03 April 2009

Perl code Larry Wall finds impressive

Larry Wall spoke at Columbia recently. In response to a request for an example of some really impressive Perl code, he referred to the Lingua::Romana::Perligata module. Example usage from the author's page:

#! /usr/local/bin/perl -w

use Lingua::Romana::Perligata;

maximum inquementum tum biguttam egresso scribe.
meo maximo vestibulo perlegamentum da.
da duo tum maximum conscribementa meis listis.

dum listis decapitamentum damentum nexto
fac sic
nextum tum novumversum scribe egresso.
lista sic hoc recidementum nextum cis vannementa da listis.
cis.

2 comments:

tormp said...

finally, someone addresses perl's legibility problem.

the application of latin, and the focus on noun declension over verb conjugation, only underscores the fact that the perl community isn't ready for concurrent programming. otherwise they obviously would have landed on a language with a more robust verb system, like classical greek.

for example, invoking your method with a future progressive construction asynchronously schedules the closure of the method and its arguments for continuous execution on a background thread. imperfect constructions imply that the stated code was already started and is in fact running now, an effective tactic for correcting programming errors at runtime. aorist constructions are never actually scheduled, or might have been completed before the program even started, or perhaps will be completed at some point in the future.

schmonz said...

I have read your comment and much like it. Imperfect construction language support would seem to require forking garden-path sentence branch prediction.