SPUG: Special 10/2 Meeting: The Damian Returneth!

[Tim Maher/CONSULTIX]

		   Announcing: YAPCTS, 2000
	   "Yet Another Perl Celebrity Talk in Seattle"
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SPUG's favorite Perl Guru and stand-up comic, that guy with the
award-winning code, funny accent, and delirious wit, will be reprising
his famous 'Latin talk' from "The Perl Conference 4.0" on the evening of
October 10th at the usual Seattle downtown location.

You know who I mean.  The official abstract for the talk follows below.

P.S. Remember that famous graffito scrawled on bathroom-walls by
first-year Latin students everywhere, "Semper ubi sub-ubi".
	(translation provided below; WAY below)

==========================================================
|  Tim Maher, Ph.D.           Tel: (206) 781-UNIX        |
|  SPUG Founder & Leader      Email: spug at halcyon.com    |
|  Seattle Perl Users Group   HTTP: www.halcyon.com/spug |
==========================================================
                      Lingua::Romana::Perligata:
                    Perl for the XXI-imus Century

The great flaw of existing programming (and natural) languages is that
word order matters, which makes it unnecessarily difficult to program
(or talk) when drunk.

You end up writing:

        push @casino's_money, @my_cash;

instead of:

        push @my_cash, @casino's_money;

Generally speaking, older natural languages rely less on word order. For
example, in Latin the sentences "Puer dedit cani escam." and "Escam
dedit puer cani." both mean "The boy gave the dog the food." In fact, the
more usual word order would be "Reverse Polish", with the verb coming
last: "Puer cani escam dedit." This flexibility is possible because
Latin uses inflection to denote lexical roles, and that single fact
allowed the Romans to build a vast empire despite their near-permanent
state of inebriation.

There is no reason that programming languages could not also make use of
inflection rather than position to denote lexical roles, thereby
allowing hackers to program in their natural -- inebriated -- state.
>From that bar-room inspiration, it was only a small, slightly wobbly
step to the Lingua::Romana::Perligata module: an Latin syntactic
binding for Perl.

No prior knowledge of the ancient Roman language will be assumed, but by
the end of the talk (or at least by the end of the after-party) the
following program will make perfect sense:

    maximum inquementum tum biguttam tum stadium egresso scribe.
    vestibulo perlegementum da meo maximo .
    maximum tum novumversum egresso scribe.
    da duo tum maximum conscribementa meis listis.
    dum damentum nexto listis decapitamentum fac sic
        lista sic hoc tum nextum recidementum cis vannementa listis da.
        next tum biguttam tum nextum tum novumversum scribe egresso.
    cis

  _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 
"Semper ubi sub-ubi" => "always wear under-wear"
	(not exactly accurate, but sorta close)

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