Re: [C&C] Re: [tlug] OT: interesting NY times article:High-Tech Japanese, Running Out of Engineers

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Dave Brown writes:
 > On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 03:05:17AM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
 > > David J Iannucci writes:
 > > 
 > >  > Much as I love Perl, I must admit that the concise beauty of the way
 > >  > Ruby applies the string transformation without the side-effect takes
 > >  > the cake :-)
 > > 
 > > Hm?  Perl uses the editable buffer model, Ruby has immutable strings,
 > > Emacs provides both.  Dif'rent strokes.
 > 
 > I think you're confusing Ruby and Python there.  Ruby's strings are as
 > editable as you like.

No, I'm inferring it from David I's comment about lack of side effect.
Does Ruby also provide a method with the same signature that mutates
the string in-place?

 > (Symbols are immutable, but it would make no sense for them to be
 > anything else.)

Actually, I've seen code in Lisp that mutates symbol names.  The
symbols are gensyms (ie, uninterned) whose values are parse trees and
the like, and the idea was to provide an indication of the state from
the pname.  Sort of like the way many programs manipulate argv[0].

Now, I don't say this makes sense to sane and/or earthly programmers,
but you have to admit there's a semblance of internal logic there.
Dave?  Dave?  Oh, was it "ettiquette time"?  At least you didn't
spontaneously combust!

P.S.  "As editable as I like?"  You dare say that to an Emacs user?
Prove it!