Perl is worse!

[Cameron Laird]

In article <8lrt2h013fp at news2.newsguy.com>,
Alex Martelli <alex at magenta.com> wrote:
			.
			.
			.
>> whereas 1 + "foo" is meaningless to almost everyone except Perl coders.
>
>No way -- it's perfectly valid in C, too, except that there it means the
>constant-string "oo".  Really, truly, X my heart, I kid you not, check it
>out if you don't believe me (I wouldn't blame you for disbelieving this!).
>
>
>Alex
>
>
>

Mutably so.  Your reflections on Wittgenstein prompt
me to speculate that soon we'll need to assure young-
sters, "well, yes,
  1 + "foo"
evaluates to
  "oo",
but of course a variable assigned with, for example,
  p = 1 + "foo";
might, depending on implementation details, eventually
end up equal to something other than
  "oo"
without itself having been reassigned."  Will they
believe it?  Like a time before seat belts and
standardized electrical power plugs ...
-- 

Cameron Laird <claird at NeoSoft.com>
Business:  http://www.Phaseit.net
Personal:  http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/home.html