[H-GEN] CGI internal server error
Jason Henry Parker
ph330812 at student.uq.edu.au
Fri Oct 16 05:02:39 EDT 1998
On Fri, 16 Oct 1998, Martin Pool wrote:
> Yeah, I was mostly joking. But I've spent more time than I care to
> think about looking for missing quotes and similar things in Perl.
Oh yes, much more aggravating than searching for missing semicolons or
quotation marks in, say, C, or Pascal, or SQL, or just about any other
language you care to mention[0].
Now, *granted*, perl's *ahem* relatively free grammar makes (say) an
autoindent mode for emacs (or even vi, shudder[1]) a little harder to
write. But I wouldn't go projecting the failings of computer languages
in general onto just *one*, poor, defenceless, little language.
Wow.
You really *can* troll without even thinking about it, once you've had
enough practice.
[0] : I am aware of that horrible horrible bug in that most evil of all
programming languages, but I dare not say its name here.
Oh, all right. To forestall the inevitable question, it's
FORTRAN. There is a FORTRAN statement that can be either an
assignment or a loop, depending on the presence of a single
space; it's this bug that meant that we had to send a second
Voyager probe into space to peek at the bits the first one
missed, iirc.
Any language that requires you to indent by four spaces just so
someone can put the printout in a binder next to flowcharts is,
by definition, very very evil.
[1] : I'm shuddering at vi with syntax highlighting and indenting, not
vi in general. I *have* changed my mind about the convenience
and cost-effectiveness of using Emacs for the special modes,
though.
Jason, who covered all this in about three lines on irc the other day.
--
Jason Henry Parker, ph330812 at student.uq.edu.au ____
``All consistent axiomatic formulations of number \ _/__
theory include undecidable propositions.'' \X /
Ascended: VVTCP. \/
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