And when the people doing in theatre recording become individual nuclear powers, the industry will actually start listening to you.
I think they already are. At least in terms of the fear they inspire in the industry, I don't see what a nuclear power could do that camcorder fan-boys aren't already. Look at all of the money being spent, the bad press the studios are willing to suffer (I know a lot of women who won't go to theathers now because they don't want some 16-year-old peeping at them in the dark with a night-scope). The studios are scared, and the funny part is that by turning it into an arms race, they are forcing the fans to justify their fears.
It was meant as a retrospective. I was inspired to write it last night when I stumbled on the United Linux site for the first time in a year.
If you don't find any of it informative, that's likely because you've been paying attention to this for 2+ years, but much of the Slashdot community isn't aware of some of the back-story (especially the Unix Wars and why UL was founded and by whom).
Well, yes and no. Today we call that foley, but traditionally foley is audio effects. Only in the last 10-20 years has foley come to mean any kind of audio work done post-production I believe. Someone who is closer to the industry can speak to that, I'm sure.
Post-production dubbing is common-place and is done in just about every movie you'll see.
Offtopic side point for the firefox inclined: anyone have problems with the incremental find where it starts a new find every time you type a single-quote? I'm going nuts having to re-click in the edit window every time I type a single-quote on Slashdot!;-)
I suspect it wasn't a case of dubbing in over other lines so much as dubbing in over background noise. There was a LOT of noise in that scene, and the line as spoke in the scene may not have been audible.
Good point though. One of my favorite scenes, just for the down-to earth, "we're all screwed" sort of attitude;-)
Seems to me that the solution is to take a bunch of these bad camcorder recordings and merge them. You should easily be able to compensate for the skew from different seating locations and jitter by comparing 3 or more recordings and establishing a sense of where the screen is in each and what how the screens map to each other.
That blurs the watermarking, can allow you to improve the image quality, remove problems like people standing up and getting in the way, etc.
Audio watermarking is also defeatable. Someone slide an engineer at this company a few k for the specs and you can just use Felton's approach.
This post is not meant to encourage anyone, I'm just trying to point out to the industry (in case they're listening) that an arms race is not a particularly wise course of action. To quote The Hunt For Red October, "this will get out of control."
Actually, wind is ripe for exploitation on a large scale, but the real value comes from tapping the Jet Stream, and that would require some kind of permanent installation a couple miles up. This could be accomplished but it's tricky (tethering a blimp to the ground might work, but the amount of helium needed would be prohibitive (considering you have to hold up a miles-long tether strong enough to hold a power plan in place!)
I love the way Fossil Fuel impact is so well understood that this article can cite what percentage impact wind power represents... last I heard the models were all based on the following logic: the sun (according to fairly accurate ice and vegitation records) fluctuates a certain amount and generates a certain measurable impact on the historical climate. Plotting that forward, it diverges around the 60s where the climate starts to warm more than could be explained by that particular solar model. The rest is considerd to be solely the result of human activity, and specifically fossil fuels.
So, the next time you hear someone cite a hard number with relation to global warming or human impact on temperature ask them to what extent they're accounting for the impact of forest fire prevention and the fact that since around the 60s forest fires have burned much hotter than before, igniting materials like tree crowns and permafrost that release millions of tons of CO and CO2 into the atmosphere. Also, ask them what the impact of the increased solar flare activity since around the 60s has been and how that compares to the geological record of solar flare activty (there is none). While you're at it ask about the rate of decline of algae populations since the last ice age, and how much data they have on that.
Bottom line: our planet is a higly complex system which we do not understand. I agree with the moderate environmentalists who say, essentially, better safe than sorry. I do think there are certain things we can do that caution dictates we SHOULD do. However, throwing around percentages as if we understood the sytems that they are based on is absurd and misleading.
Personally, I've always wondered about dams. Water vapor is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO or CO2, and dams increase the surface area of our waterways. What does this do to evaporation and how does that affect the climate?
And using zombies to do the hashing has a point as well, although the author points out that loading the zombies with additional work isn't such a bad thing after all.
NO! You're falling for it.
By assigning a price, you letitimize spam. Yes, you eliminate the bottom-feeders, but the folks who now have to spend large amounts of money to see a return are going to have to make their business scale better. You're weeding out the week in favor of the strong... did you think this would prevent spam? On the contrary! It will do the following things:
1. Legitimize spammers, increasing their customer base 2. Force businesses to spam more effectively 3. Put pressure on hardware makers by making spammers their biggest customers 4. Increase the risk that valid mail which doesn't play ball will be lost
Get ready... if hashcash takes off, spam will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Exactly. Python and Perl are not really competitors in the strictest sense. They both build on each other. In many ways, I think Larry would have made some of the choices that Python did, had he started out in the 80s knowing what he knows now, and that's evidenced by how much of Perl 6 draws from Python (as well as Ruby, Scheme, LISP, Smalltalk, C++ and Java).
Of course, the basic approaches to language design follow different philosophies (Perl's is one of inclusion, Python's is one of exclusion... both are valid). But I think in the final analysis both will be first-class citizens of the high-level language world for a long time to come, and the cooperation fostered by Parrot's runtime will help to ensure that.
ESR's problem with Perl is (and I've spoken to him at length about this) that it is easy to write bad code. I don't think there are many Perl programmers who would disagree with that. ESR's solution is to use Python. Valid choice. My solution (and that of many Perl programmers) is to write clean code, maintain it through CPAN and make sure Perl 6 makes it easier to write cleaner code. Again, a valid choice.
I'm making up eval(2), and I'm not sure off the top of my head what s is equivalent to (I know there's new rules around what "." matches in what contexts, but don't recall the details). Of course, I have nothing with which to test the example, so I'm not sure.
There are some great features for better one-liners in Perl6, though overall the language is not favoring them. I'm especially happy with the word-matching features (e.g. $x ~ m:word/a b c/ will match a, b and c with any whitespace separating them). Also nice will be the hyper- and pipeline-operators which will give new power and speed to Shwartzian Transforms.
Rules will come in handy for quick-and-dirty one-liners as well. For example:
This is not much different from the Perl5 ability to pre-compile a regexp into a scalar and then intepolate it into a larger regexp (since you're not taking advantage of any of the features of the grammar engine in the example), but it does give us a cleaner framework for this sort of thing.
sorry, I goofed. I meant to make it clear that those two definitions are mutually exclusive, and instead I made it sound like I was stating them both as THE definition. Sorry.
I don't buy your definition. I've heard many an author try to define his own genre, and with absolutely no exception they've all been fairly obvious attempts to retrofit the genre to fit their work.
The definition of science fiction is, quite simply, that which a majority of the public calls science fiction.
Yes, this means the definition changes over time. It also means that your definition and mine might not agree and we can both be right or both wrong.
Personally, I'm in the camp of intent. If you intend to write science fiction, then that's what you're writing. This means that no matter how science fiction-like the magical realism stuff may look, it's not because that's not what the author is writing.
Why do I hold to this definition? Because it's the only one that removes the reader's bias for what is and is not valid science and is immutable over time. It also favors the current trend of authors who are good enough to have a shot at being noticed in the literary world, bailing from the SF ghetto while continuing to write speculative works (e.g. magical realism).
If you prefer a different definition, have at it, but mine works for me.
Minimum wage is a red herring and has been for decades. The minimum wage is, for all intents and purposes, tied to inflation, but only when measured over the long haul. Republicans and Democrats both get tremendous political captial by slinging mud at each other over this "safe" issue. The Democrats demand a huge increase, the Republicans demand no increase. In the end they compromise on a figure that just happens to match inflation.
In the recently Republican-controled congress this has broken down a bit. The Republicans are sort of lost in that they know an increase is required, but they've never had to use their own votes to pass one. This is just a re-adjustment to the new norm, and you'll see the rate go up soon enough.
Issues of "safety" vs "freedom"
Both parties couldn't be less interested in either one. I know of only one congressman who is actively outraged by the concept of extraordinary rendition a bi-partisan concept introduced by Clinton and expanded by Bush whereby suspected terrorists, drug dealers or anyone we can shoe-horn into a dangerous sounding category can be exported to a country where tourture is legal for "questioning". Still like your party?
Various moral issues
No matter how you slice your morality, both Republicans and Democrats have worked hard to flaunt it. Concepts like the one I describe above are just the easiest examples. International influences being allowed to buy executive favor (Clinton, Bush), sex in the oval office (Clinton), drug-running for international influence (Bush Sr.), wholesale invasion of sovreign nations without cause (Reagan, Bush Sr, Clinton, Bush).
The last president with any morality whatsoever was Carter, and Congress was so terrified by this that they wouldn't work with him on a single issue. Then again, I'll take an ineffectual president over one that can "get things done" like Carter's successors.
I'm so tired of this. Every time the IOCCC winners are announced someone has to go off on how unmaintainable the code is.
For those who are unable to grasp the point, I'll say it slowly: this code is written by people who understand C well enough to twist it into any shape they please. Of course, they could write clean, maintainable code, but then they would LOSE the competition. The goal is to write obfuscated code.
The IOCCC is an expression of source-code as art in a compettitive forum. If that isn't your cup of tea, don't hurt your brain by reading the submissions.
There really aren't many choices. The current regular expression syntax is the only form I've seen tried, with only minor variation.
as he has done somewhat with the Perl 6 expressions
Perl 6 regular expressions have almost exactly the same syntax as Perl 5. The parts that are new are not regular expressions. Cosmetic differences (like [] vs <[]> are fairly ignorable syntactically. It would be like saying that Perl 5 will use// as the comment character instead of # (not that it will, just an example).
All of the inline comments and whitespace are part of Perl 5 extended expressions, though the word-matching on whitespace is new to Perl 6.
POSIX on the other hand ignored most of that historic syntax and instead chose their horribly bloated keyword syntax.
That's not really part of the regular expression syntax. Having [[:digit:]] as an alias for Perl's \d is hardly a different syntax so much as sugar. The fundamentals of POSIX regular expressions are the fundamentals of all modern regex syntaxes:
alphanumerics are literals
backslash is a character escape
parens are used for grouping
*, +, ? and {} are repeat count specifications
These are the fundamentals of Perl regular expressions, POSIX, and all of the other modern regular expression engines and in turn have only a few small differences from the basic regular expressions which Unix started with.
I've often thought that the ease with which regular expressions can be accessed within per was a blessing and a curse. So many people like yourself seem to think that Perl championed regular expressions, when in fact it just followed AWK's lead in integration between C and Ken Thompson's regular expression implementation (which in turn inspired the version that was written from scratch by Henry Spencer and used by Larry for Perl).
If you have a new syntax in mind, I suggest introducing it and seeing how it does. Modern regular expressions are an incremental improvement on classical set notations, and have served us well to date, but I'm sure someday someone will see a better way.
Perl 6 will probably not be faster than boost, but keep in mind that you also gain the power of a fully dynamic programming language in Perl 6's rules. Rules act as closures and can also contain Perl 6 code. Hypothetical variables are really going to blow people's minds (I know they took me a while to grasp, and when I did, I just sat around saying "wow" for a while:-)...)
Perl chose a keystroke-efficent syntax that makes [regular expresssions] unreadable
No, it most certainly did not. Regular expressions as they exist in Perl today are a direct descendant of POSIX regular expressions which derive from the original work done by Ken Thompson (which resulted in the grep program, which stands for "global regular expression print"). That syntax further dates back to the giants in the field of computational theory, and was specialized only slightly for text matching.
grep, awk, sed, ed, vi, emacs, and dozens of other programs and languages for Unix used this notation before Perl came along and adopted it, so let's not pretend that this syntax is somehow Perl's doing.
The extended regular expression syntax of today IS perl's doing and in almost all cases it has been a process of making regular expressions both more powerful and more readable, culminating in Perl6's rule syntax which is highly readable by comparison.
As others have pointed out, Perl 6 interpreters (at least the default one that is Parrot-based) will hand your code off to Ponie or something like it by default. You will have to start your program with the module keyword or the use 6 statement to force Perl 6 behavior, or use a special binary (e.g. something like/usr/bin/perl6).
The:p5 modifier is not there for backward compatibility so much as to allow the programmer to choose the model of regular expression to use. There are trade-offs. Here are two Perl 5 regular expressions:
m{[a-z][A-Z]+} m{^(?:\w+\d|\S+(?:\'s)?)$}
which are written in Perl 6:
m{<[a-z]><[A-Z]>+} m{^[\w+\d|\S+[\'s]?]$ }
Note that Perl 5 syntax is actually a bit nicer for the first one, so you can continue to use Perl 5 syntax there. In the second case, the new bracket-operator is very handy for enclosing sub-expressions that don't have to be remembered in the positional variables (the same as the Perl 5 (?:...) operator). You can even mix them:
Perl 6 is about making the things that you're going to need to do the most often much easier and much more supportable in very large projects. Relax and enjoy it, it's going to be a great ride.
As soneone summarized one of my other posts: Sturgen's Law.
Specficially, you are looking at everything that is on television today and comparing it only to the television that you remember because it was good enough to maintain a niche in our culture. Go look at Knight Rider and consider that for the time it came out it was reasonably well filmed television and slightly above average SF. It hurts just to say that, but it's true.
Reality TV got you down? Go watch some Candid Camera or America's Funniest Home Videos. It really has been this bad for decades. Some of the things that have graced the small screen over the years would turn your stomach.
Today, shows like The West Wing (yes, even post-Sorkin, though it's gone a long way down-hill), Lost, Veronica Mars, The Daily Show and South Park are orders of magnitude better than the crap I was watching on prime-time television while growing up. These shows are still not nearly as good as they could be, but I take heart in the state of the art. Nova isn't what it once was, but it's still good. Brittish TV is starting to invade again. Inside the Actor's Studio is often more enlightening in an hour than any 30 hours of E! and Tech TV is occasionally useful.
So what's to complain? Set up your TiVo and record what you like. Of course, you should ignore the crap. That's what a TiVo is for!
But even in that case I consider it to be an inaccurate term
You are arguing with Stephens over the defintion of the term TCP/IP... this is like watching a guy walk up to John Glenn and say, "you sir, have no idea how hard it is to get into space."
Please, just stop. We've all been through the TCP/IP thing. Yeah, it sounds wrong when you know how the protocols are structured. Yeah, it's convention. Whatever.
I'm spending too much time on the X-Files here... suffice it to say that almost none of the show had anything to do with space, spacecraft or aliens, even though there was a thread running through the show that involved all of the above.
Fandom in general has drawn this arbitrary "Skiffy" vs "Science Fiction" (preferably said with nose up and with a faint hint of a bad impersonation of a Brittish accent... if you're Brittish this might take some practice) line down the middle of the genre, but it's not only abritrary; it's also incosistent.
We look at The Nine Billion Names of God whose only claim to "science" is the fact that a computer is used to print out words on paper. The story is entirely about the mix of eastern mysticism with western pragmatism. The story just recently won the Retrospecive Hugo for its year (53 I think).
Look also at dozens of Twilight Zone episodes (often hailed as a pinical of TV SF) that have nothing at all to do with science.
Look at the science fiction sub-genre of alternate worlds. Nothing at all to do with science.
The science in "science fiction" is not intended to indicate that there is scientific riggor in the stories. In fact, the term was thrust upon the genre by people who wouldn't know a science if they hit one on the highway. It was just a label that classified a genre of speculative fiction. that was inspired by the scientific curiosity of the general public in the early and mid-part of the 20th century. Speculative fiction that deals with topics that are controversial, wierd, absurd or frightening are not dismissed from the genere on that basis alone.
Getting back to the X-Files, of a pair of FBI investigators who have starkly different views on the role of science, skepticism and faith in their work seems fertile ground for science fiction, and indeed it was. The first three years of the X-Files were some of the best science fiction on television a the time, and they rank well among the classics of the medium. Are they up to the standard of print SF? Not often, no, but as JMS has pointed out, a season of television is around 22 episodes which must be written in about 3-6 months' time. Each episode is roughly novella-length. Any genre produced at that pace will suffer.
Still, X-Files had a lot to say about the advance of technology and our society. I'm ok with that.
Slashdot Mirror
And when the people doing in theatre recording become individual nuclear powers, the industry will actually start listening to you.
I think they already are. At least in terms of the fear they inspire in the industry, I don't see what a nuclear power could do that camcorder fan-boys aren't already. Look at all of the money being spent, the bad press the studios are willing to suffer (I know a lot of women who won't go to theathers now because they don't want some 16-year-old peeping at them in the dark with a night-scope). The studios are scared, and the funny part is that by turning it into an arms race, they are forcing the fans to justify their fears.
It was meant as a retrospective. I was inspired to write it last night when I stumbled on the United Linux site for the first time in a year.
If you don't find any of it informative, that's likely because you've been paying attention to this for 2+ years, but much of the Slashdot community isn't aware of some of the back-story (especially the Unix Wars and why UL was founded and by whom).
Well, yes and no. Today we call that foley, but traditionally foley is audio effects. Only in the last 10-20 years has foley come to mean any kind of audio work done post-production I believe. Someone who is closer to the industry can speak to that, I'm sure.
;-)
Post-production dubbing is common-place and is done in just about every movie you'll see.
Offtopic side point for the firefox inclined: anyone have problems with the incremental find where it starts a new find every time you type a single-quote? I'm going nuts having to re-click in the edit window every time I type a single-quote on Slashdot!
I suspect it wasn't a case of dubbing in over other lines so much as dubbing in over background noise. There was a LOT of noise in that scene, and the line as spoke in the scene may not have been audible.
;-)
Good point though. One of my favorite scenes, just for the down-to earth, "we're all screwed" sort of attitude
Seems to me that the solution is to take a bunch of these bad camcorder recordings and merge them. You should easily be able to compensate for the skew from different seating locations and jitter by comparing 3 or more recordings and establishing a sense of where the screen is in each and what how the screens map to each other.
That blurs the watermarking, can allow you to improve the image quality, remove problems like people standing up and getting in the way, etc.
Audio watermarking is also defeatable. Someone slide an engineer at this company a few k for the specs and you can just use Felton's approach.
This post is not meant to encourage anyone, I'm just trying to point out to the industry (in case they're listening) that an arms race is not a particularly wise course of action. To quote The Hunt For Red October, "this will get out of control."
Actually, wind is ripe for exploitation on a large scale, but the real value comes from tapping the Jet Stream, and that would require some kind of permanent installation a couple miles up. This could be accomplished but it's tricky (tethering a blimp to the ground might work, but the amount of helium needed would be prohibitive (considering you have to hold up a miles-long tether strong enough to hold a power plan in place!)
I love the way Fossil Fuel impact is so well understood that this article can cite what percentage impact wind power represents... last I heard the models were all based on the following logic: the sun (according to fairly accurate ice and vegitation records) fluctuates a certain amount and generates a certain measurable impact on the historical climate. Plotting that forward, it diverges around the 60s where the climate starts to warm more than could be explained by that particular solar model. The rest is considerd to be solely the result of human activity, and specifically fossil fuels.
So, the next time you hear someone cite a hard number with relation to global warming or human impact on temperature ask them to what extent they're accounting for the impact of forest fire prevention and the fact that since around the 60s forest fires have burned much hotter than before, igniting materials like tree crowns and permafrost that release millions of tons of CO and CO2 into the atmosphere. Also, ask them what the impact of the increased solar flare activity since around the 60s has been and how that compares to the geological record of solar flare activty (there is none). While you're at it ask about the rate of decline of algae populations since the last ice age, and how much data they have on that.
Bottom line: our planet is a higly complex system which we do not understand. I agree with the moderate environmentalists who say, essentially, better safe than sorry. I do think there are certain things we can do that caution dictates we SHOULD do. However, throwing around percentages as if we understood the sytems that they are based on is absurd and misleading.
Personally, I've always wondered about dams. Water vapor is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO or CO2, and dams increase the surface area of our waterways. What does this do to evaporation and how does that affect the climate?
And using zombies to do the hashing has a point as well, although the author points out that loading the zombies with additional work isn't such a bad thing after all.
NO! You're falling for it.
By assigning a price, you letitimize spam. Yes, you eliminate the bottom-feeders, but the folks who now have to spend large amounts of money to see a return are going to have to make their business scale better. You're weeding out the week in favor of the strong... did you think this would prevent spam? On the contrary! It will do the following things:
1. Legitimize spammers, increasing their customer base
2. Force businesses to spam more effectively
3. Put pressure on hardware makers by making spammers their biggest customers
4. Increase the risk that valid mail which doesn't play ball will be lost
Get ready... if hashcash takes off, spam will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Exactly. Python and Perl are not really competitors in the strictest sense. They both build on each other. In many ways, I think Larry would have made some of the choices that Python did, had he started out in the 80s knowing what he knows now, and that's evidenced by how much of Perl 6 draws from Python (as well as Ruby, Scheme, LISP, Smalltalk, C++ and Java).
Of course, the basic approaches to language design follow different philosophies (Perl's is one of inclusion, Python's is one of exclusion... both are valid). But I think in the final analysis both will be first-class citizens of the high-level language world for a long time to come, and the cooperation fostered by Parrot's runtime will help to ensure that.
ESR's problem with Perl is (and I've spoken to him at length about this) that it is easy to write bad code. I don't think there are many Perl programmers who would disagree with that. ESR's solution is to use Python. Valid choice. My solution (and that of many Perl programmers) is to write clean code, maintain it through CPAN and make sure Perl 6 makes it easier to write cleaner code. Again, a valid choice.
There are some great features for better one-liners in Perl6, though overall the language is not favoring them. I'm especially happy with the word-matching features (e.g. $x ~ m:word/a b c/ will match a, b and c with any whitespace separating them). Also nice will be the hyper- and pipeline-operators which will give new power and speed to Shwartzian Transforms.
Rules will come in handy for quick-and-dirty one-liners as well. For example:This is not much different from the Perl5 ability to pre-compile a regexp into a scalar and then intepolate it into a larger regexp (since you're not taking advantage of any of the features of the grammar engine in the example), but it does give us a cleaner framework for this sort of thing.
you missed my followup, where I make exactly this point. It was a typo.
sorry, I goofed. I meant to make it clear that those two definitions are mutually exclusive, and instead I made it sound like I was stating them both as THE definition. Sorry.
I don't buy your definition. I've heard many an author try to define his own genre, and with absolutely no exception they've all been fairly obvious attempts to retrofit the genre to fit their work.
The definition of science fiction is, quite simply, that which a majority of the public calls science fiction.
Yes, this means the definition changes over time. It also means that your definition and mine might not agree and we can both be right or both wrong.
Personally, I'm in the camp of intent. If you intend to write science fiction, then that's what you're writing. This means that no matter how science fiction-like the magical realism stuff may look, it's not because that's not what the author is writing.
Why do I hold to this definition? Because it's the only one that removes the reader's bias for what is and is not valid science and is immutable over time. It also favors the current trend of authors who are good enough to have a shot at being noticed in the literary world, bailing from the SF ghetto while continuing to write speculative works (e.g. magical realism).
If you prefer a different definition, have at it, but mine works for me.
Raising minimum wage
Minimum wage is a red herring and has been for decades. The minimum wage is, for all intents and purposes, tied to inflation, but only when measured over the long haul. Republicans and Democrats both get tremendous political captial by slinging mud at each other over this "safe" issue. The Democrats demand a huge increase, the Republicans demand no increase. In the end they compromise on a figure that just happens to match inflation.
In the recently Republican-controled congress this has broken down a bit. The Republicans are sort of lost in that they know an increase is required, but they've never had to use their own votes to pass one. This is just a re-adjustment to the new norm, and you'll see the rate go up soon enough.
Issues of "safety" vs "freedom"
Both parties couldn't be less interested in either one. I know of only one congressman who is actively outraged by the concept of extraordinary rendition a bi-partisan concept introduced by Clinton and expanded by Bush whereby suspected terrorists, drug dealers or anyone we can shoe-horn into a dangerous sounding category can be exported to a country where tourture is legal for "questioning". Still like your party?
Various moral issues
No matter how you slice your morality, both Republicans and Democrats have worked hard to flaunt it. Concepts like the one I describe above are just the easiest examples. International influences being allowed to buy executive favor (Clinton, Bush), sex in the oval office (Clinton), drug-running for international influence (Bush Sr.), wholesale invasion of sovreign nations without cause (Reagan, Bush Sr, Clinton, Bush).
The last president with any morality whatsoever was Carter, and Congress was so terrified by this that they wouldn't work with him on a single issue. Then again, I'll take an ineffectual president over one that can "get things done" like Carter's successors.
I'm so tired of this. Every time the IOCCC winners are announced someone has to go off on how unmaintainable the code is.
For those who are unable to grasp the point, I'll say it slowly: this code is written by people who understand C well enough to twist it into any shape they please. Of course, they could write clean, maintainable code, but then they would LOSE the competition. The goal is to write obfuscated code.
The IOCCC is an expression of source-code as art in a compettitive forum. If that isn't your cup of tea, don't hurt your brain by reading the submissions.
There really aren't many choices. The current regular expression syntax is the only form I've seen tried, with only minor variation.
as he has done somewhat with the Perl 6 expressions
Perl 6 regular expressions have almost exactly the same syntax as Perl 5. The parts that are new are not regular expressions. Cosmetic differences (like [] vs <[]> are fairly ignorable syntactically. It would be like saying that Perl 5 will use
All of the inline comments and whitespace are part of Perl 5 extended expressions, though the word-matching on whitespace is new to Perl 6.
POSIX on the other hand ignored most of that historic syntax and instead chose their horribly bloated keyword syntax.
That's not really part of the regular expression syntax. Having [[:digit:]] as an alias for Perl's \d is hardly a different syntax so much as sugar. The fundamentals of POSIX regular expressions are the fundamentals of all modern regex syntaxes:
- alphanumerics are literals
- backslash is a character escape
- parens are used for grouping
- *, +, ? and {} are repeat count specifications
These are the fundamentals of Perl regular expressions, POSIX, and all of the other modern regular expression engines and in turn have only a few small differences from the basic regular expressions which Unix started with.I've often thought that the ease with which regular expressions can be accessed within per was a blessing and a curse. So many people like yourself seem to think that Perl championed regular expressions, when in fact it just followed AWK's lead in integration between C and Ken Thompson's regular expression implementation (which in turn inspired the version that was written from scratch by Henry Spencer and used by Larry for Perl).
If you have a new syntax in mind, I suggest introducing it and seeing how it does. Modern regular expressions are an incremental improvement on classical set notations, and have served us well to date, but I'm sure someday someone will see a better way.
I misspoke. Ponie is perl 5 on Parrot, not Perl 6.
Perl 6 will probably not be faster than boost, but keep in mind that you also gain the power of a fully dynamic programming language in Perl 6's rules. Rules act as closures and can also contain Perl 6 code. Hypothetical variables are really going to blow people's minds (I know they took me a while to grasp, and when I did, I just sat around saying "wow" for a while :-)...)
Reasons to convert to Ponie (Perl 6 on Parrot):
Reasons to convert from Ponie to Perl 6:
Perl chose a keystroke-efficent syntax that makes [regular expresssions] unreadable
No, it most certainly did not. Regular expressions as they exist in Perl today are a direct descendant of POSIX regular expressions which derive from the original work done by Ken Thompson (which resulted in the grep program, which stands for "global regular expression print"). That syntax further dates back to the giants in the field of computational theory, and was specialized only slightly for text matching.
grep, awk, sed, ed, vi, emacs, and dozens of other programs and languages for Unix used this notation before Perl came along and adopted it, so let's not pretend that this syntax is somehow Perl's doing.
The extended regular expression syntax of today IS perl's doing and in almost all cases it has been a process of making regular expressions both more powerful and more readable, culminating in Perl6's rule syntax which is highly readable by comparison.
The
As soneone summarized one of my other posts: Sturgen's Law.
Specficially, you are looking at everything that is on television today and comparing it only to the television that you remember because it was good enough to maintain a niche in our culture. Go look at Knight Rider and consider that for the time it came out it was reasonably well filmed television and slightly above average SF. It hurts just to say that, but it's true.
Reality TV got you down? Go watch some Candid Camera or America's Funniest Home Videos. It really has been this bad for decades. Some of the things that have graced the small screen over the years would turn your stomach.
Today, shows like The West Wing (yes, even post-Sorkin, though it's gone a long way down-hill), Lost, Veronica Mars, The Daily Show and South Park are orders of magnitude better than the crap I was watching on prime-time television while growing up. These shows are still not nearly as good as they could be, but I take heart in the state of the art. Nova isn't what it once was, but it's still good. Brittish TV is starting to invade again. Inside the Actor's Studio is often more enlightening in an hour than any 30 hours of E! and Tech TV is occasionally useful.
So what's to complain? Set up your TiVo and record what you like. Of course, you should ignore the crap. That's what a TiVo is for!
Great, so you've solved your own problem. Nicely done.
I don't see a problem with convergence in anything that you've said (actually, it sounds like a advertisment).
But even in that case I consider it to be an inaccurate term
You are arguing with Stephens over the defintion of the term TCP/IP... this is like watching a guy walk up to John Glenn and say, "you sir, have no idea how hard it is to get into space."
Please, just stop. We've all been through the TCP/IP thing. Yeah, it sounds wrong when you know how the protocols are structured. Yeah, it's convention. Whatever.
I'm spending too much time on the X-Files here... suffice it to say that almost none of the show had anything to do with space, spacecraft or aliens, even though there was a thread running through the show that involved all of the above.
Fandom in general has drawn this arbitrary "Skiffy" vs "Science Fiction" (preferably said with nose up and with a faint hint of a bad impersonation of a Brittish accent... if you're Brittish this might take some practice) line down the middle of the genre, but it's not only abritrary; it's also incosistent.
We look at The Nine Billion Names of God whose only claim to "science" is the fact that a computer is used to print out words on paper. The story is entirely about the mix of eastern mysticism with western pragmatism. The story just recently won the Retrospecive Hugo for its year (53 I think).
Look also at dozens of Twilight Zone episodes (often hailed as a pinical of TV SF) that have nothing at all to do with science.
Look at the science fiction sub-genre of alternate worlds. Nothing at all to do with science.
The science in "science fiction" is not intended to indicate that there is scientific riggor in the stories. In fact, the term was thrust upon the genre by people who wouldn't know a science if they hit one on the highway. It was just a label that classified a genre of speculative fiction. that was inspired by the scientific curiosity of the general public in the early and mid-part of the 20th century. Speculative fiction that deals with topics that are controversial, wierd, absurd or frightening are not dismissed from the genere on that basis alone.
Getting back to the X-Files, of a pair of FBI investigators who have starkly different views on the role of science, skepticism and faith in their work seems fertile ground for science fiction, and indeed it was. The first three years of the X-Files were some of the best science fiction on television a the time, and they rank well among the classics of the medium. Are they up to the standard of print SF? Not often, no, but as JMS has pointed out, a season of television is around 22 episodes which must be written in about 3-6 months' time. Each episode is roughly novella-length. Any genre produced at that pace will suffer.
Still, X-Files had a lot to say about the advance of technology and our society. I'm ok with that.