palordrolap

Perl was originally designed to carry on regardless, and that remains its blessing and curse, a bit like JavaScript which came later.

Unlike JavaScript, if you really want it to throw a warning or even bail out completely at compiling such constructs (at least some of the time, like this one) it’s pretty easy to turn that on rather than resort to an entirely different language.

use warnings; at the top of a program and it will punt a warning to STDERR as it carries merrily along.

Make that use warnings FATAL => "syntax"; and things that are technically valid but semantically weird like this will throw the error early and also prevent the program from running in the first place.

Well, you see, Perl’s length is only for strings and if you want the length of an array, you use @arrayname itself in scalar context.

Now, length happens to provide scalar context to its right hand side, so @arrayname already returns the required length. Unfortunately, at that point it hasn’t been processed by length yet, and length requires a string. And so, the length of the array is coerced to be a string and then the length of that string is returned.

A case of “don’t order fries if your meal already comes with them or you’ll end up with too many fries”.

“He sees it the way we’ve told him to see it. Absolutely masterful following of instructions.”

As a Perl fossil I recognise this syntax as equivalent to if(not @myarray) which does the same thing. And here I was thinking Guido had deliberately aimed to avoid Perlisms in Python.

That said, the Perlism in question is the right* way to do it in Perl. The length operator does not do the expected thing on an array variable. (You get the length of the stringified length of the array. And a warning if those are enabled.)

* You can start a fight with modern Perl hackers with whether unless(@myarray) is better or just plain wrong, even if it works and is equivalent.

Nerd here. That’s soft-light Rimmer. He didn’t get the hard-light drive until they met Legion in season 6.

The only things he could physically interact until then were other holographic things provided by Holly or whatever his light bee was programmed to supply.

E-e-except where the script writers made a mistake. At one point he was able to smell something burning which definitely shouldn’t have been possible. Unless Holly simulated it for him anyway. That sort of shenanigan would be right up Holly’s alley now that I think about it.

(For the uninitiated, Holly is the sarcastic and dry witted AI in charge of supervising all ship computer operations. And he’s allegedly senile after 3 million years in deep space. Allegedly.)

Per screenshots of the “skeet” = As can be understood from screenshots of the post, also known as a “skeet”

as folks on the butterfly app = (a name that) users of Bluesky

are wont to call their posts… = like to call their posts…

“Skeet” being a combination of “sky” and “tweet”, which I hope you can figure out the origins of, and also a somewhat dirty word that the owners of Bluesky would really prefer people didn’t use as the non-generic name for posts on their platform, but is also disturbingly accurate if you compare the conceptually similar word “disseminate” for the spreading of information.

I should probably have separated the above into two sentences somewhere.

The quotes were because “home” both is and isn’t the right word. There are a lot of people in this world who might still think of the house they grew up in as “home” on some level, but in many cases, that property is in the hands of strangers now.

For example, I have a relative who not only lived in but was born in a house that remained in the family until a couple of decades ago, and I think they’d dearly love to be able to go back there. Even so, I don’t think the current occupants would be best pleased if my relative decided to go “home” without some kind of arrangement, especially if they decided they were going to move in.

Feel free to generalise or pick apart this metaphor.

Israel does not have to be Zionist Israel.

Now, I’m sure the Palestinians would rather have it that, after WWII, people hadn’t come “home” to settle in the area in the first place, but if it had been handled better, and without, you know, all the genocide, they might have been more accepting of the idea.

Maybe not much, but definitely way more accepting than they are now.

It may be worth noting that this is in The Telegraph, occasionally referred to as “The Torygraph”, a nickname earned for being the slightly less rabid, but still very much right-leaning newspaper. “Tory” being used in the pejorative sense.

In that newspaper, the thought of the UK being untrustworthy or that Brexit was a bad idea must be carefully skirted at all costs. Then again, that seems to be government policy no matter who the government is these days.

Old school gamer here. Headline should definitely say Quake II.

There might not seem to be much difference to a casual observer, but from that standpoint there’s not much difference between either and any other FPS. Even Minecraft to some extent.

Speaking of which, the Minecraft equivalent to this had all the same problems outlined in other comments here. Interesting as a proof of concept, but there are almost certainly better ways of using AI.

Your first two lines need a caveat: … at a local meridian as chosen by the will of the people*.

Otherwise you end up in situations where every individual location sets their clock by local noon, which varies by longitude. If you think it’s bad there are a handful of different time zones across your continent, wait until it’s different from one end of town to the other.

The British invented (or popularised) standard time to avoid those sorts of problems. Problems that didn’t exist until high-speed long distance travel became a thing. And time zones were a later addition because Britain didn’t need any, but they’re also somewhat necessary.

* for “will of the people”, read “will of the ruling class” as necessary. See: China.