How to know when a variable is set
Laura Creighton
lac at strakt.com
Wed Nov 14 12:28:04 EST 2001
>Two decades later, well-known hacker Henry Spencer described the
> Perl scripting language as a "Swiss-Army chainsaw", intending to
> convey his evaluation of the language as exceedingly powerful but
> ugly and noisy and prone to belch noxious fumes. -- the jargon file
1. It didn't take us 2 decades to start saying that about perl.
2. You need one other definition here:
Swiss-Army knife: precisely the wrong tool for every job.
The so-called Toronto Unix Mafia were describing things as
swiss-army knives from before there _was_ a perl. It's a
_strong_ pejorative. And I can't remember which of us coined
it -- probably Geoff Collyer, since Henry and Ian Darwin and I
all believed in carrying Swiss Army knives, and owned them.
More information about the Python-list
mailing list