Invisible escreveu:
> http://web.archive.org/web/20080730063308/http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch08s02.html

> Some select quotations:
> 
> "Regular expressions are an extreme example of how concise a 
> mini-language can be. Simple regular expressions express recognition 
> behaviour that would otherwise have to be implemented with hundreds of 
> lines of fussy, bug-prone code."
> 
> Oh really? What what makes you think people don't use *libraries* for 
> pattern recognition? :-P

calling libs still far too verbose next to the power of regexes.

> "Once you get past the verbosity of XML, Glade markup is a fairly simple 
> language."
> 
> LOL! Yeah... (This quote appears just below a 32-line "Hello World" 
> example for Glade.)

nobody writes GUI glade descriptions by hand, nor should.

> "The troff(1) typesetting formatter was, as we noted in Chapter 2, 
> Unix's original killer application."
> 
> Oh really? Damn, I'm going to have to go look up what the hell troff is 
> now...

man pages, anyone?

> "The traditional term for this sort of thing is syntactic sugar; the 


> sparingly lest it obscure more than help."
> 
> And to think most people consider syntactic sugar to be a /good/ thing...

it obviously does not cause cancer of the semicolon in non-C languages.

> Language power, size and complexity are not necessarily related as 
> directly as this suggests.
> 
> The Iota calculus has 1 data type, 1 operator, and 1 constant, and it 
> manages to be Turing-complete. So it's as "capable" as you can get, and 
> just about as "small" as you can get. But powerful? Not really. Complex? 
> You betcha! o_O
> 
> Having fewer features can make a language /more complicated/ to actually 
> *use*. Sometimes a bigger language is easier to use. And sometimes you 
> can make a language smaller /and/ simpler /and/ easier to use. It's not 
> as simple as bigger = more complex = more powerful.

yes.

> "Syntactically JavaScript resembles Java with some influence from Perl, 
> and features Perl-like regular expressions."
> 
> Since when does JS have regular expressions?

since the beginning.

-- 
a game sig: http://tinyurl.com/d3rxz9

Post a reply to this message