I said cars, not "passenger vehicles". Trucks are not cars, and it's the increase in people using trucks (yes, SUVs are trucks, but I'd let minivans slide as cars) in place of cars which has led to the decrease in overall mileage. Both trucks and cars do better now than back then, but there's a higher percentage of trucks on the road now, pulling the overall average down despite their improvements within their class.
There's a rant somewhere about the staggering number of people who think that they need a truck, failing totally to realize that 4wd does no good in the hands of an inexperienced driver on ice when all four tires are slipping anyway. I'll try to contain thet rant, though, in the hopes that those idiots will be around next time I move, and that I can convince them to use their truck as intended at least once...:)
It was rewritten approximately 1 million times, so the goal of actually making something useful was never met. Since it sounds like it's getting close to useful, I guess it's about time to start another ground-up rewrite. My theory is that the developers hate writing documentation so much, that they create themselves more work just so they'll never have time to document.:) "We need more eye candy! Screw the docs!"
If you just need a hundred CPUs for an hour, couldn't you use one CPU for 100 hours? I mean, that's only a little over 4 days, or ten days of running while you sleep, or about two weeks of running while you're at work.
So, that time machine you built in the 80's worked, and dropped you off in modern 2005? Computers are faster now, and cars get better mileage. Also, many people have Internet access, and PVRs are commonplace.:)
Warning: semi-organized rambling when I should be working ahead...
Unfortunately, most of the big religions are full of people who interpret stories in ways that can be used to keep the "peasants" down. Basically, the people practicing the religions aren't getting the message of love 'n tolerance. They're getting the message that you're "either with us or against us". So, anyone non-christian is against them. Anyone suffering hard times is being punished for some earlier bad deed. Etc, on and on down the self-rightous path.
Much like most things, Americans have a tendency to only hear the part they want to hear, and ignore the rest. Lots of us miss the part about not judging our neighbor, instead feeling compelled to "damn them to hell" when they disagree. Many miss the part about God accepting everyone, choosing to consider any other religion as valid - even though they're effectively the same. It's like missing the forest for the trees.
It's kinda sad, but really, it's a country that presently seems to mostly exist through pure ignorance. Only 50% vote for a president, 25% vote for the "other" positions (we have a state senate? What?), maybe 5% know that there are parties other than Democrat/Republican, and logical arguments are often squashed through fear (think about the children! The terrorists are coming!). Organized religion, and it's use of fear and ignorance to govern, well that fits right in. The ideas behind religion, and the ideas behind America, those are generally good. Good luck finding someone who remembers that they weren't always corrupt systems, though.
I have an endoscope in my garage. It cost under $100, and is useful for looking at pistons through the spark plug holes (which is much easier than yanking cylinder heads). I guess it's probably also useful for seeing what's in someone's butt, ears, or stomach. I wonder if I could figure out a way to hook a it up to a computer by duct-taping a web cam to the back, and then get an article in some online newspaper...
Why aren't you running some antifreeze or other poisonous fluid to reduce water's suface tension? There's a good reason that cars all run antifreeze - and it's not that most areas in the US get below freezing at some point. Straight water has a high heat capacity, but doesn't absorb heat as well as a water/antifreeze (or water/other similar chemical) mixture...
"Irregardless"? "Not illegal"? Broken Mac? Man, you're all about the clumsy dialog through the use of double negatives, aren't you?:) Not to mention that the story has all sorts of "I made this up a few minutes ago" feeling to it.
Agreed. Being a dork is not overruled by the observation that there's someone even dorkier somewhere. Refering to the singers as "a Klingon and his Vulcan wife" rather than "some huge dork dressed up as a character from a TV series, and an equally dorky woman dressed up as some other species from the same TV series" pretty well guarantees a level of dorkiness that surpasses the point at which magnitude matters. A huge dork is a huge dork is a huge dork, and board game convention attendees - recently married or not - are bona fide huge dorks.:)
You're forgetting the vast array of lights, excess fans, water pumps, displays for everything, Genital Drive, etc. That stupid mod crap sucks some power, too...
By "nitro" do you mean he was running nitromethane? That seems rather impractical on the street. Perhaps you meant nitrous oxide, which would be called a "nitrous" kit, or possibly a "NO2" kit (maybe even "nos" if you're a dumbass who watched fast 'n furious too many times - but you don't sound like that kind of dumbass, since you didn't mention your 10 second 1/4 mile street-driven Honda).
Yes, I was being pedandic about the FPS. Though, I can't see the difference between film and broadcast, I'm clearly not be as sensitive to it as others.:) One could make the argument that a 1% error is somewhat minor as well, though an error of "two million, three hundred thousand cycles per second" sounds rather significant. Two million errors per second would be a lot of errors.
Furthermore, I'll point out the irony in posting
Personal attacks are never a good way to show that you know what you're talking about. All it does is tell people you're insecure.
after posting
Seriously before you whip out some "faraday cage" science just to sound like you know what you're talking about, you should really think about what you're saying.
The thing you're pissed at is that you don't work for ASUS, you work for some other "chip manufacturer" and you're obviously biased on the subject.
My [low-key] personal comment was qualified by an "if", as in "if you don't want things becoming personal, don't make them personal" or "if you want to lessen the sting of admitting error, turn to dissecting the form the discussion takes rather than the subject matter at hand".:) None the less, I should not have stooped to the level of questioning your education (or accusing you of eating microwave burritos). It's hard to stay on the high ground alone, though.;)
Given past experience with Asus, I'd put forth that they probably *would* do something that would be stable, say, 95% of the time. I hate taking the easy way out and blaming Windows (not really), but Asus knows that their users will probably be running Win32, and that any errors caused by this will be difficult to trace down to hardware. The errors'll probabaly be attributed to the software being run, rather than the BIOS intentionally moving things just slightly out of spec. I can just see some jackass marketing person arguing with the engineer about getting ahead in benchmarks rather than doing things that the engineer knows are "right". The discussion would probably involve something like "we already ave ads out saying that we're the fastest board with this chipset!" Not that I have any respect for people in marketing, of course.
Regarding the other review, I wonder if Asus had some "special" boards that they send out for their higher-profile reviewers? I know that kind of thing used to be pretty common. Heck, it probably still is common. They'd know that the reviewer wouldn't do much if any long-term stability testing, favoring instead just some quickie benchmarks... Either way, I've used lots of Asus boards (most of my newer personal systems are Asus-based), but I'm gonna have to look more seriously at some of the other makers like Tyan, Gigabyte, and probably Intel for future systems. I've been dissapointed in their quality recently - especially this one with the nVidia chipset that can't keep a consistent system clock (it gains time - about 2 hours per day - and ntpd can't keep it right because it's a constant error).
If the chip is shipped 2MHz out of spec, than normal operating fluctuations will push it even farther out of spec. Besides, if they're "just a little" off there, what else are they "just a little outside" on? The bigger issue is that the company is doing things wrong, not disclosing those changes, and can't be trusted to do anything properly.
Rather than speculating wildly any further, though, we go to the article to see what's actually being overclocked. The P5A2 has the 200MHz FSB overclocked by ~2.3MHz. That means the processor (15x FSB) is overclocked by ~33MHz. The memory is running ~3.3MHz faster, The memory timing is also changed from 4-4-4-12 to 4-3-3-8. Those are not what's specified in the BIOS setup, it's what the board does when you tell it to do something different.
The datasheet for the i925x's memory controller is here. Quoting that data sheet, "The 82925X MCH supports a FSB frequency of 200MHz". Asus is running it at 202.3MHz. That's 1.15% out of spec, on the clock that runs the memory and graphics core, among other critical components that have precision requirements of less than one percent for communication reliability. Of course, since you know all about motherboard design, and read the article, you will undoubtedly respond that your use of 800MHz as an example was supposed to be just silly, and that everyone knows that these things run with a FSB of 200MHz. Clearly ignoring the errors introduced by multipliers was "intentional". Presumably the mention of storage temperature, which has absolutely nothing to do with a running system, was also meant in jest.
I'll leave looking up the memory timings and what most memory manufacturers spec as an exercise for someone who isn't heading for bed now. I'll submit that those timings aren't what someone concerned with stability would use, though.
As far as "The actual operating speed of your processor probably varies that much in any given day just through heat and other factors!", well, you're forgetting that pesky 15x multiplier in this particular 3GHz system. I don't think many people would believe the claim that their processor varies by more than 33MHz due to temperature fluctuations during any typical day.
Regarding the FPS example: do TV shows look smoother than movies? Movies run at 24, TV runs at 30. Video games typically reach up in to the 50+ range (or did back when I had nothing better to do than playing video games). I recall not seeing a difference when I changed video cards and gained 20FPS in quake, because I was already "seeing" over 30. A 2 FPS gain at an already good frame rate is for bragging rights, not playability - much like you can't feel a gain of less than about 15HP in a typical car.
BTW, the concept of a Faraday cage is generally taught about in introductory physics courses - even those that the non-engineers take. If you find concepts like that to be impressive, please get back to me after you've finished your first year of post-high school education, or after microwaving a frozen burrito. Whichever comes first.
And Asus doesn't make [significant] chips, they apply them (note the Intel, AMD, Via, and nVidia offerings from Asus, among others) - my employer (for whom I do not speak) is fine with that.
Yes, it [generally] does. Home Theater equipment and computer stuff available at Best Buy is marketed at the typical mass-market consumer. Most people don't care about high-end stuff, and those that do, don't shop at Best Buy for that high-end stuff. Ergo, Best Buy doesn't *carry* that stuff.
As a rule of thumb, look for things that commonly ship in rack-mount equipment.
Personally, I was kinda dissapointed to find that their cover of "Black Betty" sounds nothing like their other work... Eh, I bought the album anyway.:)
Wait, so on one hand, the overclocking doens't provide a measurable speed increase for games. But then somehow it *does* make a measurable difference in benchmarks. Man, that's +5 insightful.:(
Besides that little contradiction, there's the issue of temperature fluctuations in a typical household being discussed right before the concept of 60Hz hum in a server room. Server rooms are not temperatue controlled like Jim Bob's trailer home - they're generally pretty tightly regulated to always be below the point where temperature fluctuations make a difference. Take it fromsomeone who works in a jacket half the time.
The idea of 60Hz hum causing instability in a modern computer system is just silly. For some reading that might be useful, do a google search for "faraday cage", then try to draw a parallel between that concept and the big grounded metal box around a computer, and the smaller grounded metal box around the power supply. Then do some reading on power system design in the context of corporate server rooms, and maybe some reading on emissions from two and three phase wiring. The problem is dealt with.
The chips that are being overclocked are being run outside of their specified range. Period. That negates any guarantee of stability that the manufacturer makes. 2MHz or 20 MHz, it doesn't matter - it's out of spec and isn't guaranteed to work right. Sure, it "might" work alright "most" of the time, and it "might" have worked fine for Joe User with one machine running Windows - which crashes randomly anyway.
But the thing is, Joe User doesn't spend millinons of dollars in testing to see how fast their stuff can run. My employer - a major chip manufacturer - does, as do the other major chip manufacturers. I guarantee you, if our chips were 100% reliable every time at a few MHz faster, we'd market them that way. Being faster than "the other guy" is rather important to us.
BTW, ASUS stuff *is* cheap hardware. There's a whole world outside of "stuff you can purchase at Best Buy".
I dunno - I think it's a good idea to explicitly dereference pointers, rather than relying on the language to do what I mean. In a simple example, If $pie is a reference to a scalar, and I do $tmp = $pie, then how does the language automatically tell if I want to assign the scalar referenced or the refeference itself to $tmp? The programmer has to know a little aobut what's being written. In the cases where you the programmer don't always know if you have a reference or a native type, there's the ref() method and an if/switch statement.
The only thing that really sucks is the dereferencing and the curly brackets
That's why I use the arrow operator when possible. I think it makes the code more leigible. If $pie is a reference to an array full of hashrefs, then $pie->[0]->{key} just looks much cleaner than ${${$pie}[0]}{key}. So long as you don't use pointers to pointers (which is generally a good thing in a language like perl, where you aren't supposed to ever worry about how memory's allocated), at worst, you just have to use one set of outer braces to typecast something, which seems perfectly reasonable to someone who uses parens for disambiguity anyway.
Note that OP didn't says that he'd written any other code since then, either. It was probably some guy on IRC arguing about wherther the animal on the cover of Learning Perl should be a llama or a single-humped camel. He sure wasn't someone who knew perl and had a use for it - 10 years ago the alternative was some combination of awk, sed, and a shell scripting language. He didn't switch to that, because he said he had no problems.:)
So, did you switch because you never learned to use perl effectively, or because you're such a crappy programmer that you couldn't remember to use a good coding style unless the compiler barfed when you made a mistake?:) Seriously, perl can be complicated, as there's a lot to learn...
Yes, I'm quite familiar with Python. I prefer perl. My code looks good because I know how to program, not because the language forces me to indent. Changing the name of a hash to a dictionary, an array to a list, and making a distinction between read only arrays and read-write arrays does not make a language better. Replacing semicolons with newlines doesn't make a language better. Removing the ability to coerce types when appropriate doesn't make things better (if I want to treat a number as a string, I shouldn't have to make a big deal about it in a scripting language).
Granted, I have less experience with python thatn with perl, and that drives lots of my preference. But the only thing I've found better about python is the method documentation scheme. That's marginally neat. Then again, I comment my code in perl, and it works fine.
Ignoring my rather facetious comment at the beginning, can you actually give me an example of something python does better than perl, other than really large programs (which I don't think python is all that great for, either) or converting otherwise sane people into frothing zealots?;)
PHP is more limited in scope, and many of the perl modules would be totally useless - so that should offset some of the difference. Sure, you can run PHP on the command line - if you're too slow to learn perl or python. Then again, many of the modules on CPAN are totally useless to perl programmers, too...:)
Anyway, Pear has done most everything that I'd expect a module repository to do for me in my PHP use. With recent releases, pear is actually semi-useful, too! Tihs is unlike some previous releases, where pear wasn't installed by default, or was impossible to set up...
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I said cars, not "passenger vehicles". Trucks are not cars, and it's the increase in people using trucks (yes, SUVs are trucks, but I'd let minivans slide as cars) in place of cars which has led to the decrease in overall mileage. Both trucks and cars do better now than back then, but there's a higher percentage of trucks on the road now, pulling the overall average down despite their improvements within their class.
:)
There's a rant somewhere about the staggering number of people who think that they need a truck, failing totally to realize that 4wd does no good in the hands of an inexperienced driver on ice when all four tires are slipping anyway. I'll try to contain thet rant, though, in the hopes that those idiots will be around next time I move, and that I can convince them to use their truck as intended at least once...
It was rewritten approximately 1 million times, so the goal of actually making something useful was never met. Since it sounds like it's getting close to useful, I guess it's about time to start another ground-up rewrite. My theory is that the developers hate writing documentation so much, that they create themselves more work just so they'll never have time to document. :) "We need more eye candy! Screw the docs!"
If you just need a hundred CPUs for an hour, couldn't you use one CPU for 100 hours? I mean, that's only a little over 4 days, or ten days of running while you sleep, or about two weeks of running while you're at work.
So, that time machine you built in the 80's worked, and dropped you off in modern 2005? Computers are faster now, and cars get better mileage. Also, many people have Internet access, and PVRs are commonplace. :)
Yes, I love my PVR too.
Warning: semi-organized rambling when I should be working ahead...
Unfortunately, most of the big religions are full of people who interpret stories in ways that can be used to keep the "peasants" down. Basically, the people practicing the religions aren't getting the message of love 'n tolerance. They're getting the message that you're "either with us or against us". So, anyone non-christian is against them. Anyone suffering hard times is being punished for some earlier bad deed. Etc, on and on down the self-rightous path.
Much like most things, Americans have a tendency to only hear the part they want to hear, and ignore the rest. Lots of us miss the part about not judging our neighbor, instead feeling compelled to "damn them to hell" when they disagree. Many miss the part about God accepting everyone, choosing to consider any other religion as valid - even though they're effectively the same. It's like missing the forest for the trees.
It's kinda sad, but really, it's a country that presently seems to mostly exist through pure ignorance. Only 50% vote for a president, 25% vote for the "other" positions (we have a state senate? What?), maybe 5% know that there are parties other than Democrat/Republican, and logical arguments are often squashed through fear (think about the children! The terrorists are coming!). Organized religion, and it's use of fear and ignorance to govern, well that fits right in. The ideas behind religion, and the ideas behind America, those are generally good. Good luck finding someone who remembers that they weren't always corrupt systems, though.
I have an endoscope in my garage. It cost under $100, and is useful for looking at pistons through the spark plug holes (which is much easier than yanking cylinder heads). I guess it's probably also useful for seeing what's in someone's butt, ears, or stomach. I wonder if I could figure out a way to hook a it up to a computer by duct-taping a web cam to the back, and then get an article in some online newspaper...
Why aren't you running some antifreeze or other poisonous fluid to reduce water's suface tension? There's a good reason that cars all run antifreeze - and it's not that most areas in the US get below freezing at some point. Straight water has a high heat capacity, but doesn't absorb heat as well as a water/antifreeze (or water/other similar chemical) mixture...
"Irregardless"? "Not illegal"? Broken Mac? Man, you're all about the clumsy dialog through the use of double negatives, aren't you? :) Not to mention that the story has all sorts of "I made this up a few minutes ago" feeling to it.
Hah! Where would all of these articles come from if everyone backed up data that was valuable?
Agreed. Being a dork is not overruled by the observation that there's someone even dorkier somewhere. Refering to the singers as "a Klingon and his Vulcan wife" rather than "some huge dork dressed up as a character from a TV series, and an equally dorky woman dressed up as some other species from the same TV series" pretty well guarantees a level of dorkiness that surpasses the point at which magnitude matters. A huge dork is a huge dork is a huge dork, and board game convention attendees - recently married or not - are bona fide huge dorks. :)
You're forgetting the vast array of lights, excess fans, water pumps, displays for everything, Genital Drive, etc. That stupid mod crap sucks some power, too...
By "nitro" do you mean he was running nitromethane? That seems rather impractical on the street. Perhaps you meant nitrous oxide, which would be called a "nitrous" kit, or possibly a "NO2" kit (maybe even "nos" if you're a dumbass who watched fast 'n furious too many times - but you don't sound like that kind of dumbass, since you didn't mention your 10 second 1/4 mile street-driven Honda).
You get closer to 25 out of a flat head Ford-based V8 motorcyce...
Furthermore, I'll point out the irony in posting after posting
My [low-key] personal comment was qualified by an "if", as in "if you don't want things becoming personal, don't make them personal" or "if you want to lessen the sting of admitting error, turn to dissecting the form the discussion takes rather than the subject matter at hand".
Given past experience with Asus, I'd put forth that they probably *would* do something that would be stable, say, 95% of the time. I hate taking the easy way out and blaming Windows (not really), but Asus knows that their users will probably be running Win32, and that any errors caused by this will be difficult to trace down to hardware. The errors'll probabaly be attributed to the software being run, rather than the BIOS intentionally moving things just slightly out of spec. I can just see some jackass marketing person arguing with the engineer about getting ahead in benchmarks rather than doing things that the engineer knows are "right". The discussion would probably involve something like "we already ave ads out saying that we're the fastest board with this chipset!" Not that I have any respect for people in marketing, of course.
Regarding the other review, I wonder if Asus had some "special" boards that they send out for their higher-profile reviewers? I know that kind of thing used to be pretty common. Heck, it probably still is common. They'd know that the reviewer wouldn't do much if any long-term stability testing, favoring instead just some quickie benchmarks... Either way, I've used lots of Asus boards (most of my newer personal systems are Asus-based), but I'm gonna have to look more seriously at some of the other makers like Tyan, Gigabyte, and probably Intel for future systems. I've been dissapointed in their quality recently - especially this one with the nVidia chipset that can't keep a consistent system clock (it gains time - about 2 hours per day - and ntpd can't keep it right because it's a constant error).
If the chip is shipped 2MHz out of spec, than normal operating fluctuations will push it even farther out of spec. Besides, if they're "just a little" off there, what else are they "just a little outside" on? The bigger issue is that the company is doing things wrong, not disclosing those changes, and can't be trusted to do anything properly.
Rather than speculating wildly any further, though, we go to the article to see what's actually being overclocked. The P5A2 has the 200MHz FSB overclocked by ~2.3MHz. That means the processor (15x FSB) is overclocked by ~33MHz. The memory is running ~3.3MHz faster, The memory timing is also changed from 4-4-4-12 to 4-3-3-8. Those are not what's specified in the BIOS setup, it's what the board does when you tell it to do something different.
The datasheet for the i925x's memory controller is here. Quoting that data sheet, "The 82925X MCH supports a FSB frequency of 200MHz". Asus is running it at 202.3MHz. That's 1.15% out of spec, on the clock that runs the memory and graphics core, among other critical components that have precision requirements of less than one percent for communication reliability. Of course, since you know all about motherboard design, and read the article, you will undoubtedly respond that your use of 800MHz as an example was supposed to be just silly, and that everyone knows that these things run with a FSB of 200MHz. Clearly ignoring the errors introduced by multipliers was "intentional". Presumably the mention of storage temperature, which has absolutely nothing to do with a running system, was also meant in jest.
I'll leave looking up the memory timings and what most memory manufacturers spec as an exercise for someone who isn't heading for bed now. I'll submit that those timings aren't what someone concerned with stability would use, though.
As far as "The actual operating speed of your processor probably varies that much in any given day just through heat and other factors!", well, you're forgetting that pesky 15x multiplier in this particular 3GHz system. I don't think many people would believe the claim that their processor varies by more than 33MHz due to temperature fluctuations during any typical day.
Regarding the FPS example: do TV shows look smoother than movies? Movies run at 24, TV runs at 30. Video games typically reach up in to the 50+ range (or did back when I had nothing better to do than playing video games). I recall not seeing a difference when I changed video cards and gained 20FPS in quake, because I was already "seeing" over 30. A 2 FPS gain at an already good frame rate is for bragging rights, not playability - much like you can't feel a gain of less than about 15HP in a typical car.
BTW, the concept of a Faraday cage is generally taught about in introductory physics courses - even those that the non-engineers take. If you find concepts like that to be impressive, please get back to me after you've finished your first year of post-high school education, or after microwaving a frozen burrito. Whichever comes first.
And Asus doesn't make [significant] chips, they apply them (note the Intel, AMD, Via, and nVidia offerings from Asus, among others) - my employer (for whom I do not speak) is fine with that.
Yes, it [generally] does. Home Theater equipment and computer stuff available at Best Buy is marketed at the typical mass-market consumer. Most people don't care about high-end stuff, and those that do, don't shop at Best Buy for that high-end stuff. Ergo, Best Buy doesn't *carry* that stuff.
As a rule of thumb, look for things that commonly ship in rack-mount equipment.
Personally, I was kinda dissapointed to find that their cover of "Black Betty" sounds nothing like their other work... Eh, I bought the album anyway. :)
Wait, so on one hand, the overclocking doens't provide a measurable speed increase for games. But then somehow it *does* make a measurable difference in benchmarks. Man, that's +5 insightful. :(
Besides that little contradiction, there's the issue of temperature fluctuations in a typical household being discussed right before the concept of 60Hz hum in a server room. Server rooms are not temperatue controlled like Jim Bob's trailer home - they're generally pretty tightly regulated to always be below the point where temperature fluctuations make a difference. Take it fromsomeone who works in a jacket half the time.
The idea of 60Hz hum causing instability in a modern computer system is just silly. For some reading that might be useful, do a google search for "faraday cage", then try to draw a parallel between that concept and the big grounded metal box around a computer, and the smaller grounded metal box around the power supply. Then do some reading on power system design in the context of corporate server rooms, and maybe some reading on emissions from two and three phase wiring. The problem is dealt with.
The chips that are being overclocked are being run outside of their specified range. Period. That negates any guarantee of stability that the manufacturer makes. 2MHz or 20 MHz, it doesn't matter - it's out of spec and isn't guaranteed to work right. Sure, it "might" work alright "most" of the time, and it "might" have worked fine for Joe User with one machine running Windows - which crashes randomly anyway.
But the thing is, Joe User doesn't spend millinons of dollars in testing to see how fast their stuff can run. My employer - a major chip manufacturer - does, as do the other major chip manufacturers. I guarantee you, if our chips were 100% reliable every time at a few MHz faster, we'd market them that way. Being faster than "the other guy" is rather important to us.
BTW, ASUS stuff *is* cheap hardware. There's a whole world outside of "stuff you can purchase at Best Buy".
I dunno - I think it's a good idea to explicitly dereference pointers, rather than relying on the language to do what I mean. In a simple example, If $pie is a reference to a scalar, and I do $tmp = $pie, then how does the language automatically tell if I want to assign the scalar referenced or the refeference itself to $tmp? The programmer has to know a little aobut what's being written. In the cases where you the programmer don't always know if you have a reference or a native type, there's the ref() method and an if/switch statement.
Yeah, what dotgain said. Specifically, MySQL will do that all by itself. :)
The only thing that really sucks is the dereferencing and the curly brackets
:)
That's why I use the arrow operator when possible. I think it makes the code more leigible. If $pie is a reference to an array full of hashrefs, then $pie->[0]->{key} just looks much cleaner than ${${$pie}[0]}{key}. So long as you don't use pointers to pointers (which is generally a good thing in a language like perl, where you aren't supposed to ever worry about how memory's allocated), at worst, you just have to use one set of outer braces to typecast something, which seems perfectly reasonable to someone who uses parens for disambiguity anyway.
Maybe that's my C background talking, though.
Note that OP didn't says that he'd written any other code since then, either. It was probably some guy on IRC arguing about wherther the animal on the cover of Learning Perl should be a llama or a single-humped camel. He sure wasn't someone who knew perl and had a use for it - 10 years ago the alternative was some combination of awk, sed, and a shell scripting language. He didn't switch to that, because he said he had no problems. :)
So, did you switch because you never learned to use perl effectively, or because you're such a crappy programmer that you couldn't remember to use a good coding style unless the compiler barfed when you made a mistake? :) Seriously, perl can be complicated, as there's a lot to learn...
;)
Yes, I'm quite familiar with Python. I prefer perl. My code looks good because I know how to program, not because the language forces me to indent. Changing the name of a hash to a dictionary, an array to a list, and making a distinction between read only arrays and read-write arrays does not make a language better. Replacing semicolons with newlines doesn't make a language better. Removing the ability to coerce types when appropriate doesn't make things better (if I want to treat a number as a string, I shouldn't have to make a big deal about it in a scripting language).
Granted, I have less experience with python thatn with perl, and that drives lots of my preference. But the only thing I've found better about python is the method documentation scheme. That's marginally neat. Then again, I comment my code in perl, and it works fine.
Ignoring my rather facetious comment at the beginning, can you actually give me an example of something python does better than perl, other than really large programs (which I don't think python is all that great for, either) or converting otherwise sane people into frothing zealots?
PHP is more limited in scope, and many of the perl modules would be totally useless - so that should offset some of the difference. Sure, you can run PHP on the command line - if you're too slow to learn perl or python. Then again, many of the modules on CPAN are totally useless to perl programmers, too... :)
Anyway, Pear has done most everything that I'd expect a module repository to do for me in my PHP use. With recent releases, pear is actually semi-useful, too! Tihs is unlike some previous releases, where pear wasn't installed by default, or was impossible to set up...
That's the one I probably would've messed up, too. :)