use Perl

Got parrot compiled on linux and snooped around the BASIC compiler. Whew, last time I looked at assembly code was when I programmed a picoweb web server for my model railroad.

I'm a little mystified about compiling parrot on Mac OS X though. Docs say use fink, but fink seems to want only mirrors for sources. How do I get fink to see my parrot download?

Chase Art is showing some of Dr. Seuss' lesser known works.

Found Scheme-in-Perl.txt while reading an functional programming article at PerlMonks.

I finally got mod_perl and mod_dav working together in Apache 1.3.24 - originally I was having lots of core dumps, but it turns out the fix was easy - don't use Apache's expat-lite, use the full expat. I gather this is common knowledge, but it took me a while to figure it out.

WebDAV works pretty well in IE on Windows and directly in Mac OS X. I don't have access to XP, but I understand it can mount WebDAV folders as a drive letter instead of going through IE.

At PerlWhirl '02 I sat in on one of Dominus' lectures on using functional programming techniques in Perl. I asked where I could learn more about this and was recommended the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs .

The examples are in Scheme, which is line-noise to me, so I've been using the scm2perl translator to help me understand the examples in my native perl. It does a decent job of translation, although it doesn't understand lambda functions (anon subs). scm2perl is part of the Gimp CPAN package and handles Gimp's script-fu dialect of Scheme.

Example:

[localhost:~] thomas% less sum.scm
(define (sum term a next b)
  (if (> a b)
      0
      (+ (term a)
         (sum term (next a) next b))))

[localhost:~] thomas% scm2perl sum.scm
creating parser...done
header...reading(sum.scm)...translating...trailer...wrote(sum.pl)
[localhost:~] thomas% less sum.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl

use Gimp qw(:auto);
use Gimp::Fu;

sub sum {
   my ($term, $a, $next, $b) = @_;
   if ($a > $b) {
      0;
   } else {
      (term ($a) + sum ($term, next ($a), $next, $b));
   }
}

exit main;