
- http://dictionary.reference.com/help/faq/language/ v/virus.html
- http://www.perl.com/language/misc/virus.html

PS: Otherwise an interesting post, heh.

The plural of "virus" is "viruses". Aside from that, Latin plurals end in "i", not "ii". For example, "magus" becomes "magi", not "magii". The notion of Latin plurals ending in "ii" probably comes from such words as "radii" (plural of "radius"). The reason "radii" has two "i"s is because "radi-us-" becomes "radi-i-".

"In antiquity the word virus had not yet acquired, of course, its current scientific meaning; rather it denoted something like toxicity, venom, a poisonous, deleterious, or unpleasant agent or principle, or poison in the abstract or general sense. [...] Nouns denoting entities that are countable pluralize (book, books); nouns denoting noncountable entities do not (except under special circumstances) pluralize (air, mood, valor). The term virus in antiquity appears to have belonged to the latter category, hence the nonexistence of plural forms." (taken from here) Also, "viri" is Latin for "men", so that's not it either. The word is "viruses".

I know i'm coming off like a jerk here, and normally i don't post just to criticise someone's spelling, but "virii" is a plague. It's because of mistakes like this that we have two words for "disc", and the bizarre spelling of "Thames" (i.e. people trying to make English correspond to its Latin/Greek roots). Anyway, i just thought i'd point that out. That word really bothers me (which i guess is somewhat sad).

Sources:
- http://dictionary.reference.com/help/faq/language/ v/virus.html
- http://www.perl.com/language/misc/virus.html

PS: Otherwise an interesting post, heh.

FTP is marginally better supported by interactive text clients, which means that geeks who haven't gotten any new software in the past decade will find it more convenient.

Really, it doesn't make sense to call HTTP wimpy when it's what's used to distribute The linux kernel, perl,
glibc, and so forth.

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thank you very much).

The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.

Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this . Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. To put it bluntly, Perl scripts will still look less beautiful than our friend Mr Goatse. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but BSD^W Perl is dying. Larry is buggering it up the ass without lubricants, just like Shoeboy is doing to Larry's daughter.

The plural of "virus" isn't "virii." There is no such word. The plural of "virus" is "viruses."

Here's a good explanation from cdknow.com, quoted here in its entirety because the people who most need to read this won't click on a link.

The correct English plural of virus is viruses. Please consult any good dictionary before making up words.

For the purists, in Latin, there is a rarely-used plural form:

virus, viri (neuter)

(Forms: almost always restricted to nominative and accusative singular; generally singular in Lucretius, ablative singular in Lucretius)

The point of this is that even in Latin the form "viri" is rarely used. The singular form is used in most every instance. (This is from the Oxford Latin Dictionary.)

So, when considering the Latin: "virii" is incorrect and "viri" was almost never used.

Despite the fact there was little use for the plural form, there is another reason why "viri" was rarely used. The most common Latin word for "man" is "vir" with "viri" being its plural in the form used as the subject of a sentence. Thus, since "men" as the subject of a sentence would be used far more often than "venoms" (virus means venom) the "viri" word was most commonly seen as the plural of "man."

Bottom line: Don't try to make up words using a false Latin plural form. Since the word virus in its English form is now used then the English plural (viruses) should be used.

More plural-of-virus resources:

perl.com, the canonical and exhaustive source
The alt.comp.virus FAQ
Jonathan de Boyne Pollard's Frequently Given Answer
Merriam-Webster's "Word for the Wise," January 20, 2000.

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thank you very much).

The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.

Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. To put it bluntly, Perl scripts will still look less beautiful than our friend Mr Goatse. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but BSD^W Perl is dying. Larry is buggering it up the ass without lubricants, just like Shoeboy is doing to Larry's daughter.

Are you being disingenuous or was the misunderstanding of the parent post unintentional? The poster probably intended the word "proprietary" to mean something it does not usually mean. As I understand it, (s)he means to say that the OSs should, in binary or source form, not be available to other people than the manufacturers of the cars, by purchase or otherwise. This would certainly prevent viruses from spreading as easily, although it might be a bad idea for other reasons.

PS. It's viruses , plain and simple. There's no such word as "virii."

including the entire Collections API (how anyone can write anything worthwhile without that and not tear their hair out I'll never know...)

Thank you for not saying "virii".

Parrot isn't the VM for Perl6. Parrot is a "new language from the creators of Perl and Python." Duh. There's even an O'Reilly book on it.

Seriously though. They barely mentioned Parrot and Parrot is coming along very nicely I think. Even with a Java to Parrot Bytecode program, Brainfuck, Jako, Befunge-93, cola, forth, miniperl, ook, (non-final) perl6 interpreters/compilers, as well as python, ruby and scheme interpreters/compilers coming. Of course it's not finished, so not all of the languages are either, but hey, it's getting there, and damn fast. There's even a Parrot Assembly Lange.

Parrot is definately not Perl6. It's much more. It's like java, but open source, and independent of Languages. They're hoping to have it compile on as many platforms as perl does now, unlike Java which is Windows, Mac, Linux, and some PDAs, end of story.

So everyone check it out and throw some patches in too! Of course, the only support I've given so far is moral support. :/

Viree?! What crack-monkey planet are you from?

What's the plural of "virus"?

The sequal to C should've been P.

If you don't believe that P stands for "Plus Plus", then how about swallowing up both of the next letters in .pl?

BTW, the OED only gives 'viruses' for the plural of 'virus'. this article has far too much information on the subject. :-)

Going totally off topic, it was funny finding that link on perl.com, knowing Larry Wall's liguistic background. I'll save my opinion on perl for another forum.

I liked this the first time... when it was called Cygwin.

For those whou don't know, Cygwin is a UNIX environment, developed by Red Hat, for Windows. It consists of two parts: (1) A DLL (cygwin1.dll) which acts as a UNIX emulation layer providing substantial UNIX API functionality. (2) A collection of tools, ported from UNIX, which provide UNIX/Linux look and feel. The Cygwin DLL works with all non-beta, non "release candidate", ix86 versions of Windows since Windows 95, with the exception of Windows CE.

Other thing which I'd suggest for anyone who is unfortunate enough to work under Microsoft Windows is Perl Power Tools: The Unix Reconstruction Project. The goal is quite simply to reimplement the classic Unix command set in pure Perl, and to have as much fun as we can doing so. See the command list.

(I post as AC, because I'm not a Karma whore or anything like that.)

I liked this the first time... when it was called Cygwin.

For those whou don't know, Cygwin is a UNIX environment, developed by Red Hat, for Windows. It consists of two parts: (1) A DLL (cygwin1.dll) which acts as a UNIX emulation layer providing substantial UNIX API functionality. (2) A collection of tools, ported from UNIX, which provide UNIX/Linux look and feel. The Cygwin DLL works with all non-beta, non "release candidate", ix86 versions of Windows since Windows 95, with the exception of Windows CE.

Other thing which I'd suggest for anyone who is unfortunate enough to work under Microsoft Windows is Perl Power Tools: The Unix Reconstruction Project. The goal is quite simply to reimplement the classic Unix command set in pure Perl, and to have as much fun as we can doing so. See the command list.

(I post as AC, because I'm not a Karma whore or anything like that.)

Or this, which in addition to being very portable also will revolutionise your maintainability. (Java is also better than C/C++ in this regard, but IMO it doesn't go far enough in moving away from the pitfalls of C/C++.) C-based langauges (C, objective C, C++, C#, ++C, C^2, C ad nauseam) are fundamentally outmoded, because the langauge tools place burdens on the developers that in any modern development environment ought to be handled automatically. So you end up with buffer overruns, dereferencing pointers that no longer point anywhere sensible, and other programming errors that have plagued us since the sixties and are totally avoidable if you just use a modern, high-level language. (Note to Python fans: I used Perl as my example because it happens to be a language I know and use; I did not say anything bad about Python, only about C and its ilk, which you don't like either.)

Not on slashdot, it isn't.

If anyone cares to continue this sort of boring debate, read here for some debate on both sides of the fence.

Since we want to be correct, the plural of virus is, in fact, virus. Therefore, one would say "The problem on your computer is that there are 2 computer virus on it." To which one would reply, "You idiot sound like brain-my-damage!"

So it is your choice. The plual is in fact virus, the dictionary english plural being viruses, or the slashdot plural being virii.

I stick with a different plural noun for computer virus than living virus, because they are different enough to warrant it, IMHO.

I truly HTH with this debate on how to say the plural form of virus. And, as long as I post to slashdot, I will use the preferred spelling of the maintainers of slashdot.

Thank you.

Of course the examples are biased; look at the website. It looks more like a press-release or an advertisement than a community site. It's more in the vein of this, this, and this than it resembles this, this, or this. Water is clearly being developed & marketed from "dazzle the PHB with buzzwords" angle. The big difference is that Clear Methods doesn't really have the size, reputation, or money to stuff something like this down everyone's throats. It's an even harder sell when you have tojustify the cost in comparison to the competition, which is free.