Why the software industry is morally bankrupt, volume #0xDEADBEEF

[tim]

A blog comment in response to an argument that writing a parser for Perl is Turing-complete:

"That's some mighty fine left brain thinking there( especially for a Monday morning ), but does it in anyway affect any practical aspect of Perl? Like can it be used to show that Perl is more or less reliable/secure? This isn't a criticism of your node, but I left college 35 years ago, and this sort of analysis seems very ivory-tower-ish to me now. It's sort of like saying 'one cannot prove self-existence'. Is the fact that Perl cannot parse itself a good or bad thing, or can other languages do it? Does that make them superior?"

Computer science is an intellectual and pragmatic failure. Kids, if you're looking for a good career, major in English.

Comments

[wkfauna.livejournal.com]

Heh, no, because your "easily accomplished" clause is too broad (what's easy? what's another mechanism? does conciseness count? etc). But the example "whatever" clause in the original post is interesting and shows some features that are each either neat or horrible, depending on your point of view:
* passing args without parens
* implicit matching on $_ and the existence of $_
* void context and the lack of failure thereof

Anyway, I'm not here to argue for the beauty of the design of Perl, 'cause even I think it's horrible. There's certainly plenty of design and implementation sloppiness there to go around. One just has to look at the way sort works to be convinced of that (hint: it involves manipulating symbol tables).