What does this construct mean?

ruby-talk
21

David A. Black wrote:

Without researching it at all, I'd guess that it traces back to an April Fool's Joke in comp.lang.perl that was subsequently described in Chapter 7 of the Camel Book as "Perl Poetry" (http://www.unix.org.ua/orelly/perl/prog3/ch27_02.htm\). Larry feigned innocence, but I never bought it.

I remember that example, though it still doesn't explain the equation
of the idea of "poetry mode" with lack of parentheses.

I don't think "poetry mode" means "parentheses prohibited". It means "parentheses optional", as distinct from "parentheses required". And indeed, the example poems sport numerous parentheses, all serving essential literary purposes :-).

Oh well -- my curiosity stops short of being willing to trace ten
years of evolution of usage, so I guess it will remain a mystery :slight_smile:

Same here. But there's a Ph.D. just waiting for some budding pomo cyber-linguist.

Steve

22

well, we always have

   array.sort_by{ rand }

:wink:

-a

···

On Tue, 19 Jul 2005, James Britt wrote:

Ara.T.Howard wrote:
...

it would be all line noise. i think the 'poetry' bit makes sense since poetry,
when compared to 'normal' writing is clearly an attempt to distill an ideal,
feeling, emotion, etc. into a few select words arranged to maximize there
meaning - and yet leave room for interpretation.

Interesting. I think poetry (when done well) elicits meaning from the reader; it is a trigger, a catalyst, and the "meaning" of a poem varies not only for each person, but for any given person at different times.

To my mind, code poetry would never run the same way on different machines, and indeed would never run quite the same way on the same machine, yet would still impart something of appropriate value each time.

--

email :: ara [dot] t [dot] howard [at] noaa [dot] gov
phone :: 303.497.6469
My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.
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