Only in your mind, where reality has yet to enter.

| Now this is really ridiculous.

  The joke is on you.  All the time.  Now, get off your arrogant
  ignorance and grow a clue.

| How many misunderstandings on your part did you use as base for
| lengthy tirades alone today?

  None.

Well, you also said this:

| Some languages survive, most die as experiments. Looks like sheer
| darwinism. Nature has achieved a lot by such mechanisms.

This was the point I based my comment on.

| I just don't think it is a good idea to claim the evolution of
| programming languages should stop because there are already good
| languages available.  Even excellent languages fail to attract
| programmers. Then again in some sense lesser are invented in the
| hope to achieve some progress on a broader base of users. This won't
| stop and why should it?

Nobody said anything like this.  If I understood Erik correctly his
point was more or less that new languages are not all that often
necessary if languages themselves can evolve.  Of course there might
be some new concepts that are simply so revolutionary that no current
language can adapt to incorporate them, but if you have a flexible
language, then this situation will be rare and we would probably have
fewer but more powerful languages.  This would be good.

I consider this a valid point and I think that creating completely new
languages is wasteful (nuts, as Erik put it) if you consider the time
spent on reimplementing parsers, compilers, libraries, etc.  If you
have a flexible language you might be able to incorporate new ideas
without reimplementing all this stuff.  This would be good as well.

Boris

--
bo...@uncommon-sense.net - <http://www.uncommon-sense.net/>

Here it is (feel free to use this code any way you like):

(defun SPLIT (delimiter seq
                       &key (maximum nil)
                            (keep-empty-subseqs nil)
                            (from-end nil)
                            (start 0)
                            (end nil)
                            (test nil test-supplied)
                            (test-not nil test-not-supplied)
                            (key nil key-supplied))

"Return a list of subsequences in <seq> delimited by <delimiter>.
If :keep-empty-subseqs is true, empty subsequences will be included
in the result; otherwise they will be discarded.
If :maximum is supplied, the result will contain no more than :maximum
(possibly empty) subsequences. The second result value contains the
unsplit rest of the sequence.
All other keywords work analogously to those for CL:POSITION."

;; DO: Make ":keep-delimiters t" include the delimiters in the result (?).

  (let ((len (length seq))
        (other-keys (nconc (when test-supplied
                             (list :test test))
                           (when test-not-supplied
                             (list :test-not test-not))
                           (when key-supplied
                             (list :key key)))))

    (unless end (setq end len))
    (if from-end
        (loop for right = end then left
              for left = (max (or (apply #'position delimiter seq
                                         :end right
                                         :from-end t
                                         other-keys)
                                  -1)
                              (1- start))
              unless (and (= right (1+ left) )
                          (not keep-empty-subseqs)) ; empty subseq we don't want
              if (and maximum (>= nr-elts maximum))
              ;; We can't take any more. Return now.
              return (values subseqs (subseq seq start right))
              else
              collect (subseq seq (1+ left) right) into subseqs
              and sum 1 into nr-elts
              until (<= left start)
              finally return (values subseqs (subseq seq start (1+ left))))
      (loop for left = start then (+ right 1)
            for right = (min (or (apply #'position delimiter seq
                                        :start left
                                        other-keys)
                                 len)
                             end)
            unless (and (= right left)
                        (not keep-empty-subseqs)) ; empty subseq we don't want
            if (and maximum (>= nr-elts maximum))
            ;; We can't take any more. Return now.
            return (values subseqs (subseq seq left end))
            else
            collect (subseq seq left right) into subseqs
            and sum 1 into nr-elts
            until (= right end)
            finally return (values subseqs (subseq seq right end))))))

Here are some examples of how you can use this:

CL-USER 2 > (split #\space "word1   word2 word3")
("word1" "word2" "word3")
""

CL-USER 3 > (split #\space "word1   word2 word3" :from-end t)
("word3" "word2" "word1")
""

CL-USER 4 > (split nil '(a b nil c d e nil nil nil nil f) :maximum 2)
((A B) (C D E))
(F)

CL-USER 5 > (split #\space "Nospaceshere.")
("Nospaceshere.")
""

CL-USER 6 > (split #\; "12;13;;14" :keep-empty-subseqs t)

("12" "13" "" "14")
""

CL-USER 7 > (split #\; "12;13;;14" :keep-empty-subseqs t :from-end t)

("14" "" "13" "12")
""

I think this is exactly what you're meant to do in C++.

--
Glauber Ribeiro
theglau...@my-deja.com    http://www.myvehiclehistoryreport.com
"Opinions stated are my own and not representative of Experian"

glauber

--
Glauber Ribeiro
theglau...@my-deja.com    http://www.myvehiclehistoryreport.com
"Opinions stated are my own and not representative of Experian"

Of course this problem doesn't exist in Lisp.

The other thing C++ gives us is it makes obsolete the C preprocessor. The
preprocessor is C's macro language. It's very useful, but it's also an
ever-present source of errors and unreadable code (see CLISP).

Unfortunately, C++ extended the domain of C to things that are better handled
by a higher-level language like Lisp. By trying to be all things to all
people, it became so complex that few people actually understand all of it,
and commercial compilers have only recently caught up with the spec.

Perl is a "little language" (in the sense that Bentley uses this term in
Programming Perls) aimed at making sed, awk and Unix shell programming
obsolete. Think of it as compiled sed with some awk and C thrown in for free.
It's grown a lot in the past few years and now it's almost a real programming
language, but it retained its little language feel. The thing with Perl is,
there is only one implementation, and a lot of people (some even brilliant)
have worked very hard at making that implementation fast. It's hard to beat
Perl in speed. There's also a lot of freely available code of varying
quality. My favourite is the DBI library, which makes it possible to connect
to most of the databases available in a portable way. This is important to
me, because i do a lot of database work. In the  Lisp world, there is an ODBC
library, so at least the Windows world is covered, but Unix is lacking free
Lisp database access.

glauber
--
Glauber Ribeiro
theglau...@my-deja.com    http://www.myvehiclehistoryreport.com
"Opinions stated are my own and not representative of Experian"

I was going to mention two authors now (Tolkein and Le Guin), but I'm
afraid of tripping on a corollary to Godwin's Law.  :)

  This is all in-language stuff.  I don't want to use the language do
  to these things, I want to make it unnecessary to do all the crap
  that C++ requires before it becomes a usable environment.  I mean, C
  has an annoyingly underdesigned main (argc, argv) where you get to
  implement your own command-line argument processor wrong (or at
  least unlike every other program), or use some annoying in-your-face
  implementation of a general option processor that isn't because you
  don't have lambda lists in the language.  In C++, you have to build
  your classes and the way they interact from scratch, because all the
  defaults are wrong and useless.  It's like you live in this world
  where you have to put everything together from loose parts every
  time you need anything, but as soon as you're done, they revert to
  loose parts, and every time you put something together, you have to
  remember how to put it together, because there's no support for
  anything except putting together.  (In Lisp, macros help you keep
  things together.)  Hey, I loved LEGO as a kid, and the new robot
  stuff they do is fantastic, but as a kid, I didn't take everything I
  had built apart every night only to rebuild it slightly differently
  the next day.  If my LEGO buildings and stuff fell apart during the
  night so I _had_ to rebuild everything every day, I'm sure I would
  be almost as unhappy with LEGO as with C++.

| Of course this problem doesn't exist in Lisp.

  No, it isn't, but not "of course".  Lisp is for building things that
  last.  It is this that is out of vogue in the programming world more
  than it is out of vogue anywhere else.  "Innovation", remember?  But
  it takes more than not to remember how you did it the last time to
  be innovative.

Is that what you are saying?

--

On balance, I can reasonably easily kill off the annoying postings,
and benefit from those that are valuable.

When, in 1983, Kurtz became chairman of the ANSI Standard Basic
committee, this was out of he and Kemeny being "Appalled at what had
happened to their language."  Consider that the book they released
on "Back to BASIC" was subtitled "The History, Corruption, and Future
of the Language" :-).

I remember when I first "did BASIC" on PCs in the 1970s that things
like matrix operations, described in the texts on earlier versions,
did not work on the "Spawn of Microsoft." Basically, when the 2 K's
bashed the "Corruption" of BASIC, there was just one main candidate
there responsible for the corruptive changes to the language.

  Sigh.  Can't you read?  IN ORDER TO FEEL ABLE TO EXPRESS THEMSELVES,
  I wrote.  Authors like Tolkien (spelling!) and Le Guin have
  obviously been able to express themselves in an existing language
  without inventing any new languages first.  And what was Tengwar?
  It was not the language Tolkien used to write his stories, was it?
  It was part of the story and the very rich and complete world he
  designed.

  Sometimes I wonder if some of the people who respond to me with some
  idiotic counter-example that isn't are actually devoid of a working
  brain and not just so lazy it looks like they are.  What does it
  take for those of you who lack the ability to think or habitually
  seek ways to avoid it, to grasp something that you do not already
  agree with?  Communicating thoughts to you sure is a waste of time
  when your first inclination is to destroy your ability to understand
  what people are telling you by responding with idiocy.

  I have read about how people can get into this mental state where
  input from the outside world must be blocked before it can be
  processed.  It happens when they have been exposed to something so
  frightening and painful their brain has ceased working as a sort of
  self defense.  This is supposed to happen in real life to have that
  effect, because it must happen under uncontrollable conditions and
  progress far beyond the point where brain has said STOP!, so no
  cases have been reported that _read_ themselves into this state, and
  obviously so, because one would have to read and comprehend beyond
  that stop signal.  So how come you behave the same way to something
  you read?  If it is not voluntary brain shutdown, what is it?

  Why are new thoughts to fantastically frightening to some of you
  that you react as if the world were to collapse if you made the
  little effort it takes to consider a contrary opinion or even fact
  at least enough to counter it with a _real_ counter-example?

  Why is it so fantastically important to some of you to reduce
  everything that you do not understand or agree with to silly jokes
  so there is no hope of ever understanding anything new?  That kind
  of "humor" as a self-defense mechanism is also pathological.

  Granted that you are able to read a programming language newsgroup,
  I believe that there is no excuse whatsoever to be so intellectually
  lazy as some of you guys habitually are, and it certainly is no
  accident (like blaming alcohol for a low-quality posting -- how low
  is _that_?) which means you are here to post your drivel on purpose
  and that your intention, to whatever extent you can express intent,
  is to reduce the newsgroup to the level at which you are comfortable
  -- meaning: whatever the intellectually comatose can deal with.  You
  have a TV set to watch if you want that, OK?  You do not need the
  Net if you are looking for one-way idiotic "humor" -- you'll feel
  better with the canned laughter instead of laughing alone, too.  If
  you think you have out-grown Jerry Springer or Ricky Lake, please
  try them again and leave the newsgroup alone.

  Do something that fits your inellectual level, Xenophon Fenderson
  the Carbon(d)ated.  Your posting under that label means I have no
  idea what could possibly be your level, but I'd recommend one of the
  k12 groups.  I'm sure they would have even more fun with your "name"
  than you have.

  No, you'd have to do a lot more than just become "knowledgeable"
  before you were excused.

  Was that what you were asking?

  Why do you assume that the misspeller would pronounce it right?

  Why not just assume that the misspeller didn't care to check that he
  spelled it correctly?  It is impossible not to make typos one way or
  the other, but caring about the result requires that we at least go
  over it afterwards to see if it _looks_ right.

  Blaming the English spelling system for spelling mistakes is a sure
  sign of a careless dolt who never _wanted_ to get his spelling right.

  A book to recommend to people who care about spelling is Marilyn Vos
  Savant: The Art of Spelling, ISBN 0-393-04903-5.  From the back
  cover: What kind of speller are you?  Take this instant quiz to find
  out!

  A fair speller will know which of these words are _not_ spelled
  correctly: (1) aquainted, (2) arguement, (3) cantalope, (4)
  congradulate, (5) fourty.

  A good speller will know which of these words are _not_ spelled
  correctly: (1) counterfeit, (2) hygiene, (3) niece, (4) seize, (5)
  accomodate.

  An excellent speller will know which of these words are _not_
  spelled correctly: (1) caterpillar, (2) changable, (3) harrass, (4)
  hemorhage, (5) judgement.

  She writes with a carefree humor that means you will probably want
  to read this book somewhere people aren't likely to consider you a
  lunatic for laughing about English spelling.

Of course I can read.  Whether I rightfully comprehend what I read is
apparently open to debate.  Also open to debate (hopefully in a forum
where this is on topic) is whether the Lord of the Rings would be as
well expressed without the invention of Elvish.  I think not.  Tolkien
(the corrected spelling now added to ispell, thanks) set up the Lord
of the Rings (and even more so, the Quenta Silmarillion) as a kind of
archaeological find, and his published stories were "merely"
translations.  The invented languages added a color to the stories
that I had never experienced before.  Without this coloring, perhaps
the story is just as good, but not, I think, as believable or
enjoyable.

Or maybe I'm playing a game of definitions with you, Erik.  Is English
without punctuation still English, or something else?  The poet e e
cummings decided that he couldn't express himself correctly with
punctuation, so he did away with it.  Or "is free verse still poetry?"
I think so, but I'm no literary critic.  And so the discussion goes
further afield.

Or maybe the deep understanding of language (all language) that makes
it possible to invent new ones makes it possible to express oneself
well in one language in particular?  But that's straying from the
topic at hand and the rest of you probably prefer not to hear me
ramble.

    Erik>   Sometimes I wonder if some of the people who respond to me
    Erik> with some idiotic counter-example that isn't are actually
    Erik> devoid of a working brain and not just so lazy it looks like
    Erik> they are.

You said, `There are people who have to design their own alphabets or
spellings in order to feel able to express themselves, but I think we
label them "insane" rather than applaud them as "language designers".'
Several excellent authors have done just that, including Tolkien, Le
Guin, C. S. Friedman (in her Coldfire trilogy and especially in _This
Alien Shore_), to name a few within reach, and if the term "insane"
has crept into their labels, it is because they are "insanely great".

I now make the assumption (and feel free to comment on the validity of
same) that these authors "design[ed] their own alphabets or spellings"
because they felt that this was the best possible way of expressing
themselves (vis. to tell their stories), that to not do so would
somehow be inadequate.  I assume this because I sincerely doubt these
critically-acclaimed authors would do less than their best.

(I think this is a valid counter example of your initial comment, but
I will confess that I don't remember the differences among counter
examples and contra examples and inverses and reverses and so on and
so forth, so I'm very probably wrong.  Any suggestions on a good
discrete math book?  My one copy was destroyed in a house fire some
time back.)

Again, my apologies to the newsfroup for going off topic.  Too many
people talk about Tolkien (again, spelling noted), so much so that I
think one would be justified in adding a corollary to Godwin's law
that made comparisons with Nazis, Star Trek, Star Wars, Tolkien, and
D&D cause one to immediately lose a Usenet debate, regardless of
correctness.  Obviously, my joke "I'm afraid of tripping on a
corollary to Godwin's Law" was funnier inside my head than posted to
this newsgroup, a frequent problem of mine (i.e. laughing hysterically
at something, while most people look on in confusion).

    Erik>   Why is it so fantastically important to some of you to
    Erik> reduce everything that you do not understand or agree with
    Erik> to silly jokes so there is no hope of ever understanding
    Erik> anything new?  That kind of "humor" as a self-defense
    Erik> mechanism is also pathological.

It's _all_ a Joke, but by God you'll NEVER "get" the punch-line!

    Erik>   Do something that fits your inellectual level, Xenophon
    Erik> Fenderson the Carbon(d)ated.  Your posting under that label
    Erik> means I have no idea what could possibly be your level, but
    Erik> I'd recommend one of the k12 groups.  I'm sure they would
    Erik> have even more fun with your "name" than you have.

It's just some random name on Usenet.  Why does it bother you so much?
It's not like I'm trying to hide my identity or anything, as it is
trivial to look up my complete contact information on the Internet,
using just that name.  In fact, "Xenophon Fenderson, the
Carbon(d)ated" is so completely ridiculous that even I don't take it
seriously, so please, don't give yourself a coronary over some
wannabe's nome de plume.

What I think is even more ridiculous is that I've wasted over an hour
crafting this reply to you, Erik, all to justify myself in (obviously)
my own eyes (you sure aren't going to agree with any of this drivel,
and hopefully the rest of this newsgroup will ignore me).  Maybe next
time I will be more mature and decide that I would really rather be
hacking on some choice bit of code than arguing with you over the
esoteric.

  Why are you carping on the wrong point if you can comprehend what I
  uppercased for you?

| Or maybe I'm playing a game of definitions with you, Erik.

  Yeah, I think you're playing games, all right.  You should be able
  to join the special olympics any day, now.

| You said, `There are people who have to design their own alphabets or
| spellings in order to feel able to express themselves, but I think we
| label them "insane" rather than applaud them as "language designers".'
| Several excellent authors have done just that,

  No, they haven't.  Plain and simple.  They were able to express
  themselves _fully_ without inventing their own languages first, and
  then went on to do language design.  You seem dead set on missing
  the point so that you can keep up this charade of yours.  Quit it.

  If you cannot even grasp that there are people who fall into a very
  different category than your insipid insistence on authors, all your
  games prove is that you aren't able to think outside of your silly
  prejudices.  How interesting is _that_ to show people?

| Again, my apologies to the newsfroup for going off topic.

  Really?  You were somehow _forced_ to do this?  Man, you idiots give
  ma a lot of power over you that I never even wanted to have.  Now I
  wonder, how can I put this to productive use?

| It's _all_ a Joke, but by God you'll NEVER "get" the punch-line!

  Had it not already occurred to you that you aren't funny to anyone
  but yourself?  Yes, you're a joke all the way.  Don't you think
  people "get" this?  What if you're a stupid joke, so stupid that
  it's downright _annoying_?  How long will you laugh when annoying
  people?  And what's the difference between _your_ "it's a joke!" and
  any other annoying pests on the Net who claims to have been joking?

| It's just some random name on Usenet.  Why does it bother you so
| much?  It's not like I'm trying to hide my identity or anything, as
| it is trivial to look up my complete contact information on the
| Internet, using just that name.  In fact, "Xenophon Fenderson, the
| Carbon(d)ated" is so completely ridiculous that even I don't take it
| seriously, so please, don't give yourself a coronary over some
| wannabe's nome de plume.

  Look who's bothered into defending himself.  Sheesh, dude.

| What I think is even more ridiculous is that I've wasted over an
| hour crafting this reply to you, Erik, all to justify myself in
| (obviously) my own eyes (you sure aren't going to agree with any of
| this drivel, and hopefully the rest of this newsgroup will ignore
| me).  Maybe next time I will be more mature and decide that I would
| really rather be hacking on some choice bit of code than arguing
| with you over the esoteric.

  Good, then I have at least accomplished _something_.

--

  I have heard people mispronounce Tolkien even after being corrected
  exactly the same way some people insist on misspelling some words
  even when corrected.  Considering the bewildering mess of British
  (especially) dialects, I fail to see how it is even possible to talk
  about one way to _pronounce_ something "correctly".

| I wasn't assuming anything of the sort; I was trying to explain why
| people who can't be bothered to check their spelling tend to
| misspell words like "Tolkien" but spell other words that are equally
| uncommon correctly.

  People who can't be bothered to check their spelling will produce
  random spellings if left to themselves and there's no point in
  explaining their behavior beyond just "sloppiness".  "How to go
  wrong if you don't care what you're doing" is not a particularly
  interesting thing to discuss, is it?

  I find it much more interesting that people who are conscientious
  about most things still make spelling mistakes at times.