[H-GEN] CGI internal server error

[Martin Pool]

On Fri, Oct 16, 1998 at 07:02:39PM +1000, Jason Henry Parker wrote:
> 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].

Well, it's relatively easy to cast an eyeball or two over a line of C
code and check whether the brackets match up, and whether there's a
semicolon at the end of the statement.  Also, because it's easy for
emacs to parse, you can feel pretty sure that if the next line is
indented to the place you expected then the syntax is correct.

Parsing by hand a line of Perl can be much harder, and so it's not
_obvious_ whether it's correct or not.  emacs has much more trouble
doing indenting and font highlighting correctly, so you can't use that
as a sanity check.

Designing language syntax is just like designing communications
systems: you want the messages/statement to be reasonably concise, but
also to make it unlikely that small random changes will change a
message into another legal message.

> [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.

You know emacs has ascended from application to OS when it takes as
long to boot as Linux and X put together: that happened to me the
other day.  Lovely.

-- 
Martin Pool