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Comment Projector (Score 1) 12

I was thinking about bringing a projector and maybe pulling up old stories from over the years. I'm not sure about what metrics I want to use to choose stories. Perhaps number of comments as a first attempt?

Comment Re:Uh what? (Score 3, Insightful) 105

"'There's a societal ideal that what you read is nobody else's business,'"... no, no there isn't.

When speaking about the act of reading, there is some expectation of privacy, at least from the government. This isn't related to businesses per se, but librarians have fought to keep library records private and as such, their policies and software try to keep records for only as long as necessary (e.g. the duration of loan). Librarians often refuse to give out information on their patrons unless there is a court order.

This same sort of ideal can be applied to businesses in the form of opt-in data mining, but U.S. society needs to make this sort of decision in the form of information privacy law.

Comment Re:Why do you need an example? (Score 1) 498

If high schoolers can compete in the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad , they can surely teach themselves the concepts behind regular expressions and then whip up a bit of Perl to implement it. I know I could. In fact, another competition, ACSL, has existed for a very long time (late 70s) for high-school students that want to improve their CS theory and it tests regular expression knowledge from time to time.

Comment Re:Get off my lawn (Score 1) 166

I agree with this. Schaum's Outlines are surprisingly comprehensive, easy to follow, and well-written. They are meant to complement textbooks, but given the low priority on conceptual organisation found in many textbooks, these can often be used alone if you do the problems.

Comment Re:Whatever happened to Perl 6? (Score 5, Interesting) 192

As far as the matching capabilities of Perl 6, I think they're trying to do something that will advance the state-of-the-art in terms of programming langauge integration in the same way that Perl 5's regex did. The Perl 6 rules are similar to the tricks and hacks that people do with regular expressions to build up full grammars. By separating out the parts into logical components, you will get better readability and reusability. Not only will we get cleaner text processing, but this (along with the VM architecture) will aid the development of DSLs that will extend the language into an exciting future.

Yeah, it's some good Kool-Aid and the Perl community been waiting for a while, but bringing these ideas into a production-ready language isn't trivial. I'm still using Perl 5 because of CPAN, but I feel that Perl 6 will eventually get to the same level especially with a source-to-source compiler. The hardest part would be dealing with native-code bindings.

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