palordrolap

Decades ago, someone wrote a source filter for Perl that allowed for programming Perl-wise in Latin. To the point of conjugating and declining correctly, or at least in a manner that resembled correctness.

I figure with a sufficiently commanding voice you could do much the same with that as with this.

Link (which contains an example): https://metacpan.org/dist/Lingua-Romana-Perligata/view/lib/Lingua/Romana/Perligata.pm

Pretty sure druckef should be drucked. printf means print (to) file. “File” is valid German, but it is non-standard and “Datei” seems to be the preferred form.

I could also argue that that d should be capitalised, but I’m already overstepping my bounds considering I know very little German.

I wouldn’t want to say which should take precedence between C’s preference for all-lowercase keywords and functions and German’s Rule to capitalise all Nouns.

Backups are always considered to be too expensive up until the point that not having backups becomes more expensive. This applies to redundancy of all kinds except the one that means firing employees for not setting up the other kinds.

I am old. I am still not over JavaScript existing outside of a browser. I’m not sure I ever will be. And that’s from someone who uses a Linux DE that uses JavaScript and XML as part of its GUI.

Files, hardware / peripherals and programs. The distinction can get a bit blurry what with drivers and the fact that Linux exposes most of the hardware via the filesystem.

OK, WTAF on those word replacements. I’d be freaking out about malware.

As I recall, that is remarkably close to the true story. They wanted something that could make web pages dynamic, wouldn’t crash the browser or any pages that used it and they wanted it in the Netscape browser ASAP.

One man thus threw something together that looked a little bit Java-like and it ended up in the browser fairly shortly thereafter.

Hard to believe that was 30 years ago.

Then you should have sex with as many rich people as possible then die as quickly and quietly as possible, there’s a good chap.

Best regards, Your corporate overlords

So does JPEG. It doesn’t mean that people (will) use it for that.

Microsoft tried to add VBScript to Internet Explorer in 1996, and the ghost of it lurked around in IE until it was old enough to drive. It never caught on.

When that happens often enough, the supermarket installs something that locks the wheels when the trolleys go out of range.

You can still get the trolley away by other means, sure, but I imagine it’s a pain to have to do that when there are wheels right there.

Now that you mention it, I do remember the backticks and symbols thing for infix, so yeah that’d be something extra that Haskell did. One of the few things about Haskell that wasn’t on the fringes of my capability and understanding as I recall.

I remember thinking that it would be cool if other, more procedural, languages allowed it, but then most other languages also don’t have the capability of setting the precedence of new operators relative to old ones on the fly. A lot of that stuff is hard-coded into those languages’ compilers.

This is one of those rare occasions where “IT” might have been better fully punctuated as “I.T.”, but the thought of using “Scotty” as a verb meaning “generously pad all estimates” amuses me.

e.g. “If I want to cover my a—, I should Scotty it.”

My mistake. I had somehow missed or forgotten that Lisp also supports currying, which is what I was thinking of as Haskell taking further. There might be other things regarding type declaration and such, but that’s a little beyond me to confirm or deny at the moment.

Yes. Most early BASICs even required that any reference to a function name, in definition or calling, be preceded by an FN keyword as well as the parentheses.

QBASIC, Visual BASIC and the related dialects of BASIC found in MS Office and LibreOffice all have slightly better syntax for defining and calling functions than the older BASICs, but they all still require parentheses on their subroutine parameter lists too.

At best, you might be able to call a subroutine by name with no empty parentheses after it, but as soon as you need parameters, you’ll need parentheses around them.

But like I say, there was at least one rare BASIC that didn’t need them, so I’m assuming there might have been others that I’m not aware of.

(f x) works this way in Lisp - as in the joke - and Lisp descendants like Scheme. And then there’s Haskell which takes the whole thing a step further still.

Also Perl, because Larry thought it would be fun(ctional). The external parentheses are technically optional in this case, but won’t break anything if included. Regular f(x) syntax is also supported there. (You could probably remake this meme with Python and Perl in first and second panels tbh.)

And I know of at least one dialect of BASIC that allowed subroutine calls to lack their parentheses, so the same external parentheses thing would apply if that subroutine was a function.

Guido undoubtedly had a strong, strong hatred of the number of ways braces are overloaded in Perl.

Perl time:

sub AUTOLOAD {
    our $AUTOLOAD=~s/.*:://;
    no strict;
    local $_=$_[0] and *STDOUT->$_($AUTOLOAD)
}

HelloWorld("print");

Pro: You can Give HelloWorld any (syntactically valid) name you like and (as long as the parameter is "print", anyway) its name will be printed, no pre-declaration required.

Con: The specified function inside the quotes has to be a method associated with a file descriptor.

What’s the alternative? It would have to be something that wouldn’t work if the user was unconscious and that offered plausible deniability if they were awake and being coerced.

What, other than a password, offers that?

Relatedly, I don’t even know most of my passwords these days. I use a password manager (one that doesn’t require internet access) that generated random strings. I only ever see them if I accidentally paste them into the wrong field.

Ah. Now I see. Thanks.