The ONLY reason, snot nosed foriegners are able to step foot in America is becuase the half-wit leaders never asked American citizens if foriegners should be allowed in!
Not sure if this is a troll or not; but I'll bite.
The original settlers of the USA didn't even ask before they marched in. Do you feel the "snot-nosed foreigners" who founded your country should have stayed home?
Furthermore, if you treat your friends as criminals, you're not going to have many friends. The US says places like the UK are its allies; it's closest friends. Treating UK citizens as criminals doesn't do much for international relations.
Whilst guests should treat their hosts with respect, the hosts also have a duty to be respectful to the guests.
And with the US deficit so high, and the dollar so low, you'd think the US would need those billions of tourists buying the dollar. Putting up such barriers to tourism seems foolish at best, especially if such barriers would be pretty useless at stopping terrorists.
I have a Japanese friend that demands I take my shoes completely off, so it's not that bad!
I'd rather take off my shoes, than to be treated like a criminal, and fingerprinted, photographed, and my information placed in a permanent record.
Maybe if the record was destroyed after I left, I would be less concerned.
Capitalism gives the poor as much freedom as the well-to-do. There are many stories of self made millionaires, many of whom weren't even "properly educated". Being poor doesn't mean you'll always be poor any more than being rich means you'll always be rich.
That seems a bit naive, doesn't it?
To put it glibly; it's harder to gain money, than to lose it. And many millionaires around today inherited their wealth. Fewer earnt it.
9/11 hijackers all entered the US legally. How the fuck would you feel being trapped on the top of a burning building? Did you see the video of dozens of people jumping to their death to get away from the flames?
Fingerprinting hurts far less.
Interesting. I didn't know fingerprinting could prevent people from flying planes into buildings.
How, pray tell, would fingerprints distinguish a legal visitor who wants to go to disneyland, and a legal visitor who wants to hijack a plane and fly it into a building?
If the hijacker has no previous criminal record, as with 9/11 IIRC, why would this possibly be of use?
I think the biggest success of Linux is as a viable platform for the development of Open Source software. There's nothing stopping you running X11 on another OS, or GNOME or KDE or Bash, or whatever. Just look at Cygwin.
If a better kernel comes along in the future, then it shouldn't be too hard to get X11 running on top of it. Likewise, you don't necessarily need X11 to run KDE, as KDE is based directly on Qt. Everything's layered nicely; a refreshing change from Microsoft's inability to seperate apps from the OS.
The key thing is that the interface ties between of X, GNU, KDE, GNOME, and a lot of other Free software, are very thin indeed.
Sounds more like a name of some diabolical, secret plot to rule the world.
"Launch project Janus!" "You'll never get away with this!" "I already have, Bond! Within minutes, the world will have no choice but to bow to my demands... or face the consequences." "You fiend!"...Maybe I've had too much caffeine recently.
SuSE 9.0, which I'm using now, doesn't suffer from any of the problems listed. My guess is that they'll polish a lot of it up, unless they don't want people to upgrade from 9.1.
But yep, apart from a few interesting features, I couldn't see what was so great about it. I'll probably upgrade when it comes out, though. Assuming all the bugs have been fixed and the quality of the distro is as professional and smooth as usual.
The pop-up ads and banners mentioned was decidedly annoying though. Very, very bad policy, as the article says. I hadn't noticed before, as I've never had a need to visit the portal.
My experience of Computer Science is that it is nearly useless, or at least all I have been taught.
Whilst little emphasis is spent on learning specific languages, the course I'm on still isn't very good. It's effectively all memory. You learn certain skills to answer questions for exams, and then forget about it all afterwards.
Okay, so my course may be the exception, but my experience of it is that it's not so much about computing, as trying to memorise a variety of very computing techniques and knowledge for an exam. In reality, I'm not going to bother learning all that, when it's far more effective just to look up a snippet of information in a book. There are some exceptions, and sometimes good overviews are given. But generally, my course has been solely about memorisation.:(
Meanwhile, the actual art of programming goes untaught. Apart from a few, most people can't code for toffee. They don't know about splitting a problem apart, about making sure code is nice and modular, about the reuse of code and so forth.
Instead, you get people naming their variables things like "box1", "box2", "box3" and so forth, and who can't think their way through simple computing problems. I'm not trying to be elitist; these people are very smart people. They just haven't been taught certain key skills.
And Warwick University is meant to be one of the best in the UK at Computer Science. I'd like to know what measuring stick they were using for that!
(That all said, the CompSci building is very nice; new, shiny and with a lot of Redhat machines to play with.)
As far as the EU, I believe that Japan has a bigger economy than Europe. Even after the EU adds members to make 25 the US economy will still be larger. Growth by acquisition may temporarily give the EU higher numbers in total growth when that occurs. But in the long run that will only hurt the EU's long term growth potential as these new member states are generally very under developed in terms of infrastructure, education, and economic development as well as other less tangible but very important assets like a sense of democratization and entrepreneurship.
Thank you for those links at the end of your post. If you play the adding up game, they prove my point nicely.
Adding up the current 15 EU members, you get a total GDP of $9'630 billion. That's 93% of the US's $10'400 billion, and 2.7 times larger than Japan's GDP.
Considering there's just 7% inbetween the US and the EU in 2003, I fail to see why you think the US is so fantastically far ahead.
Furthermore, if you add the GDPs for the countries set to join the EU-25, you get an EU GDP of $10'471 billion. A slight bit larger than the US GDP, no?
Of course, that small gap is likely to be a bit more. I found this link for the GDPs for world countries in 2002. Check out the difference between the GDPs of the new EU-25 countries from 2002 to 2003.
Hungary had $64 billion in 2002, but $134.7 billion in 2003. Poland had $189 billion in 2002, but $386.1 billion in 2003. The Czech Republic had $70.1 billion in 2002, but $155.9 billion in 2003.
Meanwhile, the US had $10'450 in 2002, and $10'400 in 2003.
Notice that the rate of growth in eastern Europe is amazingly high. It will level off, of course, but low living costs and close proximity to markets in the EU will mean that in the mean time, these countries are booming.
So no, Japan does not have a larger economy than the EU, and there is not that much difference between the EU and US markets. And, as I said before, baring any abrupt change in the economic climate, the EU-25 will be a larger market than the EU.
The new 10 members will probably impact upon the growth of established members, such as France, Germany and Britain, who will have to compete on an equal playing field, but taking the EU as a whole, market growth will probably increase.
I'm not belittling the rest of the world. But rightfully I am claiming that the US has done more to bring the world forward in terms of discovery, development, and freedom that any other. period.
Oh, probably. Britain and other similar countries could probably give the US a close run, but whilst the UK has probably devised more important inventions, the US capatilises on them better.
So yep, I'll agree with you there. As a country, the US has done a lot that it should rightly be proud of.
if you must know the American economy is still the fastest growing major market, by far the largest,
Not as much as you might think. Remember that the EU is a single market. If we're talking countries, then the US is by far ahead of any others. If we're talking markets, it isn't too far ahead of the EU.
Once the EU expands to 25 members, barring any surprise changes in the global market, the EU will be the largest market in the world. Not sure whether you'd count that as "fastest growing", or not, but the EU is almost certainly going to exceed the US in size.
Of course, the average citizen of the EU earns less than the average citizen of the US, and the average earnings for EU-25 will of course be lower still.
But the EU-25 will still be a fair bit bigger than the US, and many eastern europian countries like Poland and Lithuania are growing at a rapid pace. Makes you wonder how the US would respond to such a scenario; having an single economic influence larger than itself (even if it is less coordinated).
Oh, the development of electricity. Don't forget the airplane and the automobile. Uh, and inventing the IC. Do'h, I forgot the high rise building. Oh and a whole host of personal rights, freedoms and privileges. Oh, the telephone, modems, ethernet and the internet.
The "development of electricity" wasn't confined just to the US. Look at Faraday or Tesla. The automobile was pushed into mass production by the US, but not invented by a US citizen, to my knowledge. Bell was originally Scottish, even if he did go over to the US. And IC? Internal Combustion? That's hardly a US invention.
In any case, I fail to see your point. Many countries have contributed a lot to modern life. Take Britain. Where would we be without: - Electric motors/generators - Trains - Jet Engines - Television - Computers - The World Wide Web - Steam Engine - Electromagnet - Fax machines
British inventors got there first, but that doesn't mean that such things would never have been invented. I mean, the English had Collosus first, but the USians developed ENIAC independantly.
Likewise, if the US didn't invent, say, ethernet, then it probably would have been made elsewhere.
The US has a lot to be proud of. But don't belittle the rest of the world.
That could get ugly. What if one wanted to have an if-elseif-elseif-elseif-elseif-else?
(i == 1) ?? echo Option One:: (i == 2) ?? echo Option Two:: (i == 3) && echo Option Three
Hm. Well, not too bad, I suppose...
As for referencing executables, it would be nice if they could be refered to in a scalar context (which would output the return value) or a list context.
"rc" is the shell that Kernighan, Pike, Ritchie, and the rest developed for Plan 9. It's like a cleaned up and simplified descendent of Bourne with a piquant hint of smalltalk.
Oh! That sounds certainly very interesting. From what I've read, Plan 9 has done a lot of things right, at least from a structural point of view.
Ah, I see why you're making it smell a bit like Perl, you're implementing it in Perl. You probably want to look at the languages Perl was intended to replace, like awk.
Nice guess, but incorrect. Whilst Perl would have possibly been a more sensible solution, I'm constructing it in C++. Largely to show that I can; after all, this is a project where I'm meant to be showing off technical skill. I use readline for input, Bison to parse, and make heavy use of the STL. Documentation comes from doxygen. Unit testing is handled by CppUnit, a JUnit clone.
In this case, I'm making use of C++ namespaces to make things neat and tidy. All the classes that build the parse tree are in the namespace "Parser".
As for the syntax, I think that if the syntax is too complex for a simple recursive descent parser it's probably too complex. Doesn't mean you have to implement it in one, but it's worthwhile keeping in mind.
(don't mind me, I've just been hacking on cleaning languages down to the pure skeletons for 25 years)
I'll try to keep that in mind:). I'm a big fan of KISS and the virtue of Laziness in programming, so I'm inclined to agree.
2. I think you're trying to put in too much syntax. I used to do a lot of stuff in DCL, and after a while I got really tired of having the syntax get in the way when I just wanted to run programs.
Only I replace the ugly hack that is my lexer with a nice, simple, finite state automata model, then I can fiddle about with the language all I want.
Happily, the parser just builds up a parse tree out of a set of objects inheriting from Parser::Node. Each node has a set of children, and a run() method, so the actual scripting code is separate from the syntax. So any syntax changes are more or less trivial:)
My shell isn't too different. Only because I was pressed for time to make the presentation, it was easier to make ":" the operator, instead of "..". It doesn't use the "in" operator though.
The "i in" part I don't like. If you're referring to a scalar, you should really refer to it with a $ on the front, to keep the syntax constant. The "in" was dropped to give the user less to write. I am aiming for powerusers, after all:)
myshell$ for(i in {grep '^ma'/usr/dict/words}) {... } myshell$ grep '^ma'/usr/dict/words | for (i) { something $i }
These two examples are interesting...
The {} in your example act in the opposite way to the () in my shell. Essencially:
myshell$ ls | head -1 firstfile.txt myshell$ echo 2 - 1 2 - 1 myshell$ echo (2 - 1) 1
But the {} are a good idea... I'll have to draft up a better formal grammar though, to avoid getting all tangled.
Well, as it stands a GUI editor would be outside the aims of the project. Hard to use a GUI over a SSH session:)
The clipboard idea is interesting though. Once I've got the major things polished off (there are a few rushed bits I need to replace), that could be possible to do. I don't see any problems with having something like that, at least.
I don't think that "C" style syntax is really ideal for a human interface, anyway. The expression syntax is complex, and the control structures aren't well suited to the shell. Have a look at languages like icon, where control flow is largely handled by generators.
Bear in mind the original goal of this shell was to be faster for power-users, who'd probably know a "C" style syntax. Certainly it's more consistant than Bash usually is.
However, I will look into icon:) - my shell's pretty modular, so it shouldn't be hard to change the syntax if needs be. I've rewritten the parser's BNFs several times over.
As for concatenation, I'd suggest using adjacency or "+". makes the lexer simpler.
I thought of that, but there is method to my madness. In effect, one of the main problems is that I wanted to maintain compatability with environmental variables, which are stored as strings.
In my shell, scalars are stored internally as a number or a string, but because I wanted to maintain backwards compatability, all the environmental variables will initially be stored only as strings.
Because no numerical information can be carried across to environmental variables, you either have to accept loss of information, or use a separate concatenation operator. Or try and guess the type of the variable. And I've never been too fond of letting computers guess what I want:)
Interestingly enough, I'm designing a shell for my final project at Uni. This is a pretty useful article, all considering. I was originally designing the system to be more easy to use for powerusers, but perhaps there's a niche for newbies too.
Before, I was concentrating on the syntax of control structures. Like having:
if ($value == 1) { echo hello } for $i (1:10) { echo $i green bottles }
Rather than:
if [ $value -eq 1 ]; do echo hello; fi for i in `seq 1 10`; do echo $i green bottles; done
I could think about adding in a better help system as well. I've got a few months left of design work.
And I need to fix the lexer, too. In a recent presentation, I found a rather embarrassing bug. The concatenation operator in my shell is the same as perl's, the full stop, or period, ".". Cleverly, the shell can also treat numbers as strings and strings as numbers.
Unfortunately, it was all a bit too clever.
The expression 3.0 + 2.0 was parsed as (("3" . "0") + 2) . "0"). Giving 320. Oops!
But given a little more work, maybe I could get it to solve some of the problems mentioned in the article above. Could be an interesting thing to do.
More flexible and better from a usability standpoint.
I'm sure we've all received a call from some hopeless soul whose "screen was half gray" because they accidentally dragged the taskbar halfway up the screen. Thus, Windows XP default theme turns off taskbar dragging by default.
Doesn't render Slashdot correctly (as the sidebars are actually overlapping the text in the main section)
Really? I've never had that problem, and I use Firefox. Nor does that appear to be a common problem, as I've never even heard it mentioned before, at all. So either you've picked up the wrong browser, or something's wrong with your system/configuration.
The toolbars don't drag so I have two toolbars instead of one (I have a 21" CRT, I have plenty of room for the menu and the URL bars)
Right-click and go to "customise". Then drag the components to the top toolbar and turn off the one below. Not as easy as drag-and-drop, but perhaps a little more flexible.
It seems to load pages slower than IE.
Never noticed that, either, though IE might be faster. Not that it matters; the difference between them must be measured in milliseconds whenever I've compared the two.
And when I type it appears that the cursor is actually over the piece of text instead of ahead of it which makes for an annoying black on white bar while you're typing.
Haven't had that problem either. Then again, I'm using Linux at the moment.
But what's on Mars? There's the pioneering spirit, sure, and we could easily reach Mars if we pulled together as a species. But the time and effort needed to actually reach the red planet in such a short amount of time can, currently, be put to better use.
As a software developer, you are better with Gnome or Microsoft than with QT. If all you release is GPL, then it does not matter. If all you ever want to use is GPL, then it does not matter. But if you want to see Adobe Photoshop on Linux, expect your stupid QT license issues to matter, because Photoshop will not be sold with QT.
Other people have pointed out that you may be quite wrong in this assertion, but I'll collect the posts together in one post.
1. Qt is in many ways easier to develop for than GTK+.
2. Adobe is already designing software with Qt. It's likely that any version of Adobe Photoshop for Linux will be Qt.
3. $1500 per year per developer is going to be less than 4% of the amount you're going to pay your employees. If (and I stress the 'if') Qt shaves off more than 4% off the total time of development, compared to how long it would have using GTK+, then Qt works out as a good buy.
4. If you want to develop Microsoft software you need to pay a one-off charge for a Windows license. Only GNOME is 100% free to develop for.
That's not to say that GTK+ doesn't have benefits of it's own. If I were developing a proprietry Linux application, I'd be tempted to look at GTK+, or at least wxWindows, which uses GTK+, if I recall. But the pricing for Qt isn't as big a hurdle as you make out. Any reasonably large company may find Qt cheaper, overall. I'd guess that Adobe, at least, considers it the best choice.
Slashdot Mirror
The ONLY reason, snot nosed foriegners are able to step foot in America is becuase the half-wit leaders never asked American citizens if foriegners should be allowed in!
Not sure if this is a troll or not; but I'll bite.
The original settlers of the USA didn't even ask before they marched in. Do you feel the "snot-nosed foreigners" who founded your country should have stayed home?
Furthermore, if you treat your friends as criminals, you're not going to have many friends. The US says places like the UK are its allies; it's closest friends. Treating UK citizens as criminals doesn't do much for international relations.
Whilst guests should treat their hosts with respect, the hosts also have a duty to be respectful to the guests.
And with the US deficit so high, and the dollar so low, you'd think the US would need those billions of tourists buying the dollar. Putting up such barriers to tourism seems foolish at best, especially if such barriers would be pretty useless at stopping terrorists.
I have a Japanese friend that demands I take my shoes completely off, so it's not that bad!
I'd rather take off my shoes, than to be treated like a criminal, and fingerprinted, photographed, and my information placed in a permanent record.
Maybe if the record was destroyed after I left, I would be less concerned.
Capitalism gives the poor as much freedom as the well-to-do. There are many stories of self made millionaires, many of whom weren't even "properly educated". Being poor doesn't mean you'll always be poor any more than being rich means you'll always be rich.
That seems a bit naive, doesn't it?
To put it glibly; it's harder to gain money, than to lose it. And many millionaires around today inherited their wealth. Fewer earnt it.
9/11 hijackers all entered the US legally. How the fuck would you feel being trapped on the top of a burning building? Did you see the video of dozens of people jumping to their death to get away from the flames?
Fingerprinting hurts far less.
Interesting. I didn't know fingerprinting could prevent people from flying planes into buildings.
How, pray tell, would fingerprints distinguish a legal visitor who wants to go to disneyland, and a legal visitor who wants to hijack a plane and fly it into a building?
If the hijacker has no previous criminal record, as with 9/11 IIRC, why would this possibly be of use?
I think the biggest success of Linux is as a viable platform for the development of Open Source software. There's nothing stopping you running X11 on another OS, or GNOME or KDE or Bash, or whatever. Just look at Cygwin.
:)
If a better kernel comes along in the future, then it shouldn't be too hard to get X11 running on top of it. Likewise, you don't necessarily need X11 to run KDE, as KDE is based directly on Qt. Everything's layered nicely; a refreshing change from Microsoft's inability to seperate apps from the OS.
The key thing is that the interface ties between of X, GNU, KDE, GNOME, and a lot of other Free software, are very thin indeed.
Which is good
Sounds more like a name of some diabolical, secret plot to rule the world.
...Maybe I've had too much caffeine recently.
"Launch project Janus!"
"You'll never get away with this!"
"I already have, Bond! Within minutes, the world will have no choice but to bow to my demands... or face the consequences."
"You fiend!"
SuSE 9.0, which I'm using now, doesn't suffer from any of the problems listed. My guess is that they'll polish a lot of it up, unless they don't want people to upgrade from 9.1.
But yep, apart from a few interesting features, I couldn't see what was so great about it. I'll probably upgrade when it comes out, though. Assuming all the bugs have been fixed and the quality of the distro is as professional and smooth as usual.
The pop-up ads and banners mentioned was decidedly annoying though. Very, very bad policy, as the article says. I hadn't noticed before, as I've never had a need to visit the portal.
My experience of Computer Science is that it is nearly useless, or at least all I have been taught.
:(
Whilst little emphasis is spent on learning specific languages, the course I'm on still isn't very good. It's effectively all memory. You learn certain skills to answer questions for exams, and then forget about it all afterwards.
Okay, so my course may be the exception, but my experience of it is that it's not so much about computing, as trying to memorise a variety of very computing techniques and knowledge for an exam. In reality, I'm not going to bother learning all that, when it's far more effective just to look up a snippet of information in a book. There are some exceptions, and sometimes good overviews are given. But generally, my course has been solely about memorisation.
Meanwhile, the actual art of programming goes untaught. Apart from a few, most people can't code for toffee. They don't know about splitting a problem apart, about making sure code is nice and modular, about the reuse of code and so forth.
Instead, you get people naming their variables things like "box1", "box2", "box3" and so forth, and who can't think their way through simple computing problems. I'm not trying to be elitist; these people are very smart people. They just haven't been taught certain key skills.
And Warwick University is meant to be one of the best in the UK at Computer Science. I'd like to know what measuring stick they were using for that!
(That all said, the CompSci building is very nice; new, shiny and with a lot of Redhat machines to play with.)
As far as the EU, I believe that Japan has a bigger economy than Europe. Even after the EU adds members to make 25 the US economy will still be larger. Growth by acquisition may temporarily give the EU higher numbers in total growth when that occurs. But in the long run that will only hurt the EU's long term growth potential as these new member states are generally very under developed in terms of infrastructure, education, and economic development as well as other less tangible but very important assets like a sense of democratization and entrepreneurship.
Thank you for those links at the end of your post. If you play the adding up game, they prove my point nicely.
Adding up the current 15 EU members, you get a total GDP of $9'630 billion. That's 93% of the US's $10'400 billion, and 2.7 times larger than Japan's GDP.
Considering there's just 7% inbetween the US and the EU in 2003, I fail to see why you think the US is so fantastically far ahead.
Furthermore, if you add the GDPs for the countries set to join the EU-25, you get an EU GDP of $10'471 billion. A slight bit larger than the US GDP, no?
Of course, that small gap is likely to be a bit more. I found this link for the GDPs for world countries in 2002. Check out the difference between the GDPs of the new EU-25 countries from 2002 to 2003.
Hungary had $64 billion in 2002, but $134.7 billion in 2003. Poland had $189 billion in 2002, but $386.1 billion in 2003. The Czech Republic had $70.1 billion in 2002, but $155.9 billion in 2003.
Meanwhile, the US had $10'450 in 2002, and $10'400 in 2003.
Notice that the rate of growth in eastern Europe is amazingly high. It will level off, of course, but low living costs and close proximity to markets in the EU will mean that in the mean time, these countries are booming.
So no, Japan does not have a larger economy than the EU, and there is not that much difference between the EU and US markets. And, as I said before, baring any abrupt change in the economic climate, the EU-25 will be a larger market than the EU.
The new 10 members will probably impact upon the growth of established members, such as France, Germany and Britain, who will have to compete on an equal playing field, but taking the EU as a whole, market growth will probably increase.
I'm not belittling the rest of the world. But rightfully I am claiming that the US has done more to bring the world forward in terms of discovery, development, and freedom that any other. period.
Oh, probably. Britain and other similar countries could probably give the US a close run, but whilst the UK has probably devised more important inventions, the US capatilises on them better.
So yep, I'll agree with you there. As a country, the US has done a lot that it should rightly be proud of.
if you must know the American economy is still the fastest growing major market, by far the largest,
Not as much as you might think. Remember that the EU is a single market. If we're talking countries, then the US is by far ahead of any others. If we're talking markets, it isn't too far ahead of the EU.
Once the EU expands to 25 members, barring any surprise changes in the global market, the EU will be the largest market in the world. Not sure whether you'd count that as "fastest growing", or not, but the EU is almost certainly going to exceed the US in size.
Of course, the average citizen of the EU earns less than the average citizen of the US, and the average earnings for EU-25 will of course be lower still.
But the EU-25 will still be a fair bit bigger than the US, and many eastern europian countries like Poland and Lithuania are growing at a rapid pace. Makes you wonder how the US would respond to such a scenario; having an single economic influence larger than itself (even if it is less coordinated).
Oh, the development of electricity. Don't forget the airplane and the automobile. Uh, and inventing the IC. Do'h, I forgot the high rise building. Oh and a whole host of personal rights, freedoms and privileges. Oh, the telephone, modems, ethernet and the internet.
The "development of electricity" wasn't confined just to the US. Look at Faraday or Tesla. The automobile was pushed into mass production by the US, but not invented by a US citizen, to my knowledge. Bell was originally Scottish, even if he did go over to the US. And IC? Internal Combustion? That's hardly a US invention.
In any case, I fail to see your point. Many countries have contributed a lot to modern life. Take Britain. Where would we be without:
- Electric motors/generators
- Trains
- Jet Engines
- Television
- Computers
- The World Wide Web
- Steam Engine
- Electromagnet
- Fax machines
British inventors got there first, but that doesn't mean that such things would never have been invented. I mean, the English had Collosus first, but the USians developed ENIAC independantly.
Likewise, if the US didn't invent, say, ethernet, then it probably would have been made elsewhere.
The US has a lot to be proud of. But don't belittle the rest of the world.
Under such a syntax one wouldn't be able to use Awk-like concatenation.Instead...At the moment it seems as if the syntax for assignment is uncomfortably similar to the syntax for generators.
Whilst the idea of a keywordless syntax is interesting, it may be disadvantageous. Especially if the syntax gets confusing... I think.
On the other hand, it might be doable.
That could get ugly. What if one wanted to have an if-elseif-elseif-elseif-elseif-else?Hm. Well, not too bad, I suppose...
As for referencing executables, it would be nice if they could be refered to in a scalar context (which would output the return value) or a list context.However, I'm unure how best to modify the syntax to make this possible.
Maybe I'll just go with:Though I wonder if it's possible to make this any neater/smaller/easier to use.
Maybe:That's a possibility.
i=(1:10) {
echo $i
}
($i==10) {
echo "i is 10"
}
That is:
[var=](generator) { block }
Hmm... That sounds pretty interesting too. I still prefer putting a $ in front of all my scalars, though. Call it personal preference, I guess.
How would one distinguish between an "if" and a "while"? Or would while-loops not be in the language?
"rc" is the shell that Kernighan, Pike, Ritchie, and the rest developed for Plan 9. It's like a cleaned up and simplified descendent of Bourne with a piquant hint of smalltalk.
:). I'm a big fan of KISS and the virtue of Laziness in programming, so I'm inclined to agree.
Oh! That sounds certainly very interesting. From what I've read, Plan 9 has done a lot of things right, at least from a structural point of view.
Ah, I see why you're making it smell a bit like Perl, you're implementing it in Perl. You probably want to look at the languages Perl was intended to replace, like awk.
Nice guess, but incorrect. Whilst Perl would have possibly been a more sensible solution, I'm constructing it in C++. Largely to show that I can; after all, this is a project where I'm meant to be showing off technical skill. I use readline for input, Bison to parse, and make heavy use of the STL. Documentation comes from doxygen. Unit testing is handled by CppUnit, a JUnit clone.
In this case, I'm making use of C++ namespaces to make things neat and tidy. All the classes that build the parse tree are in the namespace "Parser".
As for the syntax, I think that if the syntax is too complex for a simple recursive descent parser it's probably too complex. Doesn't mean you have to implement it in one, but it's worthwhile keeping in mind.
(don't mind me, I've just been hacking on cleaning languages down to the pure skeletons for 25 years)
I'll try to keep that in mind
1. Have you looked at 'rc'?
:)
:)
Ummmm... No?
2. I think you're trying to put in too much syntax. I used to do a lot of stuff in DCL, and after a while I got really tired of having the syntax get in the way when I just wanted to run programs.
myshell$ echo $foo
10
myshell$ echo (10 + $foo)
20
myshell$ echo (10 $foo)
1010
Hmm... Looks good... Might use that
Only I replace the ugly hack that is my lexer with a nice, simple, finite state automata model, then I can fiddle about with the language all I want.
Happily, the parser just builds up a parse tree out of a set of objects inheriting from Parser::Node. Each node has a set of children, and a run() method, so the actual scripting code is separate from the syntax. So any syntax changes are more or less trivial
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
myshell$ for(i in 1..10) { echo $i }
1
2
My shell isn't too different. Only because I was pressed for time to make the presentation, it was easier to make ":" the operator, instead of "..". It doesn't use the "in" operator though.The "i in" part I don't like. If you're referring to a scalar, you should really refer to it with a $ on the front, to keep the syntax constant. The "in" was dropped to give the user less to write. I am aiming for powerusers, after all
myshell$ for(i in {grep '^ma'
myshell$ grep '^ma'
These two examples are interesting...
The {} in your example act in the opposite way to the () in my shell. Essencially:But the {} are a good idea... I'll have to draft up a better formal grammar though, to avoid getting all tangled.
Well, as it stands a GUI editor would be outside the aims of the project. Hard to use a GUI over a SSH session :)
The clipboard idea is interesting though. Once I've got the major things polished off (there are a few rushed bits I need to replace), that could be possible to do. I don't see any problems with having something like that, at least.
Bear in mind the original goal of this shell was to be faster for power-users, who'd probably know a "C" style syntax. Certainly it's more consistant than Bash usually is.
However, I will look into icon
As for concatenation, I'd suggest using adjacency or "+". makes the lexer simpler.
I thought of that, but there is method to my madness. In effect, one of the main problems is that I wanted to maintain compatability with environmental variables, which are stored as strings.
In my shell, scalars are stored internally as a number or a string, but because I wanted to maintain backwards compatability, all the environmental variables will initially be stored only as strings.
So, what I wanted is something like:So far so good, right? The "." operator could be replaced with a "+", as you can overload the operator based on the type of the other argument.
But what about:Because no numerical information can be carried across to environmental variables, you either have to accept loss of information, or use a separate concatenation operator. Or try and guess the type of the variable. And I've never been too fond of letting computers guess what I want
Before, I was concentrating on the syntax of control structures. Like having:Rather than: I could think about adding in a better help system as well. I've got a few months left of design work.
And I need to fix the lexer, too. In a recent presentation, I found a rather embarrassing bug. The concatenation operator in my shell is the same as perl's, the full stop, or period, ".". Cleverly, the shell can also treat numbers as strings and strings as numbers.
Unfortunately, it was all a bit too clever.
The expression 3.0 + 2.0 was parsed as (("3" . "0") + 2) . "0"). Giving 320. Oops!
But given a little more work, maybe I could get it to solve some of the problems mentioned in the article above. Could be an interesting thing to do.
Isn't Fedora still in beta, though?
More flexible and better from a usability standpoint.
:)
I'm sure we've all received a call from some hopeless soul whose "screen was half gray" because they accidentally dragged the taskbar halfway up the screen. Thus, Windows XP default theme turns off taskbar dragging by default.
Hm. Very true
Doesn't render Slashdot correctly (as the sidebars are actually overlapping the text in the main section)
Really? I've never had that problem, and I use Firefox. Nor does that appear to be a common problem, as I've never even heard it mentioned before, at all. So either you've picked up the wrong browser, or something's wrong with your system/configuration.
The toolbars don't drag so I have two toolbars instead of one (I have a 21" CRT, I have plenty of room for the menu and the URL bars)
Right-click and go to "customise". Then drag the components to the top toolbar and turn off the one below. Not as easy as drag-and-drop, but perhaps a little more flexible.
It seems to load pages slower than IE.
Never noticed that, either, though IE might be faster. Not that it matters; the difference between them must be measured in milliseconds whenever I've compared the two.
And when I type it appears that the cursor is actually over the piece of text instead of ahead of it which makes for an annoying black on white bar while you're typing.
Haven't had that problem either. Then again, I'm using Linux at the moment.
Off topic, I'm going to pinch a bit of that for my /sig :)
But what's on Mars? There's the pioneering spirit, sure, and we could easily reach Mars if we pulled together as a species. But the time and effort needed to actually reach the red planet in such a short amount of time can, currently, be put to better use.
As a software developer, you are better with Gnome or Microsoft than with QT. If all you release is GPL, then it does not matter. If all you ever want to use is GPL, then it does not matter. But if you want to see Adobe Photoshop on Linux, expect your stupid QT license issues to matter, because Photoshop will not be sold with QT.
Other people have pointed out that you may be quite wrong in this assertion, but I'll collect the posts together in one post.
1. Qt is in many ways easier to develop for than GTK+.
2. Adobe is already designing software with Qt. It's likely that any version of Adobe Photoshop for Linux will be Qt.
3. $1500 per year per developer is going to be less than 4% of the amount you're going to pay your employees. If (and I stress the 'if') Qt shaves off more than 4% off the total time of development, compared to how long it would have using GTK+, then Qt works out as a good buy.
4. If you want to develop Microsoft software you need to pay a one-off charge for a Windows license. Only GNOME is 100% free to develop for.
That's not to say that GTK+ doesn't have benefits of it's own. If I were developing a proprietry Linux application, I'd be tempted to look at GTK+, or at least wxWindows, which uses GTK+, if I recall. But the pricing for Qt isn't as big a hurdle as you make out. Any reasonably large company may find Qt cheaper, overall. I'd guess that Adobe, at least, considers it the best choice.
Linux 2.6.0 looks pretty nice. :D