[sf-perl] Larry Wall interview on slashdot

Joseph Brenner doomvox at gmail.com
Mon Jul 18 17:06:54 PDT 2016


There's a Larry Wall interview up on slashdot that's definitely
worth a look:

https://developers.slashdot.org/story/16/07/14/1349207/the-slashdot-interview-with-larry-wall

I liked the remarks on unicode:

  "One thing we do to fight cultural imperialism with Perl 6 is
  to treat any grapheme as if it were a precomposed character,
  whether or not the Unicode Consortium happens to have defined
  one under NFC yet. If there's no precomposed codepoint, we
  simply make one up temporarily. So we get O(1) string indexing
  based on what the user thinks is their language. (Even for
  characters outside the BMP. Lots of current languages force you
  to consider an emoji or a cuneiform character as a combination
  of two codepoints. Yuck! I mean, XP. Well, I really mean
  U+1F61D, FACE WITH STUCK-OUT TONGUE AND TIGHTLY-CLOSED
  EYES. But you'll have to imagine it for now, because Slashdot
  is not written in Perl 6. (Yet.)"


Oh and by the way:

  "You wanna write Inf as that funny sideways 8 character, or
  write pi with the Greek letter, go right ahead. You wanna write
  your powers with superscripts instead of **, you can do that
  too. Yes, we're insane, but you're gonna love it...as soon as
  you figure out how to type it."

There's an easy way of typing unicode characters in emacs:

  C-x 8 <return> <hex codepoint> <return>

I would guess there are even easier ways, but that one always works.


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