Periodic Table of the Operators

mAsterdam writes "At his code blog Mark Lentcner writes: "A while back, I saw Larry Wall give a short talk about the current design of Perl 6. At some point he put up a list of all the operators - well over a hundred of them! I had a sudden inspiration, but it took a few months to get around to drawing it..." You might want to take a look at this and think about which operators are yet to be discovered."

Comments

Undiscovered: the /. operator

[thomasdelbert]

The /. operator is the one that causes your system to grind to a halt.

- Thomas;

Re:Undiscovered: the /. operator

[Anonymous Coward]

So the equivalent of Unobtainium in periodic terms then.

Re:Oh my sweet Jesus...

[Roland Piquepaille]

That code is gonna be NASTY.

That code already is nasty. Ever looked at Perl scripts in the last few years?

I looked all over.

[Phidoux]

Where is the WTF operator?

Re:I looked all over.

[thomasdelbert]

Where is the WTF operator?

Here:

($p?(/.{70}\|$/):(/^\|/))||(&{$\[3]}<$/[0])?($p=!$ p):&{$\[$p]}||die("$d");

- Thomas;

Re:I looked all over.

[Temporal]

Man... someday someone is going to write an obfusicated perl version of "rm -rf *" and post it on slashdot, and everyone is going to fall for it.

Re:I looked all over.

[Anonymous Coward]

And do essentially no damage to their systems, because nobody runs as root, and everyone backs up their home directories on a regular, automated basis. Right?

Some of these have a halflife of a few nanoseconds

[JCCyC]

Code written with them becomes illegible after that.

Perl 6

[Anonymous Coward]

Perl 6 is going to be the best thing that ever happened to Python.

The Elements - Tom Lehrer

[Richard_L_James]

which operators are yet to be discovered.

The sentance reminded me of the Elements song.... No doubt someone has already started rewriting it for Perl !

Relevant excerpt from the INTERCAL language manual

[mcc]

TONSIL A (1)

The Official INTERCAL Character Set

Tabulated on page XX are all the characters used in INTERCAL, excepting
letters and digits, along with their names and interpretations. Also
included are several characters not used in INTERCAL, which are presented
for completeness and to allow for future expansion.

Character Name Use (if any)

. spot identify 16-bit variable
: two-spot identify 32-bit variable
, tail identify 16-bit array
; hybrid identify 32-bit array
# mesh identify constant
= half-mesh
' spark grouper
` backspark
! wow equivalent to spark-spot
? what unary exlusive OR (ASCII)
" rabbit-ears grouper
". rabbit equivalent to ears-spot
| spike
% double-oh-seven percentage qualifier
- worm used with angles
< angle used with worms
> right angle
( wax precedes line label
) wane follows line label
[ U turn
] U turn back
{ embrace
} bracelet
* splat flags invalid statements
& ampersand[5] unary logical AND
V V unary logical OR
(or book)
V- bookworm unary exclusive OR
(or universal qualifier)
$ big money unary exclusive OR (ASCII)
c| change binary mingle
~ sqiggle binary select
_ flat worm
overline indicates "times 1000"
+ intersection separates list items
/ slat
\ backslat
@ whirlpool
-' hookworm
^ shark
(or simply sharkfin)
#|[] blotch

Table 2 (top view). INTERCAL character set.

(1) Since all other reference manuals have Appendices, it was decided that
the INTERCAL manual should contain some other type of removable organ.

(2) This footnote intentionally unreferenced.

huh

[INeededALogin]

You might want to take a look at this and think about which operators are yet to be discovered

Yet to be discovered? means... Yet to be thought of... or yet to be documented. I am sure that I could find all of them by spending a few minutes looking through the code.

Sorry, I am just puzzled by what I am discovering.

Re:huh

[Anonymous Coward]

O, a sarcasm detector, thats a real useful operator.

Can't seem to find it...

[mcc]

We may have to wait for Perl 7 for that one. However, if you look under "Quasi Variables/Templars", you will find there is a "yadda, yadda, yadda" operator.

Python

[Anonymous Coward]

Then people will learn why Python is the best thing that ever happened to Ruby.

If you think this is scary...

[dexter riley]

...remember that unlike Perl operators, you can't overload the chemical elements. Imagine if He meant helium, unless some chemist changed its definition to mean Mercury, or Ununtrium, or anything else!

Mmm, a bottle of good old H2O! Glug glug. What's this small print? "The oxygen in this molecule has been overloaded to be radioactive, caustic, and-" ack!
Thud.

Re:If you think this is scary...

[pjt33]

Dexter used to drink a lot, but now he drinks no more:
For what he thought was H2O was H2SO4.

Re:the pdf file

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sick of having to copy and paste URLs into your address bar, and remove the spaces put there by Slashdot? With amazing new Hyper-Link technology, following URLs is a snap! All you have to do to create one is put this into your post:

<A HREF="your URL here">description of site</A>

Remember to include the http:// in the URL or browsers will think it's a subdirectory of slashdot.org!

Re:Oh my sweet Jesus...

[Mr. Piddle]

3.0 is identical to 3 or you get your money back

That's unfortunate. Hopefully, Perl programmers can unlearn this habit when they work with just about every other programming language ever. You just can't get around the fact that floating point numbers are constrained to a certain number of bits in RAM, unless special math libraries are used (and those libraries are not used often).

Re:Oh my sweet Jesus...

[hazem]

You obviously never studied mathematics, 3 and 2.999... are exactly the same.

I thought that was engineering:

pi =3
g=10m/s^2

or at least close enough for government work.

Re:Oh my sweet Jesus...

[Finuvir]

I was able to gauge my progress through school and college based on the number of significant digits in g. "g is 10", "g is 9.8m/s", "g is 9.81ms^-1", "screw g; you want G!", "G? This is General Relativity!"