Reading perl out loud
David Cantrell
When I'm shouting bits of perl code across the room to my colleagues,
I really confuse them. If I shout 'string foo' they type (literally)
'string foo' or something similar when I actually mean '$foo'.
Yes, that's my Bad Old Basic Habits showing through. But what IS the
accepted pronunciation for all those little non-alphanumeric
characters?
--
David Cantrell - http://www.eimages.co.uk/users/davidc/
Chelmsford City FC on the web - http://www.eimages.co.uk/users/davidc/ccfc/
Tom Sorensen
[courtesy cc of this posting sent to cited author via email]
In comp.lang.perl.misc, David Cantrell <da...@diablo.eimages.co.uk> wrote:
>When I'm shouting bits of perl code across the room to my colleagues,
>I really confuse them. If I shout 'string foo' they type (literally)
>'string foo' or something similar when I actually mean '$foo'.
Well, I'd say dollar foo. But see below.
>accepted pronunciation for all those little non-alphanumeric
>characters?
Cut 'n' paste 'n' e-mail.
Alternatively, use a white board. I would never try speaking any programming
language because no matter what language it is, you're bound to run into
English<>computerish problems. (s/English/YourNativeToungue/)
--
Tom Sorensen t...@dogbert.de.sc.ti.com | Fight the CDA |blue|
If I managed to represent TI in this post, then I'm | Responsibility | () |
probably far more surprised than TI is. | Starts at Home | /\ |
Joseph N. Hall
David Cantrell wrote:
> Yes, that's my Bad Old Basic Habits showing through. But what IS the
What we use in class (varies a little from time to time):
$a "dollar a"
$_ "dollar underscore"
@a "at a"
%a "percent a"
<STDIN> "line input from standard in"
<something> "line input from something"
<*> "glob splat"
<*.c> "glob splat dot c"
$a[0] "dollar a sub zero"
$a{"x"} "dollar a sub x"
$a <=> $b "dollar a spaceship dollar b"
-joseph
--
Joseph N. Hall http://www.5sigma.com/joseph/ jos...@5sigma.com
Proprietor, 5 Sigma Productions P.O. Box 6250 Chandler AZ 85246
Perl instruction (http://www.5sigma.com/perl/), C++/C/Perl software,
web stuff, original music >>>Perl questions? mailto:pe...@5sigma.com
Chris Phillips
On Mon, 2 Dec 1996, David Cantrell wrote:
> When I'm shouting bits of perl code across the room to my colleagues,
> I really confuse them. If I shout 'string foo' they type (literally)
> 'string foo' or something similar when I actually mean '$foo'.
>
> Yes, that's my Bad Old Basic Habits showing through. But what IS the
> accepted pronunciation for all those little non-alphanumeric
> characters?
Surely 'dollar', 'percent' and 'at' (sp?) are fine!
Cheers
Chris Phillips
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Department of Physics, Radio Astronomy Group, University of Tasmania
email: Chris.P...@phys.utas.edu.au
Phone: (03) 62202405 (Work), (03) 62485285 (Telescope)
(03) 62278324 (Home), (03) 62202410 (Fax)
Eli The Bearded
David Cantrell <da...@diablo.eimages.co.uk> wrote:
>Yes, that's my Bad Old Basic Habits showing through. But what IS the
>accepted pronunciation for all those little non-alphanumeric
>characters?
While it is not the most portible solution, I have found that
when dictating weird punctuation it is sometimes handiest to
tell people what to type rather than what it is. Other times
I use logical meanings. What works best really depends on the
audience.
An example:
if ($foo < @bar[1]) { "if open paren shift-four foo shift-comma
shift-two bar of one close close paren
open brace"
This relies on me having the keyboard that well memorized, and
that the listener has some idea about good whitespace and what
the syntax means. For a less "well" educated audience I would
sprinkle that with "space" and not assume "of one" would be
understood.
I get annoyed when talking to people who don't know the difference
between a "paren," a "brace," and a "bracket." Similarly I expect
people to know "underscore," "hyphen," "slash," "backslash," "tick,"
"backtick," and "tilde." I am usually willing to define each of
these in terms of what the key is near, assuming I know what
keyboard they are using. The old TVI keyboards with "open brace"
and "close brace" on one key and "open bracket" and "close bracket"
on another get a little annoying. And foriegn keyboards such as
Psions really get annoying.
On the other hand, I don't have to deal with those too often,
and most times in my life I have dictated rather than typed where
those when I had a "partner" for a lab at school. Dictating
vi sessions is probably a reason I am so good at writing macros
for vi now: I have a good sense of what needs to be done without
looking.
Elijah
------
"escape colon x return s return space" (go back to reading in trn)
Jerrad D Pierce
I don't know about accepted but I've always read $ as bucks
(I use BASIC and [gasp] DOS too and it probably shows)
UNIX pronounciations for for some char's:
! bang
# hash (I prefer pound)
That's about it other than the basics...
* star
/ forward slash?
\ back slash?
| pipe
Sorry couldn't be of much help...
Tom Christiansen
[courtesy cc of this posting sent to cited author via email]
In comp.lang.perl.misc,
Jerrad D Pierce <belg...@MIT.EDU> writes:
:I don't know about accepted but I've always read $ as bucks
:(I use BASIC and [gasp] DOS too and it probably shows)
:UNIX pronounciations for for some char's:
:! bang
:# hash (I prefer pound)
Yes, because a hash is something like %ENV.
--tom
tedder
Let me help with an example from the GEEKS-L list.
The following poem is excerpted with permission from Lee Leitner's
"Viewpoint" column which is featured in a bimonthly periodical for Prime
INFORMATION users called INFOCUS magazine. The original authors were Fred
Bremmer and Steve Kroese of Calvin College & Seminary of Grand Rapids, MI.
FYI - a "wahka" is the decidedly "proper" (by popular vote) name for the
characters ">" and "<." This is in spite of INFOCUS readers of Denver
who still refer to them as "Norkies." The Michigan crowd apparently has
corrupted the spelling to "waka."
To wit, it is -
"...a poem we think is about the lowly wahka. Maybe. Well, perhaps--we're
really not sure what the poem actually is about. Here it goes:"
<>!*''#
^@`$$-
!*'$_
%*<>#4
&)../
|{~~SYSTEM HALTED
Transliterated:
Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret at back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat tick dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka number four,
Ampersand right-paren dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket tilde tilde CRASH.
David Cantrell
Jerrad D Pierce <belg...@MIT.EDU> wrote:
>I don't know about accepted but I've always read $ as bucks
>(I use BASIC and [gasp] DOS too and it probably shows)
>UNIX pronounciations for for some char's:
>! bang
># hash (I prefer pound)
What do the words 'one pound' mean? '1#'? No. It means 100 pence,
the price of a lottery ticket, a tube fare from Liverpool Street to
Oxford Circus. To call the '#' symbol 'pound' would lead to even
worse confusion. Imagine if I converted all the #s in my scripts to
Łs, or arbitrarily renaming '#' to other random currencies (like
saying 'peseta' or 'mark' or 'franc') - oh what fun we would have!
So let me see, a comment is anything following a zloty sign, up to the
end of the line ...
>/ forward slash?
>\ back slash?
Even the two slashes seem to confuse some people. Even Novellers and
DOSsers who ought to know better.
David Cantrell
Tom Christiansen <tch...@mox.perl.com> wrote:
> Jerrad D Pierce <belg...@MIT.EDU> writes:
>:# hash (I prefer pound)
>Yes, because a hash is something like %ENV.
'Hash' is what I would say when reading characters out loud. 'A hash'
is what I would say when describing how the code works. I can see no
possibility for confusion here, as they are used in completely
different contexts.
Actually, I still say 'associative array', because it is easier to
understand for those who do not program every day. "An associative
array is like a normal array but it uses text strings for the index
instead of numbers"
Tom Christiansen
[courtesy cc of this posting sent to cited author via email]
In comp.lang.perl.misc,
da...@diablo.eimages.co.uk writes:
:>UNIX pronounciations for some char's:
:>! bang
:># hash (I prefer pound)
:
:What do the words 'one pound' mean? '1#'? No. It means 100 pence,
:the price of a lottery ticket, a tube fare from Liverpool Street to
:Oxford Circus. To call the '#' symbol 'pound' would lead to even
:worse confusion.
I'm afraid to tell you this because it's likely to annoy you, but
that's the way it is all over America. That's why you talk about
"pound-include" files. That's why you see potatoes on sale at 3#/$2,
that is, three pounds for two dollars. Not a bad exchange rate. :-)
So pound is both weight (16 ounces) and currency (Sterling, or 100
pence). Trust me. It really is. And save for the case above, it's
not particularly ambiguous.
--tom (who'll be in London by the time he reads the response to this)
Tad McClellan
Jerrad D Pierce (belg...@MIT.EDU) wrote:
: I don't know about accepted but I've always read $ as bucks
: (I use BASIC and [gasp] DOS too and it probably shows)
: ! bang
: # hash (I prefer pound)
: That's about it other than the basics...
: * star
: / forward slash?
: \ back slash?
: | pipe
^^^^
This usage annoys me (feel free to annoy me if you wish, perhaps
I'm too easily annoyed ;-).
pipe is the _function_ of the symbol (sometimes ;-),
not the _name_ of the symbol.
I call it 'vertical bar'. Do others use a different name for it?
: Sorry couldn't be of much help...
Me either ;-(
--
Tad McClellan, Logistics Specialist (IETMs and SGML guy)
email: mccle...@lmtas.lmco.com
Tom Sorensen
[courtesy cc of this posting sent to cited author via email]
In comp.lang.perl.misc, David Cantrell <da...@diablo.eimages.co.uk> wrote:
>Jerrad D Pierce <belg...@MIT.EDU> wrote:
>
>>I don't know about accepted but I've always read $ as bucks
>>(I use BASIC and [gasp] DOS too and it probably shows)
>>UNIX pronounciations for for some char's:
>>! bang
>># hash (I prefer pound)
>
>What do the words 'one pound' mean? '1#'? No. It means 100 pence,
Well, in perl context - absolutely nothing.
>the price of a lottery ticket, a tube fare from Liverpool Street to
>Oxford Circus. To call the '#' symbol 'pound' would lead to even
Or, for those of us who are still stuck with the ungodly unit measurement
system given to us by our cousins across the pond - it's 16 ounces.
(Ya know, it's really sad - the people who invented the English system
have even had the sense to go to metric. Yet we're stuck with it. Is this
some conspiracy to pay us back for 1776? ;) )
>worse confusion. Imagine if I converted all the #s in my scripts to
>Łs, or arbitrarily renaming '#' to other random currencies (like
>saying 'peseta' or 'mark' or 'franc') - oh what fun we would have!
Well, in the US a # is a pound symbol. It's also a number symbol.
>Even the two slashes seem to confuse some people. Even Novellers and
>DOSsers who ought to know better.
That's because they never use the forward slash. Oh, for options maybe,
but even then they don't realize it.
As a final note to all of this - check out the Jargon file. It has virtually
every known name for all these symbols we can't agree upon naming.
--
Tom Sorensen t...@dogbert.de.sc.ti.com | Fight the CDA |blue|
If I managed to represent TI in this post, then I'm | Responsibility | () |
probably far more surprised than TI is. | Starts at Home | /\ |
Unsolicited Commercial E-mail is in violation of USC 47-5-II.
Paul D. Smith
%% da...@diablo.eimages.co.uk (David Cantrell) writes:
dc> Tom Christiansen <tch...@mox.perl.com> wrote:
>> Jerrad D Pierce <belg...@MIT.EDU> writes:
>> :# hash (I prefer pound)
>> Yes, because a hash is something like %ENV.
dc> 'Hash' is what I would say when reading characters out loud. 'A
dc> hash' is what I would say when describing how the code works.
I personally often use "sharp"... pretty unambiguous.
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul D. Smith <psm...@baynetworks.com> Network Management Development
"Please remain calm...I may be mad, but I am a professional." --Mad Scientist
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
These are my opinions--Bay Networks takes no responsibility for them.
Randal Schwartz
>>>>> "David" == David Cantrell <da...@diablo.eimages.co.uk> writes:
David> Actually, I still say 'associative array', because it is easier to
David> understand for those who do not program every day. "An associative
David> array is like a normal array but it uses text strings for the index
David> instead of numbers"
Well, if I didn't have to type the word five times a day, or say it
about 15-30 times a day in classes, I'd stick with "associative array"
too.
Trouble is, that's not true. :-) I think I've now saved as many
syllables speaking by using "hash" instead of "associative array"
as I have keystrokes by using "for" instead of "foreach" :-)
Just something to ponder...
print "Just another Perl hacker," # but not what the media calls "hacker!" :-)
## legal fund: $20,495.69 collected, $182,159.85 spent; just 631 more days
## before I go to *prison* for 90 days; email fu...@stonehenge.com for details
--
Name: Randal L. Schwartz / Stonehenge Consulting Services (503)777-0095
Keywords: Perl training, UNIX[tm] consulting, video production, skiing, flying
Email: <mer...@stonehenge.com> Snail: (Call) PGP-Key: (finger mer...@ora.com)
Web: <A HREF="http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/">My Home Page!</A>
Quote: "I'm telling you, if I could have five lines in my .sig, I would!" -- me
Abigail
On 9 Dec 1996 15:45:24 GMT, Tom Sorensen wrote in comp.lang.perl.misc:
++
++ Well, in the US a # is a pound symbol. It's also a number symbol.
Having worked in London for a while, with financial institutes as
clients who sometimes have a British Pound symbol on their keyboard, I
will never call a '#' a pound again. (It's # which gets replaced by
the Pound - very funny if you log in as root, or few perl/shell
scripts....)
In Dutch, I usually call '#' "hekje", which means "little fence".
Some people call it 'railroad crossing'.
Does anyone else call <> fishhooks when they are used parenthesis?
I call ~ "tilde" and ^ "carot", which seem to confuse a lot of
people.
Abigail
Mike Stok
In article <58hc6k$m...@tilde.csc.ti.com>,
Tom Sorensen <t...@dogbert.de.sc.ti.com> wrote:
> [courtesy cc of this posting sent to cited author via email]
>
>Or, for those of us who are still stuck with the ungodly unit measurement
>system given to us by our cousins across the pond - it's 16 ounces.
>(Ya know, it's really sad - the people who invented the English system
>have even had the sense to go to metric. Yet we're stuck with it. Is this
>some conspiracy to pay us back for 1776? ;) )
Jeez, it's an octothorpe! And while you're at it a pound's 240 pence (or
denarii for the whippersnappers out there - those policemen and doctors
look pretty young to me these days :-) and how much does a pint of water
weigh?
Actually the good old imperial units are much more human in that
eyeballing halves and quarters is much easier than fifths and tenths, and
even the Babylonians understood that 12 and 60 are nice multiples to
handle for "normal" human beings.
Of course, if the French could have told the difference between fingers &
thumbs we'd be using octal, and in they could have figured out the
distance from a pole to the equator then.... but at least the Prime
Meridian goes througn Greenwich rather than Paris ;-)
Just kidding, now I have to wipe the froth off my screen :-(
--
mi...@stok.co.uk | The "`Stok' disclaimers" apply.
http://www.stok.co.uk/~mike/ | PGP fingerprint FE 56 4D 7D 42 1A 4A 9C
http://www.token.net/~mike/ | 65 F3 3F 1D 27 22 B7 41
st...@psa.pencom.com | Pencom Systems Administration (work)
Andrew Black
>Or, for those of us who are still stuck with the ungodly unit measurement
>system given to us by our cousins across the pond - it's 16 ounces.
>(Ya know, it's really sad - the people who invented the English system
>have even had the sense to go to metric. Yet we're stuck with it. Is this
>some conspiracy to pay us back for 1776? ;) )
As a "cousin over the pond", we now use Kilograms for weighing.
But will still have pints of beer and milk.
Andrew Black
London
Tad McClellan
Randal Schwartz (mer...@stonehenge.com) wrote:
: >>>>> "David" == David Cantrell <da...@diablo.eimages.co.uk> writes:
: David> Actually, I still say 'associative array', because it is easier to
: David> understand for those who do not program every day. "An associative
: David> array is like a normal array but it uses text strings for the index
: David> instead of numbers"
: Well, if I didn't have to type the word five times a day, or say it
: about 15-30 times a day in classes, I'd stick with "associative array"
: too.
: Trouble is, that's not true. :-) I think I've now saved as many
: syllables speaking by using "hash" instead of "associative array"
: as I have keystrokes by using "for" instead of "foreach" :-)
: Just something to ponder...
ponder, ponder [time passes...]
"hash" saves 5 syllables over "associative array". (I confess, I had
to look it up ;-)
"for" saves 4 keystrokes over "foreach". (this, I could tell for myself,
didn't even have to take off my shoes (which I wouldn't have done anyway,
I would have written a perl script. What else?))
So, if a syllable is equivalent in labor to a keystoke, and you have
saved as many syllables as keystrokes, then it appears that you have
been using "for" instead of "foreach" longer than you have been using
"hash" instead of "associative array"!
Exhausting!!!
Knock it off with the invitations to ponder ;-)
Now, how do you know she is a witch?
Bill Eldridge
> Jerrad D Pierce <belg...@MIT.EDU> wrote:
>
> >I don't know about accepted but I've always read $ as bucks
> >(I use BASIC and [gasp] DOS too and it probably shows)
> >UNIX pronounciations for for some char's:
> >! bang
Some time ago, before I knew the official nomenclature
for these marks, I had an officemate who used "yomama"
as his password. Being somewhat versed in proper
passwords, I started using "!yomama" instead, and
was rather humored to hear the password read back to
me.
(In America, "#yomama" would not refer to hash either).
Bill
--
Bill Eldridge
Radio Free Asia
bi...@rfa.org
Maldwyn G.T. Morris
Abigail wrote:
>
> On 9 Dec 1996 15:45:24 GMT, Tom Sorensen wrote in comp.lang.perl.misc:
> ++
> ++ Well, in the US a # is a pound symbol. It's also a number symbol.
>
> Having worked in London for a while, with financial institutes as
> clients who sometimes have a British Pound symbol on their keyboard, I
> will never call a '#' a pound again. (It's # which gets replaced by
> the Pound - very funny if you log in as root, or few perl/shell
> scripts....)
>
> In Dutch, I usually call '#' "hekje", which means "little fence".
> Some people call it 'railroad crossing'.
>
>
> Abigail
As a Londoner working in Amsterdam, I prefer hash...
Oh yeah, Perl: How much faster is the alpha 3 compiler for 'typical'
pattern matching & replacing code. Does is really work with all apps
that don't use the specific things mentioned in the readme ?
Maldwyn.
Steve
"Maldwyn G.T. Morris" <mal...@ripe.net> writes:
> > In Dutch, I usually call '#' "hekje", which means "little fence".
> > Some people call it 'railroad crossing'.
These people are not being entirely honest with you.
I call it 'hash', others call it 'gate'.
> As a Londoner working in Amsterdam, I prefer hash...
So do I *grin*
--
_ ___ _____ _____ _ _____ ______________________________________________
/ __|_ _| __\ \ / / __|
\__ \ | | | _| \ V /| _| Steve Marvell st...@fysh.org
_|___/ |_| |___| \_/ |___|__"Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder."__
Malcolm Smith
I use 'octothorp' for the '#' symbol, because that's what it is...
Malc
David Cantrell
"Maldwyn G.T. Morris" <mal...@ripe.net> wrote:
>Abigail wrote:
>> In Dutch, I usually call '#' "hekje", which means "little fence".
>> Some people call it 'railroad crossing'.
>As a Londoner working in Amsterdam, I prefer hash...
As a Londoner working in London, I couldn't possibly comment on that
sort of behaviour ;-)
Steve
Malcolm Smith <10011...@compuserve.com> writes:
> I use 'octothorp' for the '#' symbol, because that's what it is...
Get away!
'octo-thorp'
Eight sided village?
Mazda Hewitt
Mike Stok wrote:
> and how much does a pint of water weigh?
568 grams :-)
Mazda
Mazda Hewitt
Abigail wrote:
>
> In Dutch, I usually call '#' "hekje", which means "little fence".
> Some people call it 'railroad crossing'.
>
I call it a "Hash" so not to be confused with a £ ......
Mazda
Steven Elliot Pav
On Wed, 11 Dec 1996, Maldwyn G.T. Morris wrote:
> Abigail wrote:
> >
> > ++ Well, in the US a # is a pound symbol. It's also a number symbol.
> >
> > Having worked in London for a while, with financial institutes as
> > clients who sometimes have a British Pound symbol on their keyboard, I
> > will never call a '#' a pound again. (It's # which gets replaced by
> > the Pound - very funny if you log in as root, or few perl/shell
> > scripts....)
> >
> > In Dutch, I usually call '#' "hekje", which means "little fence".
> > Some people call it 'railroad crossing'.
the `#' symbol was referred to as an 'octothorpe' by my high school
pascal teacher. whether this is valid usage among any group of
speakers of english (or whether again i might have to use pascal) is
entirely questionable.
s. y. elliot pav
po 490, alfred ny 14802-0490
p...@las.alfred.edu
http://las.alfred.edu/~pav/
Tom Christiansen
[courtesy cc of this posting sent to cited author via email]
In comp.lang.perl.misc,
da...@diablo.eimages.co.uk writes:
:>! bang
:># hash (I prefer pound)
:
:What do the words 'one pound' mean? '1#'? No. It means 100 pence,
:the price of a lottery ticket, a tube fare from Liverpool Street to
:Oxford Circus.
I have very bad news for you. I went to the greengrocer's yesterday
here in Northampton (England), an d was delighted to find
that I could purchase clementines labelled
2#/90p
That is, 2 pounds for ninety pence. So it's the same in the UK as
in the US: both # and £ are pounds.
--
Tom Christiansen Perl Consultant, Gamer, Hiker tch...@mox.perl.com
I know I'm a pig-ignorant slut. --Andrew Hume
zizi zhao
Abigail wrote:
>
> On 9 Dec 1996 15:45:24 GMT, Tom Sorensen wrote in comp.lang.perl.misc:
> ++
>
> Having worked in London for a while, with financial institutes as
> clients who sometimes have a British Pound symbol on their keyboard, I
> will never call a '#' a pound again. (It's # which gets replaced by
> the Pound - very funny if you log in as root, or few perl/shell
> scripts....)
>
> In Dutch, I usually call '#' "hekje", which means "little fence".
> Some people call it 'railroad crossing'.
>
> Abigail
Do you have the similar telephone keyboard in London? Do you call
companies
in the U.S.? If some telephone answering systems tell you to input your
this/that number "ended with a pound key", which key are you going to
hit
on your phone keyboard?
ZiZi
Sapio Design Ltd
In article <32B08C...@worldnet.att.net>, zi...@worldnet.att.net (zizi
zhao) wrote:
> Do you have the similar telephone keyboard in London? Do you call
> companies
> in the U.S.? If some telephone answering systems tell you to input your
> this/that number "ended with a pound key", which key are you going to
> hit
> on your phone keyboard?
>
> ZiZi
Well, I suppose I'd look at the available buttons and press the one that
wasn't a digit or a star. We have a lot more problems when told about
that other useful service on 1-800-POUNDKEY (no letters you see).
What are you going to do when you phone up a system in Britain and they
tell you to press the square key? Come to think of it most of the keys
on my phone are square :-)
--
Duncan Harris, Sapio Design Ltd, Manchester, U.K.
mailto:dun...@sapio.co.uk
Web on CD-ROM? Check out http://www.sapio.co.uk/
Mazda Hewitt
Maldwyn G.T. Morris wrote:
> Oh yeah, Perl: How much faster is the alpha 3 compiler for 'typical'
> pattern matching & replacing code. Does is really work with all apps
> that don't use the specific things mentioned in the readme ?
Its slower!!!
Well it can be faster....
Well lets see, its slower if you're doing lots of regexp and
initialising the program only once, its faster if you're initialising
the program many times. This is because the compiled version doesn't
have to load the perl interpreter each time it starts..
Mazda
Tina Marie Holmboe
{ mcclellantj@harrier13 (Tad McClellan) }
> "for" saves 4 keystrokes over "foreach". (this, I could tell for myself,
> didn't even have to take off my shoes (which I wouldn't have done anyway,
> I would have written a perl script. What else?))
I've heard about 'stepping in other peoples shoes', but this is just
plain silly !
> Now, how do you know she is a witch?
Because she, ie. me, is asking you where I should send the bill for the
replacement of my monitor. Don't tell --write-- jokes when I am drinking
tea ! Scoundrel ! :)
--
Tina Marie Holmboe / http://www.ifi.uio.no/%7Etina/ /
/ ti...@spirou.uab.ericsson.se /
'When correctly viewed, Everything is lewd.
(I could tell you things about Peter Pan,
And the Wizard of Oz, there's a dirty old man!)' - Tom Lehrer
Tina Marie Holmboe
{ "Maldwyn G.T. Morris" <mal...@ripe.net> }
> As a Londoner working in Amsterdam, I prefer hash...
I do, oh, I *do* ,hope you know what you *wrote* there - or better: what
it sounded like when read out aloud :)
Here are the votes from the Swedish ( and Norwegian :) jury....
# : 'bregård' (Swedish for 'heaps of planks')
@ : 'kanelbulle' (Swedish for a certain type of spaced cake)
<> : 'måsvingar' (-----"----- 'seagulls wings')
^ : 'tak' (-----"----- 'roof')
~ : tilde
Tina Marie Holmboe
{ mi...@Zeus.Token.Net (Mike Stok) }
> Jeez, it's an octothorpe! And while you're at it a pound's 240 pence (or
> denarii for the whippersnappers out there - those policemen and doctors
> look pretty young to me these days :-) and how much does a pint of water
> weigh?
It starts getting *interesting* when you attempt to measure a cricket
court - how long *is* one ? Half a football one, or is it the other way
around ? Could it be 'as far as a horse can run in 4/8th of a ... ' ? >:)
Tom Christiansen
[courtesy cc of this posting sent to cited author via email]
In comp.lang.perl.misc,
abi...@ny.fnx.com writes:
:In Dutch, I usually call '#' "hekje", which means "little fence".
:Some people call it 'railroad crossing'.
I believe it's officially an octothorpe. This is not quite the same
as a musical sharp symbol.
:I call ~ "tilde" and ^ "carot", which seem to confuse a lot of
:people.
Yes, a ~ is really a tilde. ^ is actually a circumflex, which is rather
too long. Caret is ok, but note the spelling; it's neither carat (gems)
nor carrot (food). Hat is usually the short preferred form.
--tom
--
Tom Christiansen Perl Consultant, Gamer, Hiker tch...@mox.perl.com
There is no problem so complex that it can't be solved by another level
of indirection --except for too many level of indirection.
Tom Christiansen
[courtesy cc of this posting sent to cited author via email]
In comp.lang.perl.misc,
Bla...@logica.com (Andrew Black) writes:
:As a "cousin over the pond", we now use Kilograms for weighing.
Only because the Europeans have forced you. It's not like anyone here
(England) thinks it a good idea. And I can still go to the market
and get mardarins at 40p per pound. So there. :-)
:But will still have pints of beer and milk.
But not shandy. Go figure.
--tom
ps1: Mike Stok is quite right: base 12 and base 60 are infinitely more
convenient than base 10. And in a culture that can't hope to do long
division without a calculator anyway, it doesn't matter.
ps2: Don't tell me base 10 is easier on computers. It isn't.
ps3: I'll go metric when everyone and everything else does, including
time. Don't make me convert miles/hour into meters/second unless we
have have 100 seconds per minutes and 100 minutes per hour and 10
hours per day. Until then, I intend to continue with English
mesaurements, as do a quarter billion other Americans, and at least 20
or 30 million Englishmen.
ps4: A megabyte is not a million bytes; it's 2 ** 20 bytes. The disk
manufacturers alleging metric compliance are filthy liars.
ps5: Sometimes I think it would have been easier on the UK to create
a trade consortium in the North Atlantic of England, Wales, Scotland,
Ireland, Canada, and the United States, which would have avoided not
merely gratuitous conversion to the anti-convenient systeme metrique,
but would have also made moot the notion of handing over sovereignty
to the Franco-German hordes. :-)
ps6: We'd then let Quebec join the EU so the rest of us don't have to deal
with them. :-)
ps7: Now you see what a few (20-oz) pints of decent bitter and a searing
phaal does to my temperment. :-)
--
Tom Christiansen Perl Consultant, Gamer, Hiker tch...@mox.perl.com
"If Dennis Ritchie were the man who developed Modula-2 then C would be long forgotten."
--Tarjei Jensen
Ilya Zakharevich
[A complimentary Cc of this posting was sent to Tom Christiansen
<tch...@mox.perl.com>],
who wrote in article <591kuj$rug$1...@csnews.cs.colorado.edu>:
> ps3: I'll go metric when everyone and everything else does, including
> time. Don't make me convert miles/hour into meters/second unless we
> have have 100 seconds per minutes and 100 minutes per hour and 10
> hours per day. Until then, I intend to continue with English
> mesaurements, as do a quarter billion other Americans, and at least 20
> or 30 million Englishmen.
So let the kids spend their 12 years in the kindergarten studying
conversions between yards and miles...
Ilya
Tom Christiansen
[courtesy cc of this posting sent to cited author via email]
In comp.lang.perl.misc,
"Maldwyn G.T. Morris" <mal...@ripe.net> writes:
:Oh yeah, Perl: How much faster is the alpha 3 compiler for 'typical'
:pattern matching & replacing code.
No faster whatsoever. The same underlying C code is still invoked.
Although there's some work to be done (e.g. the /foo/i code can take
100x more time due to the /i) but even if thta's dealt with, it will
just mean that both the interpreter *and* the compiler get faster.
It's just the way this stuff works.
:Does is really work with all apps
:that don't use the specific things mentioned in the readme ?
So far as I have been able to tell.
--tom
--
Tom Christiansen tch...@alumni.cs.colorado.edu
OOPS! You naughty creature! You didn't run Configure with sh!
I will attempt to remedy the situation by running sh for you...
--Larry Wall in Configure from the perl distribution
Mike Stok
In article <592i0j$f...@mathserv.mps.ohio-state.edu>,
I don't think that you really need to study the relationship any more
than the relationship hidden in the fact that there are 1000mm in a m.
At least the imperial system, and pretty much any other system used by
normal humans except the metric system has a grounding in physical things
familiar to the users of the system - yards and feet have good biological
bases (albeit a little variable from person to person :-) and oddly
enough a mile just might be something like 1000 paces as taken by a
Roman, well according to
http://osman.classics.washington.edu/libellus/aides/allgre/allgre.635.html
The Roman Measures of Length are the following: -
12 inches (unciae) = 1 Roman Foot (pes: 11.65 English inches).
1.5 Feet = 1 Cubit (cubitum). - 2.5 Feet = 1 Step (gradus).
5 Feet = 1 Pace (passus). - 1000 Paces (mille passuum) = 1 Mile.
The Roman mile was equal to 4850 English Feet.
The iugerum, or unit of measure of land, was an area of 240 (Roman) feet
long and 120 broad; a little lessthan 2/3 of an English acre.
Notice that the units of measurement all have a grounding in the familiar
physical world and that mulitpliers like 120 and 240 are used. The
metric system has done average people a great disservice by dissociating
the units of measure from real life for the sake of convenience in
manipulating them.
...of course, in a decimal workd kids should spend 10 years in
kindergarten :-)
Mike
Michael J Assels
In article <591kuj$rug$1...@csnews.cs.colorado.edu>,
Tom Christiansen <tch...@mox.perl.com> wrote:
...
>ps6: We'd then let Quebec join the EU so the rest of us don't have to deal
> with them. :-)
You'll find great enthusiasm for the project until people here discover
that you don't mean Etats-Unis. :-)
You'll also have a very hard time finding a Quebecois who actually
measures gas consumption in litres per 100 kilometers. (Hey! That's not
proper SI anyway. The units should obviously be square meters.)
+-------------------------------+----------------------------------+
| Michael Assels, Analyst | Everything is what it is and not |
| Comp. Sci., Concordia Univ. | another thing. |
| 1455 de Maisonneuve O | - Aristotle (or someone else) |
| Montreal, Quebec, H3G 1M8 +----------------------------------+
| Voice: (514) 848-3030 | mjas...@cs.concordia.ca |
+-------------------------------+----------------------------------+
Terje Bless
In article <58use2$p...@euas20.eua.ericsson.se>,
ti...@spirou.uab.ericsson.se wrote:
|{ "Maldwyn G.T. Morris" <mal...@ripe.net> }
|
|> As a Londoner working in Amsterdam, I prefer hash...
|
| I do, oh, I *do* ,hope you know what you *wrote* there - or better: what
| it sounded like when read out aloud :)
I guess I'm supposed to pretend that I don't understand this in case any
future employers or law enforcement officers read this, so I hereby declare
my complete and utter ignorance on this subject.
| Here are the votes from the Swedish ( and Norwegian :) jury....
Hey, I didn't get to vote.
| # : 'bregård' (Swedish for 'heaps of planks')
'skigard' (Snow-fence (you'd understand if you'd ever been to Norway))
| @ : 'kanelbulle' (Swedish for a certain type of spaced cake)
'krøllalfa' (twirly alpha)
--
Party? Party, lord? Yes, lord. Right away, lord.
- Beopunk Cyberwulf
Tina Marie Holmboe
{ li...@tss.no (Terje Bless) }
> I guess I'm supposed to pretend that I don't understand this in case any
> future employers or law enforcement officers read this, so I hereby declare
> my complete and utter ignorance on this subject.
>:)
> Hey, I didn't get to vote.
*YOU* have admitted in another thread that you don't like Carp - you are
*not* Norwegian ! :)
> | # : 'bregård' (Swedish for 'heaps of planks')
> 'skigard' (Snow-fence (you'd understand if you'd ever been to Norway))
The question remain, of course, whether or not #'es last forever... hum...
(if he takes that one he *is* Norwegian :)
Abigail
On 16 Dec 1996 13:42:26 GMT, Mike Stok wrote in comp.lang.perl.misc:
++ In article <592i0j$f...@mathserv.mps.ohio-state.edu>,
++ Ilya Zakharevich <il...@math.ohio-state.edu> wrote:
++ >[A complimentary Cc of this posting was sent to Tom Christiansen
++ ><tch...@mox.perl.com>],
++ >who wrote in article <591kuj$rug$1...@csnews.cs.colorado.edu>:
++ >> ps3: I'll go metric when everyone and everything else does, including
++ >> time. Don't make me convert miles/hour into meters/second unless we
++ >> have have 100 seconds per minutes and 100 minutes per hour and 10
++ >> hours per day. Until then, I intend to continue with English
++ >> mesaurements, as do a quarter billion other Americans, and at least 20
++ >> or 30 million Englishmen.
++ >
++ >So let the kids spend their 12 years in the kindergarten studying
++ >conversions between yards and miles...
++
++ I don't think that you really need to study the relationship any more
++ than the relationship hidden in the fact that there are 1000mm in a m.
True. But there are 1000 mm in a m, 1000 mg in a g, 1000 mA in a A,
etc. Once you have grasped the idea that 1000 milli equals a unit,
you can apply it to anything.
The metric system is nice not because of the 10's involved, but
because its method of subdivision works for *all* units.
Kind of like Perl working on many systems.
12 inches in a foot would be ok, if there were also 12 feet in a
yeard, 12 yards in a mile, 12 ounces in a pound (or gallon), etc.
Abigail
Denis N. Antonioli
In article <593rjv$o...@newsflash.concordia.ca>,
mjas...@cs.concordia.ca (Michael J Assels) writes:
>
> You'll also have a very hard time finding a Quebecois who actually
> measures gas consumption in litres per 100 kilometers. (Hey! That's not
> proper SI anyway. The units should obviously be square meters.)
>
Your weird systems may be grounded in physical things, but it doesn't
help much reasoning about physical things.
The obvious measure of a fluid is its volume not its surface!
Ergo, cubic meters per 100 km
:-}
Happy greetings from a metric country,
dna
--
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
The address of java_lang_Compiler_command seems to be missing from the
link vector in the JDK 1.0.2. No one seems to have noticed its absence.
-- F. Yellin, The JIT Compiler API
Mike Stok
In article <E2JH2...@nonexistent.com>, Abigail <abi...@ny.fnx.com> wrote:
>On 16 Dec 1996 13:42:26 GMT, Mike Stok wrote in comp.lang.perl.misc:
>++ I don't think that you really need to study the relationship any more
>++ than the relationship hidden in the fact that there are 1000mm in a m.
>
>True. But there are 1000 mm in a m, 1000 mg in a g, 1000 mA in a A,
>etc. Once you have grasped the idea that 1000 milli equals a unit,
>you can apply it to anything.
>
>The metric system is nice not because of the 10's involved, but
>because its method of subdivision works for *all* units.
>Kind of like Perl working on many systems.
>
>12 inches in a foot would be ok, if there were also 12 feet in a
>yeard, 12 yards in a mile, 12 ounces in a pound (or gallon), etc.
This is getting way off perl, but a constant multiplier might not be
appropriate at all scales. If you were to have used the imperial system
for engineering then thousandths of an inch would have been common to
you, and it doesn't take a genius to guess that there were 1000 "thou" in
an inch. The idea of fractions worked pretty well for all measures too,
except I didn't have to remember exactly what power of 10 things without
obvious derivations (dec- cent- milli-) mean - all that mega terra and
giga suggest is "bigger that you'd think"...
The place where having that kind of mindless regularity helps is outside
of the scale of things that usually matter to normal people doing normal
things :-)
Terje Bless
In article <594h1s$4...@euas20.eua.ericsson.se>,
ti...@spirou.uab.ericsson.se wrote:
| *YOU* have admitted in another thread that you don't like Carp - you are
| *not* Norwegian ! :)
That unsavoury habit of eating fish several times a week in Norway is the
greatest tragedy of my short miserable life. I *HATE* fish.
Sushi is OK, but only on account of the Wasabi + it doesn't really count
since it isn't a traditional Norwaegian meal. :-(
| The question remain, of course, whether or not #'es last forever... hum...
OK, I give up. How was I supposed to parse that ?
| (if he takes that one he *is* Norwegian :)
Oh, I'm Norwegian alright. I'm just not a very good at it.
Tina Marie Holmboe
{ li...@tss.no (Terje Bless) }
> That unsavoury habit of eating fish several times a week in Norway is the
> greatest tragedy of my short miserable life. I *HATE* fish.
> Sushi is OK, but only on account of the Wasabi + it doesn't really count
> since it isn't a traditional Norwaegian meal. :-(
Tsk, tsk, tsk :)
> | The question remain, of course, whether or not #'es last forever... hum...
>
> OK, I give up. How was I supposed to parse that ?
"Ein skigard kan'ke vara evig
veit du,
kan aldriiiiii vara evig... "
Now go be ashamed of yourself ! >:)
Danny Aldham
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2]
Mike Stok (mi...@Zeus.Token.Net) wrote:
: The
: metric system has done average people a great disservice by dissociating
: the units of measure from real life for the sake of convenience in
: manipulating them.
The imperial system is only more convenient to you because you have always
used it. People born and raised with metric have no such trouble. And
since all serious science is done in metric, why have the High Priests
speaking a diffent language than us lay folk? But if we are going to
throw things out, how about this binary-digital stuff. ;-)
--
Danny Aldham www.postino.com
Need a UUCP E-Mail feed? - Ask me!
Dial-up access in British Columbia. TCP access around the World.
Joseph N. Hall
Terje Bless wrote:
> That unsavoury habit of eating fish several times a week in Norway is t=
he
> greatest tragedy of my short miserable life. I *HATE* fish.
You know, the trouble with being American is that
The Scottish have haggis
The Swedish (and for all I know, Norwegians) have Surstr=F6mming =
The Australians have Vegemite
The Tibetans have tsampa
The Chinese have, well, ...
And we have? McDonalds? =
-joseph
-- =
Joseph N. Hall http://www.5sigma.com/joseph/ jos...@5sigma.com
Proprietor, 5 Sigma Productions P.O. Box 6250 Chandler AZ 85246
Perl instruction (http://www.5sigma.com/perl/), C++/C/Perl software,
web stuff, original music >>>Perl questions? mailto:pe...@5sigma.com
Eric Vought
> So pound is both weight (16 ounces) and currency (Sterling, or 100
> pence). Trust me. It really is. And save for the case above, it's
> not particularly ambiguous.
As far as I am aware, the currency is named that way because of the
meaning of the word "pound" as applied to weight. In other words, "one
pound Sterling) was originally worth 16 oz of Sterling (Silver?), just
like the American dollar used to be directly convertible to a certain
amount of gold. I have no idea whether or not this still holds and
somehow doubt that it does, especially since the exchange rate of one
pound is not equal to 1 pound's (weight) worth of silver in dollars.
Donald H. Locker
>ps3: I'll go metric when everyone and everything else does, including
I'd like to see 1000 days per year. And I think a 10 hour day is too
short. Let's go for 100 hours. That'll make 10-hour work days seem
more normal. :) Heck, I'd even do an occasional 48^H^H50-hour day!
Ob. perl - who's going to handle timelocal?
> mesaurements, as do a quarter billion other Americans, and at least 20
> or 30 million Englishmen.
Are those million [billion] or 2**20??? [resp 2**30]
--
Donald.
These opinions were formulated by a trained professional.
DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!
At the time, the tone will be ... BEEP!
Lars Balker Rasmussen
"Joseph N. Hall" <jos...@5sigma.com> writes:
> You know, the trouble with being American is that
>
> The Scottish have haggis
> The Tibetans have tsampa
> The Chinese have, well, ...
>
> And we have? McDonalds?
God, how can you even ask? You have Oreos! Bleurgh!
ObPerl: How does one go back to writing perl4 when you have been
enjoying perl5 for so long?
--
Lars Balker Rasmussen <URL:http://www.daimi.aau.dk/~gnort/>
Ein Reich -- Ein Volk -- Ein Emacs
Terje Bless
In article <5971db$b...@euas20.eua.ericsson.se>,
ti...@spirou.uab.ericsson.se wrote:
|> | The question remain, of course, whether or not #'es last forever... hum...
|>
|> OK, I give up. How was I supposed to parse that ?
|
| "Ein skigard kan'ke vara evig
| veit du,
| kan aldriiiiii vara evig... "
|
| Now go be ashamed of yourself ! >:)
Alright, so I'm not a specialist in Norwegian folk songs; sue me.
Terje Bless
In article <32B791...@5sigma.com>,
jos...@5sigma.com wrote:
|You know, the trouble with being American is that
|
| The Scottish have haggis
| The Swedish (and for all I know, Norwegians) have Surströmming
In Norway it's kalled "sursild". sur = sour; strömming(.se) = sild(.no)
|And we have? McDonalds?
Yeah. This is a problem ?
Terje Bless
In article <0frakoc...@fraxinus.daimi.aau.dk>,
Lars Balker Rasmussen <gn...@daimi.aau.dk> wrote:
|"Joseph N. Hall" <jos...@5sigma.com> writes:
|
|> You know, the trouble with being American is that
|>
|> The Scottish have haggis
[...]
|> The Chinese have, well, ...
|>
|> And we have? McDonalds?
|
|God, how can you even ask? You have Oreos! Bleurgh!
*bzzt* wrong answer. You Yankees have Mountain Dew and Jolt. Both of which
are *impossible* to get a hold of in Norway. :-(
|ObPerl: How does one go back to writing perl4 when you have been
| enjoying perl5 for so long?
I've been wondering that very thing myself. Since those dammn SGI people
deliver parl 4 preinstalled on all their IRIX-running boxes and getting
someone in authority to authorise the upgrade; I've been bitten by a few
perl 5->4 traps.
Anyone want to volounteer to write perltrap inverted ?
Tom Christiansen
[courtesy cc of this posting sent to cited author via email]
In comp.lang.perl.misc,
d...@mrdog.msl.com (Donald H. Locker) writes:
:>ps3: I'll go metric when everyone and everything else does, including
:> time. Don't make me convert miles/hour into meters/second unless we
:> have have 100 seconds per minutes and 100 minutes per hour and 10
:> hours per day. Until then, I intend to continue with English
:
:I'd like to see 1000 days per year. And I think a 10 hour day is too
:short. Let's go for 100 hours. That'll make 10-hour work days seem
:more normal. :) Heck, I'd even do an occasional 48^H^H50-hour day!
Don't be ludicrous. The point is that days in a year are fixed, but
how we subdivide the day is utterly arbitrary, and thought up by the
same primitives who think base 60 is cool. The French Revolution, now
spreading to the Commonwealth, should dictate that we also employ base
10 on those divisions.
I don't buy it, however.
--tom
--
Tom Christiansen tch...@alumni.cs.colorado.edu
"Just because you're into control doesn't mean you're in control."
--Larry Wall
Tina Marie Holmboe
{ "Joseph N. Hall" <jos...@5sigma.com> }
> The Swedish (and for all I know, Norwegians) have Surstr=F6mming =
The *SWEDISH* have surstömming - luckily Norwegians don't have to
suffer *that* fate. We *do* have lutefisk and smalahove though... >:)
Dave Thomas
On 18 Dec 1996 13:36:03 GMT, Tom Christiansen <tch...@mox.perl.com> wrote:
> Don't be ludicrous. The point is that days in a year are fixed, but
> how we subdivide the day is utterly arbitrary, and thought up by the
> same primitives who think base 60 is cool. The French Revolution, now
> spreading to the Commonwealth, should dictate that we also employ base
> 10 on those divisions.
Actually, I thought the reason the 'primitives' chose 60 is that it divides
by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30, making sub-divisions more natural.
Same for the 360 degrees in a circle. Grads will neve catch on.
Dave
--
_________________________________________________________________________
| Dave Thomas - Da...@Thomases.com - Unix and systems consultancy - Dallas |
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tina Marie Holmboe
{ li...@tss.no (Terje Bless) }
> *bzzt* wrong answer. You Yankees have Mountain Dew and Jolt. Both of which
> are *impossible* to get a hold of in Norway. :-(
Told'ya he isn't Norwegian >:) Terje, do you *WANT* to know where one
can get Jolt in Norway ? *giggles*
Ok, a small shop just around the corner from Chat Noir, not far from
Nationaltheatret subway station. Of course, it is in *Oslo*, but... >:)
Richard Herring
Tina Marie Holmboe (ti...@spirou.uab.ericsson.se) wrote:
>{ mi...@Zeus.Token.Net (Mike Stok) }
> It starts getting *interesting* when you attempt to measure a cricket
>court - how long *is* one ? Half a football one, or is it the other way
>around ? Could it be 'as far as a horse can run in 4/8th of a ... ' ? >:)
The length of a cricket *pitch* is one chain.
Or a hundred links.
Or four rods, poles or perches.
Or a tenth of a furlong.
(the size of a cricket *field* depends on what's available.)
--
Richard Herring | richard...@gecm.com | Speaking for myself
GEC-Marconi Research Centre | Not the one on TV.
Bennett Todd
On Wed, 18 Dec 1996 12:32:05 +0000, Terje Bless <li...@tss.no> wrote:
>|ObPerl: How does one go back to writing perl4 when you have been
>| enjoying perl5 for so long?
>
>I've been wondering that very thing myself. Since those dammn SGI people
>deliver parl 4 preinstalled on all their IRIX-running boxes and getting
>someone in authority to authorise the upgrade; I've been bitten by a few
>perl 5->4 traps.
That sort of thing is part of why I strongly recommend always building and
installing your own, in /usr/local/, regardless of whether the vendor provides
one. For instance, BSDI, and some older releases of Linux, included a 4.036 in
/usr/bin/perl. So leave it be; things in /usr/bin are prone to obliteration
during OS upgrades, and so on; the vendor ``owns'' that heirarchy. /usr/local
is reserved for us.
On those happy occasions where I have a vendor-provided /usr/bin/perl that's
current (Red Hat 4.0 comes with perl 5.003 as /usr/bin/perl) I drop a symlink
in /usr/local/bin pointing to it, so I don't have to hack the #! lines.
-Bennett
Denis N. Antonioli
In article <598s03$cpa$1...@csnews.cs.colorado.edu>,
Tom Christiansen <tch...@mox.perl.com>, speaking of time, writes:
> The French Revolution, now
> spreading to the Commonwealth, should dictate that we also employ base
> 10 on those divisions.
>
>
> --tom
The French Revolution did, in fact, introduce the 10-days week but, even
in France, the calendar was soon to revert to the normal, Christian
tradition.
I would say it didn't lasted more than 2-3 years.
One of the (bad) trick was that you still had only 1 free day per week!
Another problem was that the year had 12 months, every month 3 weeks.
That left 5 (or 6) days out for revolutionary celebrations.
Living metrics, and enjoying it!
-- dna
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
I'm predicting that the world will end in the year 2000. The Creator of
the universe works in mysterious ways, but He uses a base ten counting
system and likes round numbers.
-- Dogbert, the Doomsday Prophet
Patrick Hayes
"Joseph N. Hall" <jos...@5sigma.com> writes:
> You know, the trouble with being American is that
>
> The Scottish have haggis
> The Swedish (and for all I know, Norwegians) have Surströmming
> The Australians have Vegemite
> The Tibetans have tsampa
> The Chinese have, well, ...
>
> And we have? McDonalds?
A number of things we usually take for granted. A Thanksgiving turkey
dinner being a case in point. Every French person who's been invited for
Thanksgiving dinner has re-evaluated the quality of "american" cooking.
My version of a Thanksgiving dinner involves:
- The golden brown turkey (correctly basted while being cooked)
- Stuffing (cooked inside the turkey)
- Sweet potatoes (cooked in orange juice and then mashed)
- Mashed potatoes (None of that instant stuff please)
- Pumpkin pie
- Crusted apple pie
- Pecan pie
- Wine (My only concession to local custom is a few bottles of Meursault)
--
--------------------------------------------------------
Patrick.Hay...@renault.fr (33) 01.41.04.64.20
--------------------------------------------------------
Terje Bless
In article <598t6v$q...@euas20.eua.ericsson.se>,
ti...@spirou.uab.ericsson.se wrote:
| Told'ya he isn't Norwegian >:) Terje, do you *WANT* to know where one
|can get Jolt in Norway ? *giggles*
I'm a caffeine addict. :-(
There's nothing better for those all night perl sessions.
(well, there is always espresso)
| Ok, a small shop just around the corner from Chat Noir, not far from
|Nationaltheatret subway station. Of course, it is in *Oslo*, but... >:)
Jogging from Tromsø is a small price to pay for a steady supply of Jolt. ;-)
Terje Bless
In article <598t2j$q...@euas20.eua.ericsson.se>,
ti...@spirou.uab.ericsson.se wrote:
| The *SWEDISH* have surstömming - luckily Norwegians don't have to
|suffer *that* fate. We *do* have lutefisk and smalahove though... >:)
Only a truly barbaric people would eat the severed head of a sow.
The Vikings aren't dead; they've only been domesticated.
Tina Marie Holmboe
{ r...@gmrc.gecm.com (Richard Herring) }
> The length of a cricket *pitch* is one chain.
> Or a hundred links.
> Or four rods, poles or perches.
> Or a tenth of a furlong.
Ok allready ! I stands corrected ! *giggles*
I dunno why, but old English measurements always intrigued me, although
(as has been properly proven) I know nothing what-so-ever about them.
But: isn't the length of a cricket *pitch* again used as a measurement for
something else ?
Tina Marie Holmboe
{ li...@tss.no (Terje Bless) }
> Only a truly barbaric people would eat the severed head of a sow.
> The Vikings aren't dead; they've only been domesticated.
It is said that it is the eyes that taste the best... >:)
Peter B. West
On 16 Dec 1996 13:42:26 GMT, mi...@Zeus.Token.Net (Mike Stok) wrote:
conversions between yards and miles...
>
>normal humans except the metric system has a grounding in physical things
>familiar to the users of the system - yards and feet have good biological
>bases (albeit a little variable from person to person :-)
A typical digitist statement. Just because you guys with 12 fingers and
12 toes are in the majority, you think you can look down on us freaks
with only 10 of each. We take comfort in the arcane Arabic number
system and wear mittens and socks to the beach.
>
>Mike
Peter
__ /__ Peter B. West
/ p.w...@mailbox.uq.edu.au
/ "Master, to whom shall we go?"
Tom Sorensen
[courtesy cc of this posting sent to cited author via email]
In comp.lang.perl.misc, Joseph N. Hall <jos...@5sigma.com> wrote:
>You know, the trouble with being American is that
>
> The Scottish have haggis
> The Swedish (and for all I know, Norwegians) have Surstr=F6mming =
>
> The Australians have Vegemite
> The Tibetans have tsampa
> The Chinese have, well, ...
>
>And we have? McDonalds? =
Actually everyone has McDonalds nowadays.
Since we're comparing "worst of"...
I nominate SPAM.
--
Tom Sorensen t...@dogbert.de.sc.ti.com | Fight the CDA |blue|
If I managed to represent TI in this post, then I'm | Responsibility | () |
probably far more surprised than TI is. | Starts at Home | /\ |
Unsolicited Commercial E-mail is in violation of USC 47-5-II.
Tom Sorensen
[courtesy cc of this posting sent to cited author via email]
In comp.lang.perl.misc, Tom Christiansen <tch...@mox.perl.com> wrote:
>Don't be ludicrous. The point is that days in a year are fixed, but
Well, wait long enough and there will be 1000 days in a year.
It will, however, take awhile for that to happen.
>spreading to the Commonwealth, should dictate that we also employ base
>10 on those divisions.
There was at one point a proposal for a metric time system. There were
even pocketwatches with 100 seconds/minute, 100 minutes/hour, and 10 hours/day.
It failed a miserable death. The time system simply works well as is.
Any math that needs to be done is always done in terms of seconds anyway,
and there's nothing wrong with "millisecond" or "megasecond" (although you
don't see the latter very much because it's rather non-sensical).
The rest of the metric system makes a helluva lot more sense than the
English system. 16 oz. in a pound? 8 oz. in a cup? Da hell?
Lars Balker Rasmussen
li...@tss.no (Terje Bless) writes:
> *bzzt* wrong answer. You Yankees have Mountain Dew and Jolt. Both of which
> are *impossible* to get a hold of in Norway. :-(
We were talking about _bad_things_. Jolt will come to Denmark soon,
anyway.
Nicholas Carey
In article <5992b8$q...@euas20.eua.ericsson.se>, ti...@spirou.uab.ericsson.se
says...
>
>{ r...@gmrc.gecm.com (Richard Herring) }
>
>> The length of a cricket *pitch* is one chain.
>> Or a hundred links.
>> Or four rods, poles or perches.
>> Or a tenth of a furlong.
>
> Ok allready ! I stands corrected ! *giggles*
>
> I dunno why, but old English measurements always intrigued me, although
>(as has been properly proven) I know nothing what-so-ever about them.
>But: isn't the length of a cricket *pitch* again used as a measurement for
>something else ?
chains, links, rods, etc. are standard units for [land] surveying. Title deeds
[at least here in the States] bound the property in these units.
N.
--
The United States and Kuwait---The only countries still under the English
system of weights and measures. The *REAL* reason for the Persain Gulf war?
I'll be extremely surprised if the opinions expressed in this message
reflect those of the Microsoft (tm) Corporation. They make me say that.
Jon Orwant
Tom Christiansen <tch...@mox.perl.com> writes:
In comp.lang.perl.misc,
Bla...@logica.com (Andrew Black) writes:
:As a "cousin over the pond", we now use Kilograms for weighing.
Only because the Europeans have forced you. It's not like anyone here
(England) thinks it a good idea. And I can still go to the market
and get mardarins at 40p per pound. So there. :-)
:But will still have pints of beer and milk.
But not shandy. Go figure.
--tom
Whenever I'm tempted to choose metric, I first wonder why we should
adopt a system that uses powers of 10. Why 10? If we're going to
relabel everything and make people Think Differently, let's have them
Think Correctly by using powers of 2, 4, 8, or 16.
The following essay is a rebuttal to an argument that one could
harness the energy from footfalls to power a wearable computer. I
include it for the first paragraph, which is a convincing argument for
keeping our romantically arbitrary English system.
-Jon
----------------
Jon Orwant
The Perl Journal
http://tpj.com/
From: Vaughan Pratt <pr...@cs.Stanford.EDU>
To: wear...@media.mit.edu
Subject: Re: Foot power
Date: Sat, 28 Oct 1995 02:11:25 -0700
Vaughan, have you read my paper "Human Powered Wearable
Computing?" on the web site?
I have now. Let's do the numbers, as they say on NPR.
turns out there is as much as 67W availablee from footfalls
The fundamental equation relating power to walking is that a horsepower
is the power required for Elizabeth Hurley to walk straight up a
vertical cliff. The fundamental equation assumes an all-up weight for
Ms. Hurley of 125 lb and a vertical walking speed of 3 mph. Very
surprisingly the equation is exact, as a fundamental equation should
be, the round numbers notwithstanding. This is because 3 mph is 264
ft/min., and this times 125 lbs equals 33,000 ft.lbs/minute, the
definition of a horsepower (note the absence of both decimal points and
the acceleration g due to gravity), mute testimony to the beauty of
British units such as Ms. Hurley.
All other relationships between power and walking can be obtained from
the fundamental equation by unit conversions (e.g. 1 HP ~ 746 watts),
ratios (your 67 watt figure is obtained by adding 20% for the 68 kg or
150 lb walker of section 8 of your paper, then dividing by 13.2 to
reduce 3 mph to your assumed 10 cm/sec vertical speed), and
efficiencies (your 67 watt figure assumes 100% efficient energy
conversion, while later on your 34 watt figure assumes 50%
efficiency).
I'd be very impressed if you could build a gadget that would extract
more than 10 watts from "brisk walking" without the walker becoming
totally exhausted after an hour. The big problem is that as you start
tapping into a significant fraction of the "walking power", you start
to feel like you are climbing stairs. You need to be in superb
physical condition to climb stairs for a long time.
Let's now compare this with how exhausted you would get from carrying a
battery all day, which you recharge while sleeping. Let's assume 8
hours use during the day at the above 10 watt figure. This comes to 80
watt-hours. Now a 1.66 oz lithium C-cell (Digikey Part No. P167-ND,
list $17.00) delivers 3v at 5 AH or 15 watt-hours. So to exceed the 10
watts of power obtainable as above from 8 hours of walking it suffices
to carry 6 of these, delivering 90 watt-hours during the 8-hour day.
Cost of batteries $102, amortized at $1/day assuming a lifetime of 100
recharge cycles (I have no idea of the real lifetime).
And how exhausted have we gotten during the 8 hours? Well, first it
was our choice whether we walked at all or just sat around while we
drew 10 watts. Second, if we walked at all we just walked, no
exhausting stair-climbing effect resulting from tapping into our
walking power. And third, the 6 batteries weigh a total of 10 oz. Fit
backpackers can walk all day with 40 lb packs. 10 oz. will go
completely unnoticed. Dimensions are exactly those of 6 C-cells,
reasonably compact for a 90 watt-hour battery. Just now I stuck three
of them in my fob pocket, the pleat completely hides the bulge so a fob
pocket on the left should conceal the other three just as well.
Bottom line: lithium power beats walking power hands down. (Boy will my
face be red if I've slipped a decimal point somewhere. :)
Vaughan Pratt
Mike Stok
In article <5994d8$o...@tilde.csc.ti.com>,
Tom Sorensen <t...@dogbert.de.sc.ti.com> wrote:
>There was at one point a proposal for a metric time system. There were
>even pocketwatches with 100 seconds/minute, 100 minutes/hour, and 10 hours/day.
>
>It failed a miserable death. The time system simply works well as is.
>Any math that needs to be done is always done in terms of seconds anyway,
>and there's nothing wrong with "millisecond" or "megasecond" (although you
>don't see the latter very much because it's rather non-sensical).
I dunno, there are *about* pi seconds in a nanocentury, seems pretty metric
to me ;-) Fortunately pi is dimensionless so the foreign hordes haven't
been able to legislate that pi = 5.
>The rest of the metric system makes a helluva lot more sense than the
>English system. 16 oz. in a pound? 8 oz. in a cup? Da hell?
If you're cooking then having a pound that you can subdivide into ounces
by halving, and having some linkage between fluid volume and weight means
that once can cook quite well without scales, eyeballing an ounce of
butter from a 4 ounce stick or an 8oz block isn't that hard, and all those
strange volumetric measures map to sizes of cooking utensils. I think
the 20oz pint doesn't make sense in this scheme, but once I'm in a pub
the logic seems fine 8*)
Science can stop people reveling in uncertainty and engineering things
they do to fit a human life if you let it start messing with things that
really matter all the time - the neat thing about perl is that it still
feels like a human language, complete with all of the little rough edges,
holes and expressiveness that that entails. I think that this attracts a
much broader and more interesting group clustering around perl and
discussions like this are great fun (as long as they are occasional...)
for getting insights into other aspects of poster's characters that might
not show through in the more "traditional" comp.lang.* postings.
Remember, letting the decimalists at the units we use every day is the
thin end of the wedge, soon they'll be orthogonalising perl and enforcing
indentation. Soon "We shall lose the wonder and find nothing in return" :-(
Mike
--
mi...@stok.co.uk | The "`Stok' disclaimers" apply.
http://www.stok.co.uk/~mike/ | PGP fingerprint FE 56 4D 7D 42 1A 4A 9C
http://www.token.net/~mike/ | 65 F3 3F 1D 27 22 B7 41
st...@psa.pencom.com | Pencom Systems Administration (work)
Chuck Adams
>
>Whenever I'm tempted to choose metric, I first wonder why we should
>adopt a system that uses powers of 10. Why 10? If we're going to
>relabel everything and make people Think Differently, let's have them
>Think Correctly by using powers of 2, 4, 8, or 16.
>
I dunno, maybe because our standardized number system has 10 digits?
Michael J Assels
In article <595ni9$5...@bioko.ifi.unizh.ch>,
Denis N. Antonioli <ant...@ifi.unizh.ch> wrote:
>In article <593rjv$o...@newsflash.concordia.ca>,
> mjas...@cs.concordia.ca (Michael J Assels) writes:
>>
>> You'll also have a very hard time finding a Quebecois who actually
>> measures gas consumption in litres per 100 kilometers. (Hey! That's not
>> proper SI anyway. The units should obviously be square meters.)
>>
>
>Your weird systems may be grounded in physical things, but it doesn't
>help much reasoning about physical things.
>The obvious measure of a fluid is its volume not its surface!
>Ergo, cubic meters per 100 km
But the units there are m**3/10**5m, so, dropping the constant, we
have units of m**2, QED. Gawd, I love science!
Anyway, nobody ever notices the volume of fuel being consumed. The
really meaningful measure is paycheques per odometer rotation. :-)
Michael
Scott Henry
>>>>> "T" == Terje Bless <li...@tss.no> writes:
T> I've been wondering that very thing myself. Since those dammn SGI people
T> deliver parl 4 preinstalled on all their IRIX-running boxes and getting
T> someone in authority to authorise the upgrade; I've been bitten by a few
T> perl 5->4 traps.
T> Anyone want to volounteer to write perltrap inverted ?
Or you can just wait until IRIX-6.4 gets to you... (perl5.003
installed). Although I expect to upgrade to 5.004 before the
all-platforms ships (assuming it comes out soon enough before
feature freeze...).
--
Scott Henry <sco...@sgi.com> / Help! My disclaimer is missing!
Networking Services, / GIGO *really* means: Garbage in, Gospel Out
Silicon Graphics, Inc / http://reality.sgi.com/scotth/
Abigail
On 18 Dec 1996 22:04:04 GMT, Mike Stok wrote in comp.lang.perl.misc:
++ In article <5994d8$o...@tilde.csc.ti.com>,
++
++ >The rest of the metric system makes a helluva lot more sense than the
++ >English system. 16 oz. in a pound? 8 oz. in a cup? Da hell?
++
++ If you're cooking then having a pound that you can subdivide into ounces
++ by halving, and having some linkage between fluid volume and weight means
++ that once can cook quite well without scales, eyeballing an ounce of
++ butter from a 4 ounce stick or an 8oz block isn't that hard, and all those
++ strange volumetric measures map to sizes of cooking utensils. I think
++ the 20oz pint doesn't make sense in this scheme, but once I'm in a pub
++ the logic seems fine 8*)
I don't think eyeballing 250 grams from a 500 gram block is anything
harder than eyeballing 4 ounce from 8 ounce. Or eyeballing 362 ml
from 724 ml.
You know what? I don't think dividing things into two by eyeballing
them even becomes more difficult if you don't know the weight in
either system.
Abigail -- I buy 2 litre bottles of Coke it both Europe and the USA.
Abigail
On 18 Dec 1996 21:50:21 GMT, Jon Orwant wrote in comp.lang.perl.misc:
++
++ Whenever I'm tempted to choose metric, I first wonder why we should
++ adopt a system that uses powers of 10. Why 10? If we're going to
++ relabel everything and make people Think Differently, let's have them
++ Think Correctly by using powers of 2, 4, 8, or 16.
Well, don't try to make us think the metric system is something new.
It's old. About as old as the USA. And why 10? Maybe those people
who started using them looked at a system we are all familiar with,
for thousands of years. The decimal number system. Even the old Romans
use a system based on 5's and 10's.
Abigail
Ed Thomson
Jerrad D Pierce (belg...@MIT.EDU) wrote:
: I don't know about accepted but I've always read $ as bucks
: (I use BASIC and [gasp] DOS too and it probably shows)
: UNIX pronounciations for for some char's:
: ! bang
: # hash (I prefer pound)
:
: That's about it other than the basics...
:
: * star
: / forward slash?
: \ back slash?
: | pipe
~ squiggle
@ shell
* splat
Carey
On 18 Dec 1996 22:04:04 GMT, Mike Stok <mi...@Zeus.Token.Net> wrote:
>In article <5994d8$o...@tilde.csc.ti.com>,
>Tom Sorensen <t...@dogbert.de.sc.ti.com> wrote:
>
There's a fairly good linkage between millilitres (cubic centimetres) and
grams. And as long as I'm cooking, not baking, I'll sometimes work in
pinches, a bit more, a lot more, a "glob" (to relate to the newgroup).
>eyeballing an ounce of
>butter from a 4 ounce stick or an 8oz block isn't that hard,
Getting 250g off a 1kg block isn't that difficult. Getting two
tablespoons out of a margarine tub is a bit harder.
>and all those
>strange volumetric measures map to sizes of cooking utensils.
At least in NZ: teaspoon = 5 ml, tablespoon = 15 ml, cup = 250 ml.
>I think
>the 20oz pint doesn't make sense in this scheme, but once I'm in a pub
>the logic seems fine 8*)
--
Carey Evans <*> c.e...@student.canterbury.ac.nz
"The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make a
nuisance of himself to other people." - John Stuart Mill, _On Liberty_
Mike Stok
In article <E2oM3...@nonexistent.com>, Abigail <abi...@ny.fnx.com> wrote:
>On 18 Dec 1996 22:04:04 GMT, Mike Stok wrote in comp.lang.perl.misc:
>I don't think eyeballing 250 grams from a 500 gram block is anything
>harder than eyeballing 4 ounce from 8 ounce. Or eyeballing 362 ml
>from 724 ml.
>
>You know what? I don't think dividing things into two by eyeballing
>them even becomes more difficult if you don't know the weight in
>either system.
Congratualtions. You managed to miss the implied sharp pointy bit of my
post.
The "officially sanctioned" sub-units of measurement in most non metric
systems seem to map onto the easy halvings - A gallon -> quarts -> pints,
A pound -> ounces (through a series of halvings yeilding half a pound,
quarter of a pound, 2 ounces, then an ounce)
Explicitly I was just saying it's easier, in my opinion, to eyeball down
from pounds to ounces or gallons to pints to cups then it is to get from
litres to decilitres.
Mike Stok
The decimal number system is a fine thing for abstract manipulation of
numbers. The imperial system is a fine way for people to manipulate
phusical quantities and the subunits reflect this in terms of their
physical scale and the ratios between one "named" thing and another (e.g
inches, feet, yards; tons, hundredweight, stones, pounds, ounces etc)
It may have escaped your notice that seeing "It was B inches long" is one
heck of a lot rarer than "It was 11 inches long" in normal English. We
do use the decimal system for representing numerical values (which are
dimensionless) but the dimension units have much more "natural"
subdivisions.
Stijn van Dongen
mi...@Zeus.Token.Net (Mike Stok) writes:
>In article <E2oLr...@nonexistent.com>, Abigail <abi...@ny.fnx.com> wrote:
I missed some of this thread, but I gather Mike is an advocate of the
gallon-pint etc system, as it being a "natural" system. A lot can be
said of something being "natural", but most often it boils down to
culture and upbringing. The metric system seems very natural to me!
Two questions occur: I (a Dutch European (we have 25 different types
of plugs in Europe, so I heard) and used to the metric system), seem
to remember that England, the US, perhaps Australia and several other
countries all have their own systems. US gallons are not imperial
gallons etc etc. Is that correct?
The other one is: A litre of water weighs a kilo. Which somehow I
find very convenient. Do you have a similar kind of convenience?
Regards,
Stijn
Tom Christiansen
[courtesy cc of this posting sent to cited author via email]
In comp.lang.perl.misc,
sti...@cwi.nl (Stijn van Dongen) writes:
:The other one is: A litre of water weighs a kilo. Which somehow I
:find very convenient. Do you have a similar kind of convenience?
A pint's a pound the world around,
except in England
Where a pint of wahter's
a pound in a quahter.
I believe that the standard 2**4 ounces per pint system was
changed due to a tax scam, but I don't have the exact reference
on this.
A friend of mine -- who chooses to remain anonymous and apart
from our silly little banter, offers this amusing story:
A surprising amount of the English system is based on the observation
that if X is a useful measure, then .5X and 2X are, too.
From time to time, I've tried making a full list of liquid measure
that I could use to label powers of two. I never persist, but here's
a surprisingly long list off the top of my head, with '-' where I can't
think of something.
dram
-
tablespoon
ounce
-
gill (pronounced "jill," damn it!), noggin
cup
pint
quart
magnum
gallon
Yep. 1 gallon = 2**10 drams.
I don't use all of these. I typically say "half-gallon," not "magnum."
Most other people use "half-pint" more often than "gill"; I, however,
have a half-pint daughter, whom you've met, named Gillian.
In the same spirit, while a barrel is 42 gallons, we also have this series:
barrel
hogshead
pipe
tun
There's more here that I don't know, (I just don't buy enough wine.
Maybe XXX XXXXX could tell you. :-)
My mother (or XXXXXXXX XXXXXXX) could tell you that there are 4 pecks
to a bushel and 8 quarts to a peck.
Sure, powers of two are cumbersome when you're doing a lot of arithmetic
base 10, but for software geeks these measures should be elegant and
attractive, not a target of derision. Anyone for "magnum-bytes" and
"gallon-bytes"?
Interesting. Seems to me that base 2 is pretty natural after all. :-)
--tom
--
Tom Christiansen tch...@alumni.cs.colorado.edu
Although the Perl Slogan is There's More Than One Way to Do It, I hesitate
to make 10 ways to do something. :-)
--Larry Wall in <96...@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Bennett Todd
On Fri, 20 Dec 1996 15:40:02 GMT, Stijn van Dongen <sti...@cwi.nl> wrote:
>A litre of water weighs a kilo. [...] Do you have a similar kind of convenience?
"A pint's a pound the world around", that's the mnemonic.
I like the metric system a lot better, though. None of these is more "natural"
than another; it's all what you are accustomed to. I think it's terribly
sad that people's minds have gotten so limp and lazy that they will invent
nonsense justifications for SAE units rather than learning a better system.
5280 feet per statute mile, yeah, wonderful.
-Bennett
Mike Stok
In article <stijnvd....@news.cwi.nl>,
>>In article <E2oLr...@nonexistent.com>, Abigail <abi...@ny.fnx.com> wrote:
>[snip]
>
>I missed some of this thread, but I gather Mike is an advocate of the
>gallon-pint etc system, as it being a "natural" system. A lot can be
>said of something being "natural", but most often it boils down to
>culture and upbringing. The metric system seems very natural to me!
I advocate neither system, thinking about where they come from and how
they might have ended up how they have can shed some insight onto people
and how they handle abstract ideas, concrete things and what happens when
the abstract and the concrete meet. This can be of direct relevance to
people implementing software, and if not relevant it might at least be
interesting.
>Two questions occur: I (a Dutch European (we have 25 different types
>of plugs in Europe, so I heard) and used to the metric system), seem
>to remember that England, the US, perhaps Australia and several other
>countries all have their own systems. US gallons are not imperial
>gallons etc etc. Is that correct?
My father was Dutch, and the differing TV standards (PAL, SECAM, and the
middle eastern SECAM), voltages and plugs all reflect political and
economic influences (in my opinion) being used to control markets for the
new fangled electricity and entertainment systems. The basic problems of
measuring length, area, weight and volume have been around mankind ever
since the problems of evenly dividing land or beer between people or
making a mead which was halucinogenic rather than poisonous have been
here. Once money was invented then measuring things became even more
important...
>The other one is: A litre of water weighs a kilo. Which somehow I
>find very convenient. Do you have a similar kind of convenience?
You could carve up the English speaking world into "the commonwealth",
"the ex-colonies" (he said tongue firmly in cheek) there are 2 types of
pint (beer and Bud) whioch are 20 and 16 fluid ounces respectively. A
fluid ounce of water weighs an ounce, and the 16oz pint weighs a pound.
I wouldn't argue that the decimal system is an admirable way of
representing arbitrary numbers, even the Romans had 5s, 10s, 50s, 100s
etc. but their system of representing numbers didn't lend itself too well
to long division. If you consider units which have relevance to an
average person, maybe on the scale of 0.5cm to whatever a mile is in Km,
8/5Km maybe, and weights and volumes that are to do with family sized
eating and measuring - that is measures with a frequent and direct impact
on "real" day to day life for most people - then having useful often used
quantities which were easily divided down saved resorting to fractions
which was more than your average person could do in the middle ages.
Halves, and to an extent thirds, are relatively easy to guage by physical
observation, tenths are not. That's why I think that 12 is a popular
number, it's close to 10 (which is the number base we all use most of the
time) but is easy to divide down into subunits. Once physical quantities
get out of the "immediate" experience of people than most systems will
resort to 10s 'cos until recently 100 miles might have been 1000 for all
the average person cared...
Some of the "odd" measures like rods and chains actually owe their names
to the equipment used to survey land, the term for an exact 1/3 inch is a
barleycorn, all of which have real physical relevance to people living
just 80 to 100 years ago.
I just find this stuff interesting, the metric system is very good for
regualrising stuff and making the number field about as boring as it could
get to the casual observer - if you ever see a book called "Figuring (The
Joy of Numbers)" by Shakuntala Devi or "Mathematics Made Difficult" by
Carl E Linderholm (I think) and read them you might see why I gibber like
this :-)
My final points are:
* an english term for being drunk is having had "one over the eight" rather
than "one under the ten" (reference to the number of 20oz pints quaffed)
(octal used in preference to decimal)
* if we have the ability to be comfortable in many bases (like pre-decimal
kids in the UK saving pocket money) then we won't be the butts of jokes
like:
Q: Why do computer scientists confuse Christmas and Halloween?
A: Because Oct 31 = Dec 25
because we know that they are both representations of a date of
significance to the faithful!
That's all,
Mike
(I blame the humour on http://king.mcs.drexel.edu/~uminger/math.txt)
Tom Sorensen
[courtesy cc of this posting sent to cited author via email]
In comp.lang.perl.misc, Mike Stok <mi...@stok.co.uk> wrote:
>My father was Dutch, and the differing TV standards (PAL, SECAM, and the
And NTSC. Blah. (Shrug - PAL has more lines of resolution, but NTSC
has a higher frame rate. Let's ditch 'em both and get something better
after 50 years)
>to long division. If you consider units which have relevance to an
>average person, maybe on the scale of 0.5cm to whatever a mile is in Km,
What relevance does a mile *REALLY* have though? Maybe a couple thousand
years ago, when Roman Centurions were distinctly concerned with how
far they would walk every M strides, but now?
>8/5Km maybe, and weights and volumes that are to do with family sized
>eating and measuring - that is measures with a frequent and direct impact
>on "real" day to day life for most people - then having useful often used
>quantities which were easily divided down saved resorting to fractions
>which was more than your average person could do in the middle ages.
Yes. But it's not the middle ages anymore. Nor does the metric system
have to resort to fractions any more than the English system does.
>Halves, and to an extent thirds, are relatively easy to guage by physical
>observation, tenths are not. That's why I think that 12 is a popular
Agreed. But I don't see why people think that you MUST reduce by 10
everytime you play in the metric system. What's wrong with going from 100 cm
(1m) to 50 cm?
>barleycorn, all of which have real physical relevance to people living
>just 80 to 100 years ago.
And none to us today. At least, no more than anecdotal relevance.
As others have pointed out, if you grow up in a country with the metric
system then that seems natural to you. If you grow up in a country
with the English system, that's natural. Even though I prefer the metric
system from an objectivist point of view, I'll admit I'm more
comfortable with feet than meters, pounds than kilos, and gallons
than liters.
Oh well... I'm going on vacation like a large number of people in the
world right now... if this thread is still going when I'm back, I'll
be even more astonished than if the US ever converted to metric
(Gee, thanks Clinton for killing the conversion *again*)
Terje Bless
|>>>>> "T" == Terje Bless <li...@tss.no> writes:
|
|T> I've been wondering that very thing myself. Since those dammn SGI people
|T> deliver parl 4 preinstalled on all their IRIX-running boxes and getting
|T> someone in authority to authorise the upgrade; I've been bitten by a few
|T> perl 5->4 traps.
|
|T> Anyone want to volounteer to write perltrap inverted ?
|
|Or you can just wait until IRIX-6.4 gets to you... (perl5.003
|installed). Although I expect to upgrade to 5.004 before the
|all-platforms ships (assuming it comes out soon enough before
|feature freeze...).
I'd heard about that, but if you think it's hard to get perl up-to-date
here; don't even *breathe* the words "OS" and "upgrade" in the same
sentence.
I guess 5.004 is going to be installed somewhere under ~link/
Terje Bless
In article <59fksr$k...@tilde.csc.ti.com>,
t...@dogbert.de.sc.ti.com (Tom Sorensen) wrote:
|As others have pointed out, if you grow up in a country with the metric
|system then that seems natural to you. If you grow up in a country
|with the English system, that's natural.
Except if you live in a big US city where drug dealers will inform your
young ones that cokain is measured in kilograms. :-(
John G Dobnick
From article <5994d8$o...@tilde.csc.ti.com>, by Tom Sorensen <t...@dogbert.de.sc.ti.com>:
: Any math that needs to be done is always done in terms of seconds anyway,
: and there's nothing wrong with "millisecond" or "megasecond" (although you
: don't see the latter very much because it's rather non-sensical).
Straying from Perl... :-)
Gee, I always had a soft spot for nano-years and milli-fortnights.
--
John G Dobnick "Knowing how things work is the basis
Information & Media Technologies for appreciation, and is thus a
University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee source of civilized delight."
j...@csd.uwm.edu ATTnet: (414) 229-5727 -- William Safire
KMAGLO...@delphi.com
In the telephone company world of digital switching, the ^ is also referred
to as an "uphouse"
Kevin
>abi...@ny.fnx.com writes:
>:In Dutch, I usually call '#' "hekje", which means "little fence".
>:Some people call it 'railroad crossing'.
>I believe it's officially an octothorpe. This is not quite the same
>as a musical sharp symbol.
>:I call ~ "tilde" and ^ "carot", which seem to confuse a lot of
>:people.
>Yes, a ~ is really a tilde. ^ is actually a circumflex, which is rather
>too long. Caret is ok, but note the spelling; it's neither carat (gems)
>nor carrot (food). Hat is usually the short preferred form.
>--tom
>--
>Tom Christiansen Perl Consultant, Gamer, Hiker
>tch...@mox.perl.com
>There is no problem so complex that it can't be solved by another level
>of indirection --except for too many level of indirection.
>.
The only that stays the same is change. - Melissa Etheredge
KMAGLO...@delphi.com
I am a fan of the Vikings. So what if they got beat by the Cowboys. There are
less players on probation on the Vikings team than in the Cowboys.
BTW, please pass the jowels and that bottle of Open Pit.
Kevin
Quoting tina from a message in comp.lang.perl.misc
>{ li...@tss.no (Terje Bless) }
>> Only a truly barbaric people would eat the severed head of a sow.
>> The Vikings aren't dead; they've only been domesticated.
>It is said that it is the eyes that taste the best... >:)
>--
>Tina Marie Holmboe /
>http://www.ifi.uio.no/%7Etina/ / / ti...@spirou.uab.ericsson.se /
>'When correctly viewed, Everything is lewd.
>(I could tell you things about Peter Pan,
>And the Wizard of Oz, there's a dirty old man!)' - Tom Lehrer
KMAGLO...@delphi.com
Yea, but does anyone know the real story behind Octothorp? Extra credit given
if the parties can be named and why.
Kevin
>Get away!
>'octo-thorp'
>Eight sided village?
>--
>_ ___ _____ _____ _ _____ ______________________________________________
>/ __|_ _| __\ \ / / __|
>\__ \ | | | _| \ V /| _| Steve Marvell st...@fysh.org
>_|___/ |_| |___| \_/ |___|__"Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder."__
Ron Isaacson
KMAGLO...@delphi.com wrote:
> Yea, but does anyone know the real story behind Octothorp? Extra
> credit given if the parties can be named and why.
I believe the parties you are looking for are Don Macpherson and Jim
Thorpe. According to the story I heard, Don Macpherson was a Bell Labs
employee in the 60's when the first computer-controlled switching
system began to make use of the # key on the telephone. He needed a
technical-sounding name for that key. He wanted it to be an "octo-"
something, because of the 8 points around the outside of the symbol.
Also a devotee of 1912 Olympic gold medalist Jim Thorpe, he decided on
the unique and honorary "octothorpe".
FWIW, I think I would call it "the pound sign" in normal conversation.
- Ron, isaa...@seas.upenn.edu
http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~isaacson/
James Michael Hammond
The 'gct' instrumenting compiler provides coverage data for
c programs -- you compile with gct, run your test suite, and
out comes a nifty report with a bunch of data of arguable
validity and usefulness about "how deeply" you have tested
the code. (I happen to believe in the usefulness of this
report but your mileage may vary.)
Does anything similar exist for perl code?
--JMike
using netscape news for the first time so I hope my .sig comes thru...
philippe...@eurolang.fr
In article <32D107...@hickory.engr.utk.edu>,
I would recommend the following approach:
. Put the following code in a file, e.g. coverage.pl
package DB;
my %profile; # collected information
my %files; # list of included files
my $file; # current file
my $line; # current line
sub DB {
($file, $line) = (caller(0))[1,2];
$files{$file}++;
$profile{$file, $line}++;
return undef;
}
sub sub {
$sub{$sub} =~ /(\d+)-/;
$profile{$file, $1}++ if defined $1; # no info for anonymous
&$sub;
}
END {
select STDERR;
my $rule = "=" x 80 . "\n";
my $lines; # lines whitout profiling information
foreach $file (keys %files) {
if (not open(LINE_IN_FILE, "$file")) {
warn "can't open $file\n";
} else {
print "\n$rule Profile of $file\n$rule\n";
while (<LINE_IN_FILE>) {
last if /^__END__/ ;
if (not exists $profile{$file, $.}) {
$lines .= sprintf("%4d\t%5s\t%s", $., '', $_);
} else {
if ($lines) {
print $lines;
$lines = '';
}
printf("%4d\t%5d\t%s", $., $profile{$file, $.}, $_);
}
}
print $rule;
}
}
}
1;
__END__
. In the program to analyse add:
require "coverage.pl"
. Type "s" in reply to the debugger prompt.
For a *real* test coverage analysis you could accumulate data in an DBM
file.
Philippe
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