they actually pay me for this

[topaz]

Highly valuable information I have learned today:

eval { foo }; is permissible syntax.
eval { foo } is not.

I want those six hours of my life back, goddamnit.

I think omegabeth is right.  This is clearly all because Mercury is in retrograde.

Comments

[keyne.livejournal.com]

Yer just cruisin' for a bruisin' from our friendly astronomer, aincha?

[phornax.livejournal.com]

Oh, he's just being a "typical Scorpio." Interestingly, the Wikipedia entry for Scorpio provided a good yuk:

The individuals born under this sign are thought to be loyal, strong-willed, complex, capable of genius, thoughtful, supportive, protective, generous, intense, humble, quiet, brave, and emotional. Scorpios can also be jealous, stubborn, demanding, grudge-holders, obsessive (especially with sex), secretive, possessive, angry, suspicious, hedonism, and unreliable. Also, Scorpios tend to be suicidal and for good reason.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

> fortune -m SCORPIO
%% (fortunes)
SCORPIO (Oct 23 - Nov 21)
        You are shrewd in business and cannot be trusted.  You will achieve
        the pinnacle of success because of your total lack of ethics.  Most
        Scorpio people are murdered.
%%
SCORPIO (Oct. 23 to Nov. 21)
        Friends abound today, seeking repayment of past loans.  Smile.  Check
        for concealed weapons.  Your natural cheerfulness makes others want
        to throw up.  Knock it off.
%%
SCORPIO (Oct.24 - Nov.21)
        You will receive word today that you are eligible to win a million
        dollars in prizes.  It will be from a magazine trying to get you to
        subscribe, and you're just dumb enough to think you've got a chance
        to win.  You never learn.

I'm a Scorpio, and so is my wife. Rawr.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

But it's all so true.

[jss]

Scorpios of LimeGerbil, unite!

[fraterrisus]

The individuals born under this sign are thought to be... hedonism

have you met my friend qwrrty, and his wife the grammar nazi? :)

[jacflash.livejournal.com]

Are you saying that qwrrty is not hedonism?

[fraterrisus]

quite the contrary my lad :)

[opadit.livejournal.com]

I have no joke here, I just like saying, "Scorpios can also be hedonism."

I actually don't know

[ratatosk.livejournal.com]

Why does everyone always blame Mercury? It's not like you can't usually find all sorts of other things in retrograde at any given point.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

In general, Mercury rules thinking and perception (http://www.astrologycom.com/mercret.html), processing and disseminating information and all means of communication, commerce, education and transportation. By extension, Mercury rules people who work in these areas, especially people who work with their minds or their wits: writers and orators, commentators and critics, gossips and spin doctors, teachers, travellers, tricksters and thieves.

Mercury retrograde gives rise to personal misunderstandings; flawed, disrupted, or delayed communications, negotiations and trade; glitches and breakdowns with phones, computers, cars, buses, and trains. And all of these problems usually arise because some crucial piece of information, or component, has gone astray, or awry.

It is therefore not wise to make important decisions while Mercury is retrograde, since it is very likely that these decisions will be clouded by misinformation, poor communication and careless thinking. Mercury is all about mental clarity and the power of the mind, so when Mercury is retrograde, these intellectual characteristics tend to be less acute than usual, as the critical faculties are dimmed. Make sure you pay attention to the small print!

Aren't you sorry you asked?

[ratatosk.livejournal.com]

Aren't you sorry you asked?

Actually, no, that was a real answer. :) I will still tease people about Eris being in retrograde if I think _they_ don't know the real answer, though. :P

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

The downside is that you could be right!!!1

[ratatosk.livejournal.com]

About what? That they don't know the prevailing beliefs about different planets, or about which are in retrograde, or something else? In the past I have laboriously checked first, because I am OCD like that.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I'd imagine that, with Eris being so new, they don't yet know what they don't know about it, as Donald Rumsfeld might put it.

[ckd]

And yet Perl programmers complain about Python's use of significant whitespace.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

Hey, don't look at *me*. If I had it my way we'd all be working in Lisp.

[khedron.livejournal.com]

=)

And heck, if you could Have It Your Way, it might even be a Lisp which specified support in the language for threading, networking, and graphics, instead of leaving it up to the vendor. Where do I sent the check for the Qwrrty Way? ;-)

[noeltheone.livejournal.com]

(((Because)that would)(be)((so much) better).)

[khedron.livejournal.com]

You're doing it wrong. (http://lemonodor.com/archives/2007/10/youre_doing_it_wrong.html)

But at least you balanced your parens. =)

[noeltheone.livejournal.com]

Yeah, well, the last time I did anything in Lisp was before dirt, so I just went for the cheap joke.

And of course I balanced my parens. I'd hate to have to trace the bug if I didn't. :-)

[khedron.livejournal.com]

Whoa... Lisp predates dirt? That strongly implies that it's older than quartz, silicon, and all possible bases for electronic computing. XKCD was right? (http://xkcd.com/224/)

(And that brings us back around to the topic of the post again, I think.)

[jss]

What keyne said.

[beowabbit]

In other news, one of the students who work here recently discovered that the contact information (not-quite-email-address) in a DNS SOA record is not, in fact, optional.

[huaman.livejournal.com]

I've lost that same 6 hours so many times... well, enough that I remember at least 2 of them vividly. And general other missing ; events too. I feel your pain.

[omegabeth.livejournal.com]

Just so you know, I was so done with yesterday that I have bent the universe to my will--Mercury shouldn't give you any more trouble.

[szasz.livejournal.com]

Arrrgh this takes me back to my dumb arguments in my early CS classes about "statement separators" vs. "statement terminators". My memory is probably not completely accurate, but in PL/I the semicolon ENDED a statement whereas in Pascal it SEPARATED two statements. I think Perl is in that latter camp.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting way of putting it. I'd never thought about it that way before but I think you're right, in that the last statement in a block generally does not need to have a semicolon after it (this applies to C as well).

But still. Code like if ($foo) { bar } is legitimate with or without a trailing semicolon. Why isn't eval { foo } okay?

I'm sure Tom or Randal would be able to explain why there is a very important semantic distinction between a block in a control statement and a block passed as an argument to a function. As far as I'm concerned they can bite my skinny white ass. TMTOWTDI, indeed.

[szasz.livejournal.com]

Hm. At the risk of talking out my ass, I think it's because the semantics of the curly braces in each case are different.

if ($foo) { bar } is a construct; an if statement and a following block of statement(s). Blocks are enclosed by curly braces.

eval { foo }; is a single statement with the block { foo } being the argument to the eval function. Since that block is an argument to eval, it doesn't have any syntactical "identity" as a block in the program itself. The statement needs a semicolon to separate it from the next statement in the program, just as if it had read, say, eval $biteme;.

I'm pretty sure that's right. Perl has always been big on interpreting language elements in very different ways in different contexts, which is really confusing sometimes and is one of my biggest beefs with the language.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's more or less what I was guessing too, so you're probably right. But my beef with it here is that Perl's syntax idiosyncrasies are usually structured (to hear it from the Perl proselytizers) to make the language more accessible to the programmers and to make the syntax get in your way less.

That's fine as far as it goes, but this is one big glaring counterexample.

I suppose that means I should submit it as a bug. Maybe if I get sufficiently motivated. :-)

[szasz.livejournal.com]

You have far more motivation than I to even think about reporting established parts of the Perl syntax diagram as "bugs," my friend. :)