tchrist

133 reputation

bio	website	perl.com
	location	Boulder, CO
	age	50
visits	member for	2 years, 6 months
	seen	Apr 26 at 16:59
stats	profile views	118

I’m Tom Christiansen, author of Programming Perl and Perl Cookbook from O’Reilly. I’m a freelance instructor giving courses in Perl programming, including Unicode and regular expressions. I’ve been using BSD Unix for 30 years now; like your maid, I don’t do Windows.

I’ve undergraduate degrees in Spanish and in Computer Science, and a graduate degree in compsci focusing on operating systems design and in natural language processing. I’ve studied Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Latin, and German, with a smattering of other languages thrown in. For the last few years I’ve been dabbling in computational linguistics.

	133 reputation	bio	website	perl.com	visits	member for	2 years, 6 months
27 badges		location	Boulder, CO		seen	Apr 26 at 16:59

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Feb 12	comment	Scientific evidence that supports using long variable names instead of abbreviations? Theonlyproblemwithlongvariablenamesiswhenpeopleforgettoincludespacesbetweeneachw‌ord. And_of_course_we_put_spaces_in_variables_using_underscores. Your choice.
May 13	comment	what limitation will we face if each user-perceived character is assigned to one codepoint? @Pacerier Because they’re legit Unicode extended grapheme clusters, that’s why. You are far too tied to non-specialist English for this to make sense to you. You should read the explanation of and justification for combining characters in the Unicode Standard, because you clearly fail to understand, or fail to recognize, or perhaps fail to accept, the motivations that the Unicode Consortium had for these. Even for the simple Latin and Greek cases, you need countably infinite variations due to matters such as combining marks in IPA and mathematical notation.
May 13	comment	what limitation will we face if each user-perceived character is assigned to one codepoint? @Pacerier Disagree. Consider combining single and double overlines and underlines.
May 13	comment	what limitation will we face if each user-perceived character is assigned to one codepoint? @Pacerier You really are missing the point. You cannot possibly have one code point per extended grapheme cluster, because the number of the latter easily exceeds 32 bits, let alone 21 of them. It just isn’t possible. You need to learn to iterating by grapheme clusters just as you need to learn how to iterate by words. Both are higher-level concepts of any open-ended problem space that is subject to infinite variation.
Apr 16	awarded	Pundit
Mar 5	awarded	Excavator
Mar 5	revised	Why are regular expressions so morbidly attractive? spelling and formatting fixes
Mar 4	suggested	suggested edit on Why are regular expressions so morbidly attractive?
Mar 4	comment	Why are regular expressions so morbidly attractive? That’s just bull. Learn out to write proper modern regexes.
Mar 4	comment	Why are regular expressions so morbidly attractive? Why is it that everyone confuses pulling out little bits of HTML with completely parsing a full-blown web page into a full parse tree? *It’s really stupid.* Believe me, when I edit HTML pages in `vi`, you bet your life I use `:%s/foo/bar/gc` on it. If it’s good enough for an editor, it’s good enough for a script.
Mar 4	comment	Why are regular expressions so morbidly attractive? Anybody who isn’t writing all his regexes in `/x` mode to allow for whitespace for the elbowroom of cognitive chunking, and for comments to explain why things are being done, should of course have his ears boxed. But for real regexes of reasonable complexity, you need to consider applying top-down design via grammatical regexes. Once you have seen the light, you’ll never go back to `/@#$^^@#$^&&*)@#/`.
Mar 4	comment	Why are regular expressions so morbidly attractive? @peterchen Read ’em and weap!
Mar 4	comment	When you should NOT use Regular Expressions? Modern regexes are so far beyond what your grandma was taught that regexes could do that it her advice is immaterial. And even primitive regexes can handle most little snippets of HTML. This blanket prohibition is ridiculous and unrealistic. Regexes were *made* for this sort of thing. And yes, I do know what I’m talking about.
Mar 4	comment	When you should NOT use Regular Expressions? There is no reason in the world to avoid throwing a regex at a string like `"<a href='foo'>stuff</a>"`. Modern regexes have no trouble with this.
Mar 4	comment	When you should NOT use Regular Expressions? Actually, attacking bits of HTML with regexes is easy and worthwhile. It’s trying to parse an entire web page with a single regex that’s ridiculous. But there is no reason in the world why not to use a regex on a string like `"<b>foo bar</b>"`. The parrots don’t know what they’re squawking about.
Mar 2	awarded	Autobiographer
Feb 28	awarded	Editor
Feb 28	revised	Is it a must for every programmer to learn regular expressions? deleted 5 characters in body
Feb 20	comment	How Should I Go About Learning Ruby From Perl? Thanks for the great link. I’m still reading it over, but so far it is indeed better than any of the others like it I’ve seen. In particular, I haven’t caught any glaring errors yet.
Feb 19	comment	How Should I Go About Learning Ruby From Perl? I have no complaint about the word, just about there not being a good comparison table anywhere that I know of. Sorry for being unclear.