Archive: June 04, 2002
You heard it here first! I've been checking Perl.com more than usual this week since I found out last week that the next apocalypse was due this week. Here, for your enlightenment, on a topic near and dear to Perl enthusiasts everywhere, is Larry Wall's Apocalypse 5: Regular Expressions.
In fact, regular expression culture is a mess, and I share some of the blame for making it that way. Since my mother always told me to clean up my own messes, I suppose I'll have to do just that.
For prior Apocalypses, I've used the RFCs as a springboard for discussion of my thinking, but this one is special, because none of the RFCs were courageous enough (or foolhardy enough) to look at the big picture and propose radical change where it's needed. But Perl has often been tagged as a language in which it's easy to write programs that are difficult to read, and it's no secret that regular expression syntax that has been the chief culprit. Funny that other languages have been borrowing Perl's regular expressions as fast as they can...
Given all this, I need to warn you that this Apocalypse is going to be somewhat radical. We'll be proposing changes to certain "sacred" features of regex culture, and this is guaranteed to result in future shock for some of our more conservative citizens. Do not be alarmed. We will provide ways for you to continue programming in old-fashioned regular expressions if you desire. But I hope that once you've thought about it a little and worked through some examples, you'll like most of the changes we're proposing here.
Wow, and the thing is 24 pages according to the way Perl.com breaks it up, but it's about 50 pages printed.
Just noticed that version 1.0 of Yoix was released about a month ago.
Via InstaPundit:
Quote:
The New Mexico Supreme Court has ruled the state's concealed weapons law, as written, is unconstitutional.
The law allowed licensed citizens over the age of 21 to carry hidden firearms, but only after completing background checks and safety training.
On Tuesday, the State Supreme Court ruled that option for cities or counties to ban concealed weapons is unconstitutional. It stated that communities do not have the right to decide whether or not to follow a state law.
That's awesome! I wonder what the crime rate is in NM? Whoa, it's actually very high.
Ever marvel at how much code it takes to do even simple stuff? How many times have you written data validation routines? Every little check to make sure some data you got was numeric, or that it looks like a date, or that the ID of the foreign key of the associated record you're trying to add actually exists before you blindly go insert into the table adds up. You wish you could just will it to be on the screen because you've done it so many times before, but you still have to type it out.
How many times have you written code like this?
<select name="show_hour">
<?php
for($n=1;$n<=12;$n++){
echo "<option value=\"$n\"";
if($show_hour == $n){
echo ' selected="true"';
}
echo ">$n</option>\n";
}
?>
</select>
Oh, and not to mention the constant argument with yourself about how to structure your code (tradeoff between speed of coding, correctness, and maintainability), and between checking-every-single-thing-because-otherwise-the-code-just-isn't-"correct" and keeping yourself to realistic expectations of how robust you need to make your code (which obviously differs depending on the project).
I just found this freeware page in my referrer log. He has links to some neat freeware I never knew about. I'm adding everything useful to my downloads page.
Some of the neat stuff:
- MD5summer
- PtFB
- VirtuaWin - I have yet to try a virtual window manager I've liked, but I'll give this one a try too.
- 2020 - looks like a neat image viewer, but turns out to be "adware" (run and hide).
- XChat IRC client - I usually just use the one in Mozilla though, ChatZilla.
This post is one of those "put everything here so I can come back if I forget" posts.
Via Langreiter.com, XML sucks, but you have to use it anyway. I don't think XML is quite as bad as this guy does (read some of the other stuff on xmlsucks.org), but the presentation is definitely worth a read, and has some insightful comments.
Part of the point of XML is that eventually, we'll have so many useful tools built around it that it'll just become infrastructure. We're still relatively early in the "XML age" - the spec's not all that old, and complementary specs are still working out the kinks.
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Tuesday, June 4, 2002
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