Larry Wall

"Perhaps you should compile your Perl with long doubles one of these megaseconds."

": Why Bible quotes exclusively? What happened to the Eastern religions?<BR> I'm still working on the Unicode mods."

"Maybe we should take a clue from FTP and put in an option like 'print hash marks on every 1024 iterations'."

"And besides, if Perl really takes off in the Windows space, I think the rest of us would just as soon have a double-agent within ActiveState."

"The court finds everyone to be in contempt (including himself :-), and orders everyone sentenced to five years hard labor. (Working on Perl, of course.)"

"I note that the Python folks still think they like JPython. I wonder how long that will last?"

"I view the JVM as just another architecture that Perl ought to be ported to. (That, and the Underwood typewriter...)"

"So please don't think I have a 'down' on the MVS people. I'm just pulling off their arms to beat other people over the head with."

"It's, uh, pseudo code. Yeah, that's the ticket... &#91;...&#93; And 'unicode' is pseudo code for $encoding."

": What do people think? What, do people think?"

"Well, sure, I explicitly mentioned 'vtables' last time I brought this up. But a single pointer is fairly paltry, as tables go."

"I dunno. Perhaps you should be happy that I have a policy of refraining from grumbling about handicapped operating systems."

"Perl did not get where it is by ignoring psychological factors."

"On the plus side, it's a lot easier in general to find /usr/include than cpp."

"Psychotics are consistently inconsistent. The essence of sanity is to be inconsistently inconsistent."

"That which hits the fan tends to get flung in all directions."

"If this were Ada, we'd simply doc it as 'erroneous'."

"So I'm thinking about ??, or !!, or //, or \\, or whatever. But I think I like ?? the best so far. Or the least worst."

"One operator is no big deal. That can be fixed in a jiffy."

"In Clintonese, that would be 'You are free to infer that I was saying that.'"

"Would you trust the linguistic intuitions of someone who has been studying Latin or Greek for three days?"

"But I know what's important to me, and what isn't. And I think I know what people can get used to, and what they can even learn to like. (It just takes some people longer than others. :-)"

"My arthritic pinkies are already starting to ache just thinking about ||||=."

"Orthogonality for orthogonality's sake is not something I'm keen on."

"Must be a different Larry Wall. There are at least 137 of us in the U.S."

"Symmetry is overrated. Overrated is symmetry."

"That is a known bug in 5.00550. Either an upgrade or a downgrade will fix it."

"That being said, I think we should immediately deprecate any string concatenation that combines '19' with '99'."

"The Golden Gate wasn't our fault either, but we still put a bridge across it."

"It should be illegal to yell 'Y2K' in a crowded economy."

"One thing I do understand is that people get scared when I start thinking out loud."

": No comment, since this is still hovering (see Larry's reply). Flutter, flutter."

"And don't tell me there isn't one bit of difference between null and space, because that's exactly how much difference there is."

"Because . doesn't match \n. &#91;\0-\377&#93; is the most efficient way to match everything currently. Maybe \e should match everything. And \E would of course match nothing."

"Besides, REAL computers have a rename() system call."

"Chip Salzenberg sent me a complete patch to add System V IPC (msg, sem and shm calls), so I added them. If that bothers you, you can always undefine them in config.sh."

"I don't know if it's what you want, but it's what you get."

"I dunno, I dream in Perl sometimes..."

"Piet van Oostrum: I find this a nice feature but it is not according to the documentation. Or is it a BUG? Larry Wall: Let's call it an accidental feature."

"(To someone at New York University) If you consistently take an antagonistic approach, however, people are going to start thinking you're from New York."

"If you want to program in C, program in C. It's a nice language. I use it occasionally..."

"I know it's weird, but it does make it easier to write poetry in perl."

"I'm sure that that could be indented more readably, but I'm scared of the awk parser."

"It is, of course, written in Perl. Translation to C is left as an exercise for the reader."

"It's all magic."

"It's documented in The Book, somewhere..."

"It won't be covered in the book. The source code has to be useful for something, after all..."

"Dan Smith: I've tried (in vi) 'g/&#91;a-z&#93;\n&#91;a-z&#93;/s//_/'...but that doesn't cut it. Any ideas? (I take it that it may be a two-pass sort of solution). Larry Wall: In the first pass, install perl."

"Let's say the docs present a simplified view of reality..."

"Let us be charitable, and call it a misleading feature"