perl and XEmacs
Joe Davison
David Bakhash wrote:
>
> I was planning to use perl in the following way. Most of emacs
> functions on the notion of buffers, and some buffers have their
> associated filenames. This *does* go well with the filehandle concept
> in Perl, and so was hoping that elisp could leverage off of Perl by
> making use of what's already been done. Suppose I wanted to do a
> search-and-replace like the following on a buffer or region:
>
> s/(darn\s+){2,4}/Damn!/
Uh, doesn't query-replace-regexp do exactly that? The syntax of the regexp
may be slightly different, but I think the capability is there.
--
Joe Davison jwda...@lucent.com
Sure it doesn't work as well as it used to,
but think of all the money we're saving.
Vladimir Alexiev
In article <33F0C496...@netscape.com> Jamie Zawinski <j...@netscape.com> writes:
> Kelly Murray wrote:
> > Why not make everything a stream of BYTES ?
> > Then we can send one programs output BYTES as input BYTES to another
> > program! It works, you can do a lot of stuff with it -- been around
> > now for 20-30 years. Has a few bugs though. BYTE number 4 causes
> > some confusion. BYTE number 0 too. BYTE numbers > 127 seem to cause
> > some bugs too.
> The notion that everything is a stream of bytes is utterly braindead.
Jamie, you gotta learn to recognize sarcasm when you see some. Unless I'm
completely mistaken and Kelly is an idiot.
> > Hmm, maybe if everything was an OBJECT instead, we might get
> > somewhere??
No, he's just being sarcastic.
> The notion that regexps are the solution to all problems is equally
> braindead.
Agreed, but still, having more powerful regexps in emacs won't be bad.
Of course, embedding perl in emacs for only that reason is ridiculous.
> Just like Perl.
What's wrong with perl? To me perl is the triumph of utalitarianism.
Jari Aalto
| sublanguages in one monolithic executable. It combines the power of
| C with the readability of PostScript.
Well; I can't imagine any other language that would allow me to
to do Newsgroup server scan and looking for specific articles by
just few lines of Perl5 OO code. Hey; i can even do batch Http
search on selected URL pointers with handfull of code.
It's simply amazingly powerfull compared to any other language.
And if you comment your code well, it's not that hard to understand
at all.
Cheers!
jari
Les Schaffer
Jamie Zawinski <j...@netscape.com> writes:
> At any time, at any place, our snipers can drop you. Have a nice day.
gee. is this how the 90's are? you write a famous piece of software,
then get hired by a famous company, and then post obnoxious sigs like
that above? Nice. where do i apply for membership?
Les
Jym Dyer
>> What's wrong with perl?
=o= I would say Bourne shell and Lisp, except not really Lisp,
more like awk, and not in a "worst aspects" way, either.
=o= It corrects my one and only complaint about Emacs Lisp, in
that it uses egrep-style regexps instead of grep-style regexps
(hence, no "backslash-itis").
=o= GUILE would win me back over by doing the same.
<_Jym_>
Randy J. Ray
>>>>> "Jamie" == Jamie Zawinski <j...@netscape.com>
>>>>> wrote the following on Tue, 12 Aug 1997 13:16:22 -0700
Jamie> The notion that everything is a stream of bytes is utterly
Jamie> braindead. The notion that regexps are the solution to all
Jamie> problems is equally braindead.
Jamie> Just like Perl.
The two points are valid, and I doubt that anyone in the so-called "higher
ranks" of Perl would try to put these ideas forward. A current interview with
Larry Wall (the creator of Perl) in SunWorld OnLine shows that certainly
doesn't buy into the one-universal-tool theory. But on what grounds do you
label Perl "braindead"? I speak from the standpoint of managing the development
of a product that includes over 50,000 lines of Perl code, a system that has
to run identically and cleanly on more than 5 different architectures, a
requirement that Perl meets very smoothly. I have many tools in my box, Perl is
just one, and for the things it is suited to, it is the best tool. XEmacs is
another, as are Lisp in general, C, various symbolic debuggers, etc.
Jamie> Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know,
Jamie> I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.
The first of which is assuming that one solution fits universally to the whole
set of problems, yes. My guess is, the second problem is an irrational
resistance to new tools and techniques to solve problems.
Randy
--
===============================================================================
Randy J. Ray -- U S WEST Technologies IAD/CSS/DPDS Phone: (303)595-2869
Denver, CO rj...@uswest.com
"It's not denial. I'm just very selective about the reality I accept." --Calvin
Barry A. Warsaw
>>>>> "JA" == Jari Aalto <ssj...@uta.fi> writes:
JA> Well; I can't imagine any other language that would allow me
JA> to to do Newsgroup server scan and looking for specific
JA> articles by just few lines of Perl5 OO code. Hey; i can even
JA> do batch Http search on selected URL pointers with handfull of
JA> code.
Check out Python. It can do all this and more. It might be
minimally more verbose than equivalent Perl, but then you might also
have a hope of reading your own code a month later.
Spider plant breeding program
I like perl. 8-)
Nick
--
#!perl -wlpi[finger.liv.ac.uk] # If it doesn't work see doio.c line ~256
BEGIN{use Socket;$_="YIN;sockeXPZSOCK_STREAM,~proto'tcp'and\$|=connecXpack'S
na4x8',AZ79,\$;=~host qq$^Ior die\$!;print'/w nickc\r'YOUT;print\$^I";s/X/t
STDIN,/g;s/Y/;select STD/g;s/Z/F_INET,/g;s/~(\w*)/get$1byname/g;eval||die}
Ian Miller
Jamie Zawinski wrote:
>
> Perl's nature encourages the use of regular expressions almost to the
> exclusion of all other techniques; they are far and away the most
> "obvious" (at least, to people who don't know any better) way to get
> from point A to point B.
>
The Pattern Extraction and Reporting Language making extensive use
of regular expressions.... now who would have thought it?
> Maybe Java will save the day, once someone straps a Java front end onto
> the gcc back end.
Perl might be an abomination, but at least it's free.
ian
--
+-------------------------------------+---------------------------------------+
| ian miller; research student; |"Train with both heart and soul with- |
| learning agents and systems group; | out worrying about theory. Very often |
| university of aberdeen, scotland. | a man who lacks the essential quality |
+-------------------------------------+ of deadly seriousness will take |
| imi...@csd.abdn.ac.uk | refuge in theory." |
| http://www.csd.abdn.ac.uk/~imiller/ | -- Funakoshi Gichin |
+-------------------------------------+---------------------------------------+
Randy J. Ray
Jamie> The Jargon File defines "brain dead" as
...
Jamie> and brain-damaged as
...
Jamie> Sounds about right to me.
Sounds like a certain GUI application that pretends to be a web browser cum
mail user agent cum newsreader, that spends most of its time making 49 Meg
core dumps on my HP workstation. But then, I'm not running a Micro$oft box,
so I'm not a real concern.
>> I speak from the standpoint of managing the development of a
>> product that includes over 50,000 lines of Perl code,
Jamie> I'm very, very sorry. It must really suck to be you.
Well, I was going to keep this "debate" fairly civil, but if you wish to
resort to sniping, I'd say working for Netscape and criticising other software
as "brain-dead" must really define "living in a glass house".
Jamie> If Perl gets you through the day, great; more power to you.
Jamie> But as a language, and as an application platform, it still
Jamie> sucks.
Compared to what? C? Is that what you rocket scientists are using to code
Netscape? I have a (supposedly) stable release version of NS 3.01, as my
company has a corporate-wide license agreement with NC. This "stable" released
product last week dumped a core nearly 50 Meg in size. What was it doing at
the time? Sitting on my internal (intranet) webserver's home page, a page with
no cutesy animated gifs or such, and Netscape was iconified. *YOU* may wish
to label Perl as braindead, but it is a considerably more stable piece of
software than anything I've seen come out of your company's domain.
Jamie> That doesn't mean that nobody is in the unfortunate situation
Jamie> where Perl is the best solution available to a given problem
Jamie> -- since we're living in the new dark ages of computing, that
Jamie> can easily happen, it happens every day. But that doesn't
Jamie> mean Perl is any less wrongheaded. Just that, sometimes,
Jamie> it's the only game in town.
You still don't explain why Perl is *wrong*. What is *wrong* about it. You
don't like the syntax? None of C, C++, Java or even Lisp are any more
naturally readable to a person new to the language.
Jamie> Personally, I'd like to be hacking in CLOS in the luxurious
Jamie> bucket seats of a highly tuned Lisp Machine development
Jamie> environment. But I don't think that's bloody likely, as I've
Jamie> been hacking C (it's not just a language, it's a grade) for
Jamie> the last six years.
Well, that's nice if it would make you happy, but what if there are people
and companies out here for which a CLOS/Lisp Machine environment is not the
best approach to the problems at hand to be solved? Or do you think that if
CLOS is your hammer, all the world's problems *really are* just nails?
Jamie> Perl's nature encourages the use of regular expressions
Jamie> almost to the exclusion of all other techniques; they are far
Jamie> and away the most "obvious" (at least, to people who don't
Jamie> know any better) way to get from point A to point B.
Yes, the regex engine is one of the strongest features. I'd much rather do any
form of data processing in Perl than Lisp. Maybe programmers with less
experience take simplistic approaches; that doesn't make a language itself
bad. If so, I'd love to see what havoc a novice Lisp programmer can wreak on
the repuatation of Lisp itself.
Jamie> Perl is not *all* bad; just mostly. In its favor, at least
Jamie> it has automatic storage management, lexical scope, and
Jamie> function pointers. But I'd say the bad parts
Jamie> (metastasization of regexps, excessive use of line-noise-like
Jamie> syntaxes for much, and Algoloid syntax for the rest) far
Jamie> outweigh the good parts.
I have no idea to what extent you have evaluated Perl, or to what other
languages and standards you are comparing it. I wouldn't dream of trying the
tasks I am responsible for in Lisp, and they would be very difficult in C
since one of the requirements is an ability to run on 5 or more different
architectures (none of which is a Lisp Machine). It's really kind of insulting
to listen to someone rave on about how flawed Perl is as a language and
development tool. I expect this sort of I-know-whats-best elitism from someone
like Richard Stallman, but I don't accept it from him, either.
Jamie> Maybe Java will save the day, once someone straps a Java
Jamie> front end onto the gcc back end.
Maybe no one language will ever save the day. Maybe we're doomed to have to
always choose from a variety of tools to select the one most suited to the job.
Felix Schroeter
Hello!
In article <uowrabi...@tremere.ecte.uswc.uswest.com>,
Randy J. Ray <rj...@uswest.com> wrote:
>>>>>> "Jamie" == Jamie Zawinski <j...@netscape.com>
>>>>>> wrote the following on Mon, 18 Aug 1997 18:42:07 -0700
> [...]
>Well, I was going to keep this "debate" fairly civil, but if you wish to
>resort to sniping, I'd say working for Netscape and criticising other software
>as "brain-dead" must really define "living in a glass house".
While we are at flaming netscape, I should tell about something much
more annoying than their browser:
:Newsgroups: rec.arts.comics.misc
:Message-ID: <5tkli9$5c...@news.sau.edu>
:From: ne...@saunix.sau.edu
:Approved: ne...@saunix.sau.edu
:NNTP-Posting-Host: news.sau.edu
:Path: mamba.pond.sub.org!ullisys.pond.sub.org!juliet.pond.sub.org!ka.sub.net!blackbush.xlink.net!howland.erols.net!news-peer.sprintlink.net!news-pull.sprintlink.net!news-in-east.sprintlink.net!news.sprintlink.net!Sprint!167.142.225.6!newsrelay.netins.net!news.sau.edu!news.sau.edu
:Date: 22 Aug 1997 18:25:13 GMT
:Organization: Another Netscape Collabra Server User
:Subject: cmsg newgroup rec.arts.comics.misc y
:Control: newgroup rec.arts.comics.misc y
:Lines: 3
:Xref: mamba.pond.sub.org control:90065
:
:
:Control message generated by Netscape Collabra Server.
Those kinds of unsolicited and unauthorized control messages get more
frequent as the number of "Netscape Collabra Server"s increases.
Any questions?! :-E
Regards, Felix.
David Masterson
Jamie Zawinski <j...@netscape.com> writes:
> Maybe someday, the language that practicality makes us settle for will
> also be one that doesn't suck quite so much as the current crop do.
> Maybe we won't be "settling" at all.
>
> I expect this will be about the time we're all buzzing around on jet
> packs, living in automatic houses, and driving nuclear-powered cars.
Or we're all speaking esperanto?
--
David Masterson
da...@batcave.bungi.com
