Yes, adding and removing objects from a film photo can be done but it is more labor-intensive and harder to pull off than with a photo manipulation program.
Umm, no. You *ARE* aware that modern photo-printers, atleast those that normal mortals use generally work by *scanning* the film, and then *printing* the resulting file the same way they would print a file coming from a digital camera ?
The fact that one file comes from a CCD, and the other file from a scan of a negative makes no difference for the difficulty of manipulating the resulting file.
Will this mean some future US administration will be able to declare it's own citizens as enemy combatants or even the current one over the next few years.
You mean "illegal combatant" enemy combatants would be prisoners of war, those have rigths, such as the rigth to be released when the war is over.
In lawful countries there are ONLY two ways you can legally be imprisoned. Anyone in prison is either a criminal, in which case he needs to be charged with breaking some existing law, convicted, in a court, with a defence-attorney, with a possibility of appeal, with a definitive sentence etc. Or he is a prisoner of war, in which case he gets another set of rigths.
Only in the USA is there now a third category, a "illegal combatant". This is a person who is not charged with breaking any law, which is *not* given the rigths of a prisoner of war, who is not convicted for anything, by anyone. Which does not have the rigth to a defence. Which does not have a defnitive sentence, but instead is held however long it damnwell pleases whoever is in control (it's a secret who, exactly, that is, and by what criteria releases or continued imprisonment is decided)
In ligth of this, it's quite amusing really, to hear Bush talk on the telly about "unlawful states". Yeah rigth....
I know I'm supposed to "diversify" that crap. But I REALLY don't want to have to think about this shit. Someone should do it for me. Just as a lot of people aren't talented at taking care of their Windows boxes, I have no talent (or interest) in managing money.
There are people doing that. Thing is, $10K is a very small amount to have invested, small enough that it's simply not a paying proposition to be dealing with it for you. Paying anyone to do so would cost more than the investment pays off anyway.
The nice thing is that it doesn't matter. Really. Even when knowing just the very basics, you'll do exactly as well as the professionals. You need to choose your risk-level, high-risk acceptance, but high expected return, or low risk-acceptance, but also lower expected return. Other than that, you can invest randomly and do aswell as anyone.
It's even a running joke: The Economist has a stock-bet every year, they invite leading analysts to choose 5 stocks that they think will do well next year, and always include as an "analyst" the output of simply throwing a dart-arrow at a wall-poster with the stocknames on it. On average, throwing dart-arrows works aswell as asking the analysts.
This may seem strange, but the reason is that *IF* the analysts really (at this point!) collectively understand something about the "correct" pricing of a stock, *THEN* this understanding is already reflected in the stock-price.
Besides, it's a zero-sum game. Beating the index *REQUIRES* that someone else looses the same amount, relative to the index.
Sure it's common. It's said that every people get *exactly* the leaders they deserve, perhaps that is worth a thougth. In Norway the mandatory waranty for capital goods meant to last is 5 years. (for other stuff 2 years). The warranty does offcourse not cover normal wear and tear, but defects in materials or workmanship are covered.
Sure. In the (in Norway around 8%) of the cases where the father has custody, the overwhelming majority it is so because the mother agreed to this arrangement, or the children are old enough that their meaning counts. When my parents divorced I stayed with my father, but I was 14, and he was staying where I had lived all my life, had all my friends and my school, and my mother was moving away to start a new life with a new child and a new man -- it wasn't really much of a question.
Not all women are assholes. Indeed the large majority aren't. Even most of those who have custody, wishes for the child to have the possibility to also meet the father. In those (majority!) of the cases it matters little what the law says, because the parents reach an agreement anyway.
Thing is though, the law is there for those (few!) cases where one part does *NOT* act reasonably.
Re:My short experience with perl...
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What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1
I understand what you say, and I'm fully aware you *can* make lists of lists in Perl. I just simply disagree with you. I don't agree that spoken language in general works like Perl.
In spoken language, you rarely use recurcive lists as *all*. On the rare occasions that you do, they work like in any non-perl language.
For example, if doing something entails going to 3 shops and buing stuff at each of them, you migth have a list containing 3 elements, each of which is a list containing the stuff to buy in that shop. And that is *not* the same as a single flat list with all elements flattened.
Most women agree with you. Most *everyone* agrees with you, certainly in Norway, which is relatively radical about equal rigths. But several of the laws I mentioned are precisely the same in Norway. (I happen to be Norwegian by the way, I only live in Germany at the moment) For example, a unmarried woman who gets a child with someone gets absolutely *all* the rigths of a parent while the father gets none whatsoever, except the rigth (and duty) to pay for the child offcourse.
Fathers who *are* married are not much better off: The normal case in Norway (atleast on paper) is that the parental-rigths are split. But this can only work if both parts wishes it to work. If the woman simply refuses, she ends up getting all parental rigths alone in like literally 98% of the cases. Not by law, but because the judges are old conservative males who basically think a mother is more suited as a parent than a father in 98% of the cases.
My opinion: Sharing the responsibility should be the norm. If one of the sides refuses to cooperate in sharing, then as a rule, the sole custody should automatically go to the *OTHER* parent. This makes sense, because it's the only way to ensure the child gets to have contact with both parents.
It's pretty much the same for lesbians (Hi, I peeked at your website). The one who physically is pregnant will in most cases receive all rigths if the couple splits up, the other is only allowed to pay. This is one reason why quite a few choose to adopt a child instead of having their own -- it is the only way to ensure that both parents are treated as equal.
This doesn't sound right to me. I'm pretty sure gravity accelerates any amount of mass at an equal rate: 9.8m/s^2. Shouldn't matter whether it's 50kg or 1500kg.
Sure. But in this case the mass causing acceleration (i.e. the inbalance) is much smaller than the mass accelerating. The thing is actually large, passenger-capacity is like 100 people in each wagon, and the counterweigth is actually a second wagon that goes up when the first goes down.
So if the total system (2 wagons, 2km cable, 150 passengers) end up weighing 70.000 kg (I actually think that's a fair guess), but the passengers are split 100 in one wagon and only 50 in the other, then there's an imbalance of around 3750kg. Since this is only around 5% of the mass to be accelerated, you end up with an acceleration of only 5% of 9.8m/s**2, or around 0.5 m/s**2 which is very moderate.
It's that rare ? Strange. It's actually a very good game. And I personally know where atleast 4 of those copies live -- several friends of mine bougth a copy after trying out mine.
Sure. There's lots of examples like this. Most from child/family settings. The reason being that the traditional role of the female is to deal with the children, so she often gets the final say by default (or because the laws are old)
For example, in germany (and many other countries) when a nonmarried couple gets pregnant, the mother *automatically* get sole child-custody. The father gets no rigths whatsoever, except offcourse the rigth to pay. The mother:
Decides by herself if she wants to keep the child. She can put it up for adoption if she likes, the biological father doesn't automatically get the child even in this case.
Doesn't need to let the father ever even see his child.
Can move away, even to another country, and take the child along.
Automatically gets the pension-bonus given to people who care for small children. (Note: This is true *even* in the case where the mother works full-time and the *father* is the one actually caring for the child!)
It's even in the german constitution that "the mother" receives special protection. Fathers aren't mentioned with a single word and certainly receive no special protections.
If you're bowhunting, that is fast enough to kill medium sized game
In practice, no. In the real world, a bolt fired horisontally (or nearly so) at 16m/s or so falls to the ground after like 3 meter. Good luck getting that close to "medium sized game" and then perfectly hitting its weakest spot.
Yes, sure, if you hold a crossbow firing a bolt at that speed directly up to the neck of some animal and then fire, the bolt will penetrate, probably atleast 5cm, quite possibly more.
In hindsight, the whole episode was like something out of Harry Potter.
You noticed this too ? I had that feeling too, though not of HP since he wasn't invented. Today, everyone take it for granted. But it's not. It's anything but. It's mindboggling is what.
That we consider it trivial that a single click of a mouse-button causes billions of transistors all over the world to change state, magnetic platters to spin, and photons to surge trough hair-thin fibers of glass, all in a split-second, giving you whatever website you clicked the link to is *not* trivial at all. It only seems that way because the technology is so simple to use.
Best way to learn them, imho, movies, tv and the written word (fiction works: novels, comic books).
I disagree. The problem with all of these is that they are passive -- you merely read/hear what others have produced. The huge advantage of chatting onlinem, having a penpal, or go visiting a country is that it's interactive. Many people, me included, learn like a gazillion times better when we *use* what we learn instantly, when we're active participants and not only passive receivers.
I don't think the slang and so on is such a problem. You recognize it as such, and it's not a minus knowing the slang of a language, aslong as it's in addition to the normal words.
My english is learnt trough a mixture of reading books, writing and receiving megabytes of email and irc-chat, and spending around a year talking englisch around the clock. It's not perfect, but all of it was a lot more effective than what we had in school.
Indeed. Any modern elevator has like three independent braking-systems. For example, the funicular in Bergen is able to stop by any of:
Aslong as the cable is intact, the cable can be braked by a drum-brake at the top.
If that drum-brake goes, there's a second, independent cable-brake that basically clamps around the cable.
If both those go, the cars still don't accelerate very much, because there's a counterweigth so only the imbalance of passengers would cause acceleration.
If that's still bad, or the cable itself is broken, then the wagons instantly clamp to the rails they travel along. This is so because the tension on the cable is working against a spring that tries to push brake-shoes up against the rails. If the tension goes away, the spring wins.
Yeah, if *all* of that fails, you migth have a problem.
Needless to say, this never happened. Inspite of the thing being in operation for like literally a hundred years and transporting thousande of passengers daily. I imagine newer designs can be even more secure, but I don't really think it's worth the effort -- it's good enough. People plummeting to their death in elevator-accidents is not a major cause of death outside of Hollywood.
Re:you've got it a bit wrong...
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1
It was done to simplify passing arguments. If a function takes a variable number of arguments (like join or for the C folks, printf) you can pass a list and the members of the list will be expanded automatically as parameters.
Yes. And this again means you need special trickery if you want to *avoid* that happening (i.e. if the first parameter should really be a list. So again you get a special case: passing lists as parameteres require trickery that is not needed for passing other types of parameters. Adding tons of "special cases" makes a langauge significantly complexer.
Is it a good idea? Well, like many things in Perl that were done as convenience in one spot, it comes back to get you in other places sometimes.
Indeed.
As to it being intuitive, that's a strange argument. Computer programming isn't intuitive in any case.
I disagree. It's not a matter of is or is not, it's a matter of is more or is less. Less "gotschas" is in general a good thing. Perl has more "gotschas" than any other language I know of. This thing -- where a programmer trying to do something reasonable, something that'd work like he expected it to in Python, Ruby, C++, Java, C, bash, Pascal, or basically 95%+ of all high-level languages, but blew up in a unexpected way under Perl is but one example.
Re:My short experience with perl...
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1
But that's *not* what you are saying. You, in general, make a list by putting it in () and separating the elements by a comma. So in general (object,object,object) will be a list with three elements. Now, what those elements are is a different question, they can be just about anything.
Only in Perl, if one or more of the objects just so *happens* to be a list, then it's no longer nessecarily a list with three members. It means that answering (seemingly!) trivial questions like how many elements are in: (foo, bar, baz) is not doable, without reading trough the rest of the program and look into what are assigned to those variables.
The list you mention is something different, and works inituitively also in Python. Adding a list to a list should (well atleast I agree it's quite reasonable) yield a longer list:
Works like you'd expect, i.e. you get one 5-element flat list.
Re:My short experience with perl...
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1
Perl's syntax is based on linguistics, not the last programming language you happened to use.
Yes. And being different from all others is a minus in itself, unless there are large advantages to it, I've yet to hear the large advantages of the list-sillyness.
It's something you'd expect if you'd bothered to learn it. Expecting $language_N to behave like $language_N-1 reflects on your expectations, not on $language_N.
Precisely ! You got it ! Now, in say Python this is different: It's something you'd expect even if you HAVEN'T bothered to learn it. It behaves like most reasonable programmers would expect. Not in a way that is unexpected to everyone, except those who spent time studying it. *ANYTHING* behaves according to expectation for those who have studied the details, that's not a useful measure. Much more useful is the question: what would someone with no prior exposure to the language expect ?
In Python, you can sit down and pound out whatever dumb stuff you like, and then when you deploy it, it'll throw a nice pretty exception telling you exactly why you're fired. No thanks.
You can write bad programs in any language. This is well-understood and wasn't the issue here. The issue was if the semantics are inituitive, or if they are strange and only understandable after you've spent time studying them.
Re:My short experience with perl...
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
This is true. And to a perlhead it even makes sense. But it still makes the language a *lot* harder to come to grips with.
In python, an array consists of "[ what,ever,here ]" and that extends inituitively, *without* needing to read any manual-page to the case where "what" in itself is a array (or anything else).
It's not inituitive that (1,2,3,4) is the same as ((1,2),(3,4)). That's not reasonable at all. Yes there's an explanation for it. Yes the explanation makes sense, from a certain point of view. The thing is, you first have to *aquire*/precisely/ that point of view. It's not something you'd expect.
Re:My short experience with perl...
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1
Perl is a mess. It can do a lot of stuff, but it's very hard to be diciplined enough to keep it readable. There's tons of write-only code in perl out there. (i.e. code that noone, not even the author, is capable of reading anymore)
I second python on syntax. Python can do all that perl can do, allthough sometimes at the cost of ten extra keystrokes. For that you get a syntax that is clean and semantics that are sane. The one thing people get hung-up about in Python is that indentation matters.
Now, any sane person would indent code the way python insists you should indent it anyway, but for some obscure reason some people still need to complain about it.
Yeah. Sorta. If you have a heatpump where you can't control that yourself. That is an advantage, because with the setup you mention, one is left essentially guessing how much heat you can demand without going to resistive heating.
I do have a heat-pump. But it's a bit more controllable, it's got a separate termostat for the resistive heating, I can thus say: Go for 21 degC, but if we'd otherwise drop under 18 -- use the resistive heating.
Daytime, when I come from work the programming is with a bit of different times, I arrive around 16:30 and the heatpump has programming like: during the day, atleast +12, don't use resistive heating. From 15:30 try reaching 20 degC, don't use resistive heating. From 16:15 if needed, use resistive heating to reach atleast 18degC.
True, but is the amount of heat produced always directly proportional to the amount of fuel used? In other words, is the efficiency of the furnace a constant, or are some settings more efficient (in terms of heat per fuel) than others?
"always" is a tricky word. Most furnaces operate in off/full-power modus, which mean they are equally effective regardless, there's only one "on" mode, it's just a matter of how often this is used. heat/fuel should be fairly constant even for furnaces that don't operate like this, and offcourse if your heating is electric, the same thing holds, possibly even more so.
There's no logic behind it. It's just one of them things that sorta sounds like it migth sense; "Let it get too cold, and you'll use more energy re-heating it" aslong as you don't think about it that is. And by the time someone confronts this silly idea, it's sometimes so deeply ingrained that the person even starts defending it on reflex, because he feels an attack on the idea is in essence an attack on himself.
This usually happens when the person has internalized the idea; he consider it something "he knows", not something that somebody claimed or something that he once read.
Yes there's edge-cases, there always is. But that doesn't change the fact that in general it's simply bullshit.
I've heard the same thing for electric warm-water-makers with a reservoir by the way: You save power by setting them lower, or turning them completely off when you go away for a few days, yet I've heard it claimed that you save more by leaving it at say 50 centigrade than by powering completely off --- the reason offered being the same one as here: it'd cost too much to re-heat the water if you allowed it to cool down to room-temperature.
You gotta be north-american. Your building-standards are unbelievable. Unbelievable as in low I mean. You upgraded from 4 to 6 inches insulation. Congratulations. Meanwhile, my *grandmothers* house, built before the war, came with 8" insulation, and new housing is not even *allowed* to have less than 10". 12-15" is more common though. (yes, that's a foot, or more of insulation)
Oh, but this is Norway where it's bone-cold, I hear you think. Only that's not really the best description of the west-coast. The average january-temperature in Bergen is something like +2 centigrade (i.e. 2 degrees above freezing), colder than 5 degrees minus is rare.
First, you use the most fuel transitioning from your low temperature setting to the high temperature setting. You don't want the low to be too much lower than the high or you'll actually increase consumption, and you don't want to transition too many times per day.
Oft-repeated "wisdom" -- if you let the temperature fall too deeply, it'll cost more to re-heat than you saved in the first place.
This ignores the plain fact that this is physically impossible.
To keep a house warm, you need to add the same amount of heat that escapes.
The amount of heat that escapes is, to a first aproximation, proportional to the temperature-differential between indoors and outdoors. (if that is 0, no heat is lost, if it's 60 degrees you will require roughly twice the heating you would need if it was only 30)
Less heat lost means less heat needed.
Now, this means that there is *no*way* it can ever be cheaper to say, keep a house at 15 centigrade instead of letting it drop to 10 and then reheating it to 15. It's simply physically impossible.
There are other reasons too large heat-gradients can be disadvantagous, such as the risk of condensation and moisture when warm air cools and is no longer able to retain all its water-vapour, but heating-cost is simply not one of them.
I agree. Looking at something for 50 milliseconds, and then judging does not imply that we judge in 50 milliseconds.
That claim is as stupid as blinking someone '15*31' for 100ms, and then, when the person is (eventually!) able to say what that is, claim the person does multiplication in his head in 100ms, he does nothing of the sort.
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, no. You *ARE* aware that modern photo-printers, atleast those that normal mortals use generally work by *scanning* the film, and then *printing* the resulting file the same way they would print a file coming from a digital camera ?
The fact that one file comes from a CCD, and the other file from a scan of a negative makes no difference for the difficulty of manipulating the resulting file.
You mean "illegal combatant" enemy combatants would be prisoners of war, those have rigths, such as the rigth to be released when the war is over.
In lawful countries there are ONLY two ways you can legally be imprisoned. Anyone in prison is either a criminal, in which case he needs to be charged with breaking some existing law, convicted, in a court, with a defence-attorney, with a possibility of appeal, with a definitive sentence etc. Or he is a prisoner of war, in which case he gets another set of rigths.
Only in the USA is there now a third category, a "illegal combatant". This is a person who is not charged with breaking any law, which is *not* given the rigths of a prisoner of war, who is not convicted for anything, by anyone. Which does not have the rigth to a defence. Which does not have a defnitive sentence, but instead is held however long it damnwell pleases whoever is in control (it's a secret who, exactly, that is, and by what criteria releases or continued imprisonment is decided)
In ligth of this, it's quite amusing really, to hear Bush talk on the telly about "unlawful states". Yeah rigth....
There are people doing that. Thing is, $10K is a very small amount to have invested, small enough that it's simply not a paying proposition to be dealing with it for you. Paying anyone to do so would cost more than the investment pays off anyway.
The nice thing is that it doesn't matter. Really. Even when knowing just the very basics, you'll do exactly as well as the professionals. You need to choose your risk-level, high-risk acceptance, but high expected return, or low risk-acceptance, but also lower expected return. Other than that, you can invest randomly and do aswell as anyone.
It's even a running joke: The Economist has a stock-bet every year, they invite leading analysts to choose 5 stocks that they think will do well next year, and always include as an "analyst" the output of simply throwing a dart-arrow at a wall-poster with the stocknames on it. On average, throwing dart-arrows works aswell as asking the analysts.
This may seem strange, but the reason is that *IF* the analysts really (at this point!) collectively understand something about the "correct" pricing of a stock, *THEN* this understanding is already reflected in the stock-price.
Besides, it's a zero-sum game. Beating the index *REQUIRES* that someone else looses the same amount, relative to the index.
Sure it's common. It's said that every people get *exactly* the leaders they deserve, perhaps that is worth a thougth. In Norway the mandatory waranty for capital goods meant to last is 5 years. (for other stuff 2 years). The warranty does offcourse not cover normal wear and tear, but defects in materials or workmanship are covered.
Not all women are assholes. Indeed the large majority aren't. Even most of those who have custody, wishes for the child to have the possibility to also meet the father. In those (majority!) of the cases it matters little what the law says, because the parents reach an agreement anyway.
Thing is though, the law is there for those (few!) cases where one part does *NOT* act reasonably.
In spoken language, you rarely use recurcive lists as *all*. On the rare occasions that you do, they work like in any non-perl language.
For example, if doing something entails going to 3 shops and buing stuff at each of them, you migth have a list containing 3 elements, each of which is a list containing the stuff to buy in that shop. And that is *not* the same as a single flat list with all elements flattened.
Fathers who *are* married are not much better off: The normal case in Norway (atleast on paper) is that the parental-rigths are split. But this can only work if both parts wishes it to work. If the woman simply refuses, she ends up getting all parental rigths alone in like literally 98% of the cases. Not by law, but because the judges are old conservative males who basically think a mother is more suited as a parent than a father in 98% of the cases.
My opinion: Sharing the responsibility should be the norm. If one of the sides refuses to cooperate in sharing, then as a rule, the sole custody should automatically go to the *OTHER* parent. This makes sense, because it's the only way to ensure the child gets to have contact with both parents. It's pretty much the same for lesbians (Hi, I peeked at your website). The one who physically is pregnant will in most cases receive all rigths if the couple splits up, the other is only allowed to pay. This is one reason why quite a few choose to adopt a child instead of having their own -- it is the only way to ensure that both parents are treated as equal.
Sure. But in this case the mass causing acceleration (i.e. the inbalance) is much smaller than the mass accelerating. The thing is actually large, passenger-capacity is like 100 people in each wagon, and the counterweigth is actually a second wagon that goes up when the first goes down.
So if the total system (2 wagons, 2km cable, 150 passengers) end up weighing 70.000 kg (I actually think that's a fair guess), but the passengers are split 100 in one wagon and only 50 in the other, then there's an imbalance of around 3750kg. Since this is only around 5% of the mass to be accelerated, you end up with an acceleration of only 5% of 9.8m/s**2, or around 0.5 m/s**2 which is very moderate.
It's that rare ? Strange. It's actually a very good game. And I personally know where atleast 4 of those copies live -- several friends of mine bougth a copy after trying out mine.
For example, in germany (and many other countries) when a nonmarried couple gets pregnant, the mother *automatically* get sole child-custody. The father gets no rigths whatsoever, except offcourse the rigth to pay. The mother:
In practice, no. In the real world, a bolt fired horisontally (or nearly so) at 16m/s or so falls to the ground after like 3 meter. Good luck getting that close to "medium sized game" and then perfectly hitting its weakest spot.
Yes, sure, if you hold a crossbow firing a bolt at that speed directly up to the neck of some animal and then fire, the bolt will penetrate, probably atleast 5cm, quite possibly more.
You noticed this too ? I had that feeling too, though not of HP since he wasn't invented. Today, everyone take it for granted. But it's not. It's anything but. It's mindboggling is what.
That we consider it trivial that a single click of a mouse-button causes billions of transistors all over the world to change state, magnetic platters to spin, and photons to surge trough hair-thin fibers of glass, all in a split-second, giving you whatever website you clicked the link to is *not* trivial at all. It only seems that way because the technology is so simple to use.
I disagree. The problem with all of these is that they are passive -- you merely read/hear what others have produced. The huge advantage of chatting onlinem, having a penpal, or go visiting a country is that it's interactive. Many people, me included, learn like a gazillion times better when we *use* what we learn instantly, when we're active participants and not only passive receivers.
I don't think the slang and so on is such a problem. You recognize it as such, and it's not a minus knowing the slang of a language, aslong as it's in addition to the normal words.
My english is learnt trough a mixture of reading books, writing and receiving megabytes of email and irc-chat, and spending around a year talking englisch around the clock. It's not perfect, but all of it was a lot more effective than what we had in school.
- Aslong as the cable is intact, the cable can be braked by a drum-brake at the top.
- If that drum-brake goes, there's a second, independent cable-brake that basically clamps around the cable.
- If both those go, the cars still don't accelerate very much, because there's a counterweigth so only the imbalance of passengers would cause acceleration.
- If that's still bad, or the cable itself is broken, then the wagons instantly clamp to the rails they travel along. This is so because the tension on the cable is working against a spring that tries to push brake-shoes up against the rails. If the tension goes away, the spring wins.
- Yeah, if *all* of that fails, you migth have a problem.
Needless to say, this never happened. Inspite of the thing being in operation for like literally a hundred years and transporting thousande of passengers daily. I imagine newer designs can be even more secure, but I don't really think it's worth the effort -- it's good enough. People plummeting to their death in elevator-accidents is not a major cause of death outside of Hollywood.Yes. And this again means you need special trickery if you want to *avoid* that happening (i.e. if the first parameter should really be a list. So again you get a special case: passing lists as parameteres require trickery that is not needed for passing other types of parameters. Adding tons of "special cases" makes a langauge significantly complexer.
Is it a good idea? Well, like many things in Perl that were done as convenience in one spot, it comes back to get you in other places sometimes.
Indeed.
As to it being intuitive, that's a strange argument. Computer programming isn't intuitive in any case.
I disagree. It's not a matter of is or is not, it's a matter of is more or is less. Less "gotschas" is in general a good thing. Perl has more "gotschas" than any other language I know of. This thing -- where a programmer trying to do something reasonable, something that'd work like he expected it to in Python, Ruby, C++, Java, C, bash, Pascal, or basically 95%+ of all high-level languages, but blew up in a unexpected way under Perl is but one example.
Only in Perl, if one or more of the objects just so *happens* to be a list, then it's no longer nessecarily a list with three members. It means that answering (seemingly!) trivial questions like how many elements are in: (foo, bar, baz) is not doable, without reading trough the rest of the program and look into what are assigned to those variables.
The list you mention is something different, and works inituitively also in Python. Adding a list to a list should (well atleast I agree it's quite reasonable) yield a longer list:
shopping = ["beans", "ham", "eggs"]
shopping += ["soda", "water"]
Works like you'd expect, i.e. you get one 5-element flat list.
Yes. And being different from all others is a minus in itself, unless there are large advantages to it, I've yet to hear the large advantages of the list-sillyness.
It's something you'd expect if you'd bothered to learn it. Expecting $language_N to behave like $language_N-1 reflects on your expectations, not on $language_N.
Precisely ! You got it ! Now, in say Python this is different: It's something you'd expect even if you HAVEN'T bothered to learn it. It behaves like most reasonable programmers would expect. Not in a way that is unexpected to everyone, except those who spent time studying it. *ANYTHING* behaves according to expectation for those who have studied the details, that's not a useful measure. Much more useful is the question: what would someone with no prior exposure to the language expect ?
In Python, you can sit down and pound out whatever dumb stuff you like, and then when you deploy it, it'll throw a nice pretty exception telling you exactly why you're fired. No thanks.
You can write bad programs in any language. This is well-understood and wasn't the issue here. The issue was if the semantics are inituitive, or if they are strange and only understandable after you've spent time studying them.
In python, an array consists of "[ what,ever,here ]" and that extends inituitively, *without* needing to read any manual-page to the case where "what" in itself is a array (or anything else).
It's not inituitive that (1,2,3,4) is the same as ((1,2),(3,4)). That's not reasonable at all. Yes there's an explanation for it. Yes the explanation makes sense, from a certain point of view. The thing is, you first have to *aquire* /precisely/ that point of view. It's not something you'd expect.
I second python on syntax. Python can do all that perl can do, allthough sometimes at the cost of ten extra keystrokes. For that you get a syntax that is clean and semantics that are sane. The one thing people get hung-up about in Python is that indentation matters.
Now, any sane person would indent code the way python insists you should indent it anyway, but for some obscure reason some people still need to complain about it.
I do have a heat-pump. But it's a bit more controllable, it's got a separate termostat for the resistive heating, I can thus say: Go for 21 degC, but if we'd otherwise drop under 18 -- use the resistive heating.
Daytime, when I come from work the programming is with a bit of different times, I arrive around 16:30 and the heatpump has programming like: during the day, atleast +12, don't use resistive heating. From 15:30 try reaching 20 degC, don't use resistive heating. From 16:15 if needed, use resistive heating to reach atleast 18degC.
"always" is a tricky word. Most furnaces operate in off/full-power modus, which mean they are equally effective regardless, there's only one "on" mode, it's just a matter of how often this is used. heat/fuel should be fairly constant even for furnaces that don't operate like this, and offcourse if your heating is electric, the same thing holds, possibly even more so.
There's no logic behind it. It's just one of them things that sorta sounds like it migth sense; "Let it get too cold, and you'll use more energy re-heating it" aslong as you don't think about it that is. And by the time someone confronts this silly idea, it's sometimes so deeply ingrained that the person even starts defending it on reflex, because he feels an attack on the idea is in essence an attack on himself.
This usually happens when the person has internalized the idea; he consider it something "he knows", not something that somebody claimed or something that he once read.
Yes there's edge-cases, there always is. But that doesn't change the fact that in general it's simply bullshit.
I've heard the same thing for electric warm-water-makers with a reservoir by the way: You save power by setting them lower, or turning them completely off when you go away for a few days, yet I've heard it claimed that you save more by leaving it at say 50 centigrade than by powering completely off --- the reason offered being the same one as here: it'd cost too much to re-heat the water if you allowed it to cool down to room-temperature.
You *never* need to add more heat than escapes. And lower temperature-differential *always* means less heat escapes. End of discussion.
Oh, but this is Norway where it's bone-cold, I hear you think. Only that's not really the best description of the west-coast. The average january-temperature in Bergen is something like +2 centigrade (i.e. 2 degrees above freezing), colder than 5 degrees minus is rare.
Oft-repeated "wisdom" -- if you let the temperature fall too deeply, it'll cost more to re-heat than you saved in the first place.
This ignores the plain fact that this is physically impossible.
Now, this means that there is *no*way* it can ever be cheaper to say, keep a house at 15 centigrade instead of letting it drop to 10 and then reheating it to 15. It's simply physically impossible.
There are other reasons too large heat-gradients can be disadvantagous, such as the risk of condensation and moisture when warm air cools and is no longer able to retain all its water-vapour, but heating-cost is simply not one of them.
That claim is as stupid as blinking someone '15*31' for 100ms, and then, when the person is (eventually!) able to say what that is, claim the person does multiplication in his head in 100ms, he does nothing of the sort.