I suspect the earth's gravitation would tend to focus any near misses of earth right at the moon's little hidey-hole. Good day to be on the far side of the moon, though you might have to duck a few flying boulders from the near side.
Well, you can figure it out. The impact time is roughly 9:30 UTC which is about noon in Alaska. It's coming from outside the earth's orbit, so whatever is on the other side from Alaska is the target. I make it somewhere between Iraq and India, give or take half a planet.
Um, hate to point this out, but China/India is the side of the earth it's aimed at, by my reckoning. The safe place appears to be the USA this time around. And the far side of the moon, maybe. (Though I think due to the earth's gravitational lensing the moon may be almost as likely a target as the earth, since it's almost directly downstream from the direction the rock is coming from.)
The intent is that grammars default to recursive descent, but that it be possible to ask for various kinds of optimizations via pragma. The grammar for parsing Perl 6 itself will be a hybrid between top-down and bottom-up techniques to maximize both speed and flexibility.
As always, that will depend on who is trying to do the distinguishing, and more importantly on whether they're actually trying at all. People who do try generally don't have much problem with Perl 5, and Perl 6 will be much improved in that respect.
Nah, you haven't figured out yet when the tail should wag the dog. In Perl culture, if you're gonna go and rename something because it's inaccurate or unwieldy, you have to have the hubris to come up with a new name that is shorter and handier. That's how "associative arrays" turned into "hashes" in Perl 5. And if you were up on Perl 6, you'd already know that "regular expressions" are turning into "rules" (though people are still allowed to say "regex", of course). While Perl likes technological hacks, Perl loves cultural hacks.
Of course there was a year 0. It's also called 1 BC. And year -1 was 2 BC. And so on. It's not our numbering that's screwed up, it's those BC dudes--and they lived a long time ago.
And for every way to do it in Perl, there are fifty or a hundred different ways to do it in the outside world. Now you know why Perl is so popular--it's actually a simplification of the outside world.
So if you find Perl confusing, I wonder what you think about everything else out there that Perl is synopsizing...:-)
Any body is massive enough for its own gravity to form it into a spheroid if it has ever been close enough to the sun for some major component of it to melt...
...it feels like the language is expanding in every possible direction at the same time, and in the most complex way possible.
No, it's expanding in every possible direction in the simplest way possible.:-)
Seriously, there
are pages and pages and pages of rambling explanations for changes to
something already solid and useful, like regular expressions (which
are already fairly complex as it is).
Yes, and your average regex in Perl 6 will be a lot simpler.
Perl 6 is all about throwing out the unnecessary complexity in
order to map the complexity of the problem onto the complexity of the
solution more efficiently.
There are some gems in there,
but do we really need it *all*?
Of course not. Nobody needs it all. I've never even used all
of Perl 5. But all the bits we're putting in will make someone
somewhere deliriously happy, because we've "matched the impedance"
of the solution and the problem. And we're trying really hard to
hide the bits that you don't have to know about upfront.
Do you have all the manpages on your system memorized? Do you expect to?
Perl's always been a language you can learn "small end first". That's
not going to change.
Perl 6 is already coming across as
much more complex than any language I've seen...
Then obviously you've never seen English.:-)
...this seems like a classic case of going off and attacking
a major problem (a general, high-performance VM), before you really
understand what it's for.
More like digging a tunnel through a mountain from both ends. When
two groups are working hard on converging at the same point, they
can usually work things out, one way or another. And the Parrot
guys do understand pretty much what Parrot is for, or they would have
just gone off and used an existing VM.
But Parrot's problems are small compared to
the language's, and Perl 6 could come to fruition without Parrot. The
Mozilla team seemed way off track for many years, but they eventually
pulled together a good product (Firefox), in the end.
Our intent is not to come up with the language you'll use in six
months, but the language you'll use in ten or twenty years.
To that end, we've intentionally bitten off way more than any one
person can chew. And we're just gonna keep gnawing on it till
the thing is digested, and easily digestible by others.
Eh? No, Perl 6 is limiting itself strictly to Latin-1, even though many of these Unicode characters are easily typable in, say, vim. But forms are not a part of core Perl 6, so they can do whatever they like (or more precisely, whatever Damian likes).
I recommend they just wrap up whatever concepts they have now and start moving toward an alpha.
Which is precisely what we've been doing for some time now. Apocalypse 12 will be out very shortly, and it will look like a lot of new concepts,
but they're mostly concepts we've been aiming at
for a long time now. Get this through your noggin--it's not the conceptualizing that's the hard part. The "wrapping up" is where almost all the effort goes, because that's where the hard work of design is. Anybody can come up with a list of new features. We've had the RFCs for three years, and you know what a mess they were...
We're still working on it, but we're having the dangdest time getting the syntax anywhere near close. It seems people would rather write beautiful programs in an ugly language than ugly programs in a beautiful language.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect the earth's gravitation would tend to
focus any near misses of earth right at the moon's little hidey-hole. Good day to be on the far
side of the moon, though you might have to duck a few flying boulders from the near side.
I meant 21:30 UTC. Durn 24-hour clocks...
Well, you can figure it out. The impact time is roughly 9:30 UTC which is about noon in Alaska. It's coming from outside the earth's orbit, so whatever is on the other side from Alaska is the target. I make it somewhere between Iraq and India, give or take half a planet.
Um, hate to point this out, but China/India is the side of the earth it's aimed at, by my reckoning. The safe place appears to be the USA this time around. And the far side of the moon, maybe. (Though I think due to the earth's gravitational lensing the moon may be almost as likely a target as the earth, since it's almost directly downstream from the direction the rock is coming from.)
On the other hand, given current trends in TV fare, Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister won't have to change its name.
Sorry, guess again. Larry never posts AC--he has a policy against anything remotely resembling astroturfing.
The intent is that grammars default to recursive descent, but that it be possible to ask for various kinds of optimizations via pragma. The grammar for parsing Perl 6 itself will be a hybrid between top-down and bottom-up techniques to maximize both speed and flexibility.
As always, that will depend on who is trying to do the distinguishing, and more importantly on whether they're actually trying at all. People who do try generally don't have much problem with Perl 5, and Perl 6 will be much improved in that respect.
Nah, you haven't figured out yet when the tail should wag the dog. In Perl culture, if you're gonna go and rename something because it's inaccurate or unwieldy, you have to have the hubris to come up with a new name that is shorter and handier. That's how "associative arrays" turned into "hashes" in Perl 5. And if you were up on Perl 6, you'd already know that "regular expressions" are turning into "rules" (though people are still allowed to say "regex", of course). While Perl likes technological hacks, Perl loves cultural hacks.
If you assume that languages can't scale both up and down simultaneously, please don't try to design any computer languages near me. Thank you.
Lawn chairs are fine, but in actual fact, kitchen sinks are more useful.
Of course there was a year 0. It's also called 1 BC. And year -1 was 2 BC. And so on. It's not our numbering that's screwed up, it's those BC dudes--and they lived a long time ago.
So if you find Perl confusing, I wonder what you think about everything else out there that Perl is synopsizing... :-)
Any body is massive enough for its own gravity to form it into a spheroid if it has ever been close enough to the sun for some major component of it to melt...
No, Larry is personally in favor of letting users add Unicode operators. Big difference.
No, it's expanding in every possible direction in the simplest way possible. :-)
Seriously, there are pages and pages and pages of rambling explanations for changes to something already solid and useful, like regular expressions (which are already fairly complex as it is).
Yes, and your average regex in Perl 6 will be a lot simpler. Perl 6 is all about throwing out the unnecessary complexity in order to map the complexity of the problem onto the complexity of the solution more efficiently.
There are some gems in there, but do we really need it *all*?
Of course not. Nobody needs it all. I've never even used all of Perl 5. But all the bits we're putting in will make someone somewhere deliriously happy, because we've "matched the impedance" of the solution and the problem. And we're trying really hard to hide the bits that you don't have to know about upfront.
Do you have all the manpages on your system memorized? Do you expect to?
Perl's always been a language you can learn "small end first". That's not going to change.
Perl 6 is already coming across as much more complex than any language I've seen...
Then obviously you've never seen English. :-)
More like digging a tunnel through a mountain from both ends. When two groups are working hard on converging at the same point, they can usually work things out, one way or another. And the Parrot guys do understand pretty much what Parrot is for, or they would have just gone off and used an existing VM.
But Parrot's problems are small compared to the language's, and Perl 6 could come to fruition without Parrot. The Mozilla team seemed way off track for many years, but they eventually pulled together a good product (Firefox), in the end.
Our intent is not to come up with the language you'll use in six months, but the language you'll use in ten or twenty years. To that end, we've intentionally bitten off way more than any one person can chew. And we're just gonna keep gnawing on it till the thing is digested, and easily digestible by others.
Eh? No, Perl 6 is limiting itself strictly to Latin-1, even though many of these Unicode characters are easily typable in, say, vim. But forms are not a part of core Perl 6, so they can do whatever they like (or more precisely, whatever Damian likes).
I think your argument is that Perl 5 is too sloppy for programming-in-the-large. Perl 6 will make it a lot easier not to be sloppy.
Sure, I remember it. And that's why Perl has formats. Is this a problem for you?
If there is such a law, Perl 6 will break it. Switch statements force you to use $_ implicitly, for instance.
Well, the Python folks thought it was a joke, but the Perl folks have been taking it seriously for some time now.
We're still working on it, but we're having the dangdest time getting the syntax anywhere near close. It seems people would rather write beautiful programs in an ugly language than ugly programs in a beautiful language.
The entire syntax is redefinable, including removing will if you hate it.