Guido wins FSF Award

[Peter Hansen]

Hans Nowak wrote:
> 
> Magnus Lie Hetland wrote:
> >
> > In article <8867.813T2365T9245607threeseas at earthlink.net>, Timothy Rue wrote:
> > [...]
> > >Certainly everyone does understand in reading and responding to post here,
> > >they actually make use of all nine action. It's physics, but they may
> > >think it's me and that somehow their reactions will cause a dismissal
> > >of.... well physics.
> > >
> > >Lets see now:
> > [...]
> >
> > No, no! This isn't simple enough. The *real* truth (and it's physics,
> > so you can't contradict me) is that there is only one true action:
> >
> > DS - Do Stuff
> >
> > Now deal with it and go somewhere else with your false theory.
> 
> Do you also have a model with zero actions? This one seems kind of
> difficult to me.

Yes.  Look at the way computers store floating point numbers.  The
left-most one is assumed, so never stored.  Likewise with the 
zero-instruction VIC (ZIVIC) one just assumes the DS instruction
before all parameters.  I posted a script written in ZIVIC a 
few weeks ago, using parameters drawn from running the dictionary
compiler over the Python docs to extract the basic structure of
the language.  The result was quite straight-forward and readable
to most of us here, with one possible exception...

I'll post another sample here:

# ZIVIC code: assumes DS instruction prior to all parameters
file = open('somefile.txt')
length = len(file.readlines())
print 'Lines in file:', length

As this is the first working implementation based on the VIC 
concepts, I trust this will put to rest all the negativism 
expressed here about the viability of the concept.  Clearly it
works, and I suggest we all go back to using it...

-Peter