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Can anyone enlighten a cuttlefish about what this means/does?
by ascuttlefish 17y ago
Can anyone enlighten a cuttlefish about what this means/does?
- jrockway 17y agoThere are a few places where it seems to me the program would die, but they are surrounded by conditionals that are always false... so I am not sure. I am downloading Perl 3 and am just going to run the thing. Edit: OK, yacc is too new, make is too new, the C compiler can't understand 1989 C, etc... so I have lost interest.
- anr 17y agoI think this poem was present in Programming Perl, 1st edition, which covers Perl 4.
- koenigdavidmj 17y agoPerl 4 and the book's first edition were released simultaneously, and Perl 4 was merely a version of the Perl 3 interpreter. Depending on who you ask, this decision was either for convenience ("this book teaches Perl 4" is easier to say than "this book teaches Perl 3.numbers.here") or marketing ("look--Perl 4 came out!"), the latter sort of like Slackware's increment of version numbers from 4 to 7.
- pyre 17y ago> the latter sort of like Slackware's increment of version numbers from 4 to 7 That was done because all of the other distros at the time had higher version numbers and people were looking at Slackware with a, "Well, it's only version 4. RedHat/Mandrake/etc are already on version 7!" attitude. I remember there being a written (web) justification for it.
- nfnaaron 17y agoThis is a good demonstration of why, if you're saving/archiving/safeguarding important code, that you save the code, the toolchain, environment and hardware. Important enough to make all that effort, anyway. Like maybe climate research code, that kind of important and long-term relevant.
- ascuttlefish 17y agoI work in an archives and for the reasons you mention many archives--with the exception of various national and large-scale archives--are failing in their efforts to preserve born digital records. It's a thorny problem, really. In many cases, we have to preserve hardware required to decode information--think u-matic tape players, 5.25" floppies, Iomega zip drives, etc.--as well as software to decode the information on the files.
- bdr 17y agoCould you store VMs?
- patrickas 17y agoIt's just a poem, written in Perl instead of English. perl (ver3 or 5 for the updated poem) can compile it but running the poem doesn't do anything useful.
- ascuttlefish 17y agoAh, okay, thanks! I guess I assumed that it was infamous because it did something terrible. Still pretty neat!
- anr 17y agoIf I recall correctly, Perl poetry should parse, there's no need for it to do something useful.
- cmallen 17y agoI'm confused, are you a cuttlefish or a scuttlefish?
- ascuttlefish 17y agoI'm an all-seeing cuttlefish. However, that was too long for an HN username. Despite seeing it all, I comprehend very little and require the help of my betters to understand. Hence the questions.