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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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  • I must be the only person in the world who thinks it is absurd to see code formatting as a matter of personal preference.

    If

        I just ( you know , like this )
    format my English text in any old way,it
        gets awfully hard to read.There are standard grammatical conventions for written text,yet we try to reinvent them for programming
    . See how silly it is to break before the operator
    ?And what's the deal with braces being non-tight
    ? ( I mean, we don't have space after an opening paren ( and

    • I must be the only person in the world who thinks it is absurd to see code formatting as a matter of personal preference.

      In French, it's conventional to put a space before the question mark -- like this ? They also don't seem to indent new paragraphs. ¡In Spanish, they mark exclamations at the front too! In Czech, we can see, that they put commas before "that" when the independent clause comes first (as in this sentence, so "we can see" isn't parenthetical). In German, they capitalize Nouns and sometimes in Phrases, extra Commas put.

      So I think it's absurd that you think it's absurd that formatting is a preference. :) (Though you could probably argue that those languages are consistent "internally", so picking a format for Perl would only be equivalent to picking it for one of those languages. Maybe programming languages each need a few hundred years to settle on formatting conventions.)

      Recently I've been experimenting a little with the formatting of my emails, as I don't like all of the "standard grammatical conventions for written text". For example,

      Also, it takes frustratingly long for
       any kind of change we make
       to get into an actually-used version of Bricolage.
      It was news recently that Emacs was having this problem,
      and Debian notoriously had it. The result is that
       people who at first anxiously add a feature to the project
       subsequently lose interest as the feature sits there
       practically forever
       without seeing the light of day till years later.
      We suffer badly from this.

      (So I was trying to put one "phrase" per line, with continuations indented by one space.) They end up looking almost like poems, which I think makes them too flippant. It doesn't mean I have to accept the standard conventions, though.

      I wonder why we even use text and punctuation much any more in programming. I'd think it'd be nicer to abstract those things away. (What was that project whose name I can never remember, S*****y, where you program by plugging images together?) I guess we're used to typing keys on a keyboard, though, so editing text is easiest.

      • Though you could probably argue that those languages are consistent "internally", so picking a format for Perl would only be equivalent to picking it for one of those languages.

        Yes. And Perl is (quite arguably (on many levels)) linguistically based in English.

        Maybe programming languages each need a few hundred years to settle on formatting conventions.

        Maybe, but please name some French/ Spanish/ German/ Czech programming languages.

        (So I was trying to put one "phrase" per line, with continuations indented by one space.) They end up looking almost like poems, which I think makes them too flippant.

        Poems yes, but "poem" does not imply "flippant". Poetry has been quite influential throughout history (though we forget that thanks to technological advances like "fox news".) Poems are memorable because of the rhyme (or non-rhyme), beat, linebreaks, syntactical twists, etc. It's not much different than distending an array/hash decl

        • Maybe, but please name some French/ Spanish/ German/ Czech programming languages.

          Rasmus Lerdorf (Denmark) designed PHP.

          Bjarne Stroustrup (Denmark) designed C++.

          Guido van Rossum (Netherlands) designed Python.

          Yukihiro Matsumoto (Japan) designed Ruby.

          Niklaus Wirth (Switzerland, german part) designed ALGOL, Pascal, Modula.

          Jean David Ichbiah (France) designed Ada.

          The Ericsson company (Sweden) designed Erlang.

          French professors designed Prolog.

          Norwegian professors designed Simula.

          INRIA (France) designs OCAML.

          etc, etc.

          I could go through the thousands of programming languages listed

          --
          Close the world. txEn eht nepO
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