Re: Another view point.
Re: Another view point.
- Subject: Re: Another view point.
- From: email@hidden
- Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2001 21:51:18 -0500
On Mon, 19 Feb 2001 10:34:31 -0800, Chris Nebel <email@hidden> recited,
>
Pale light from the screen
>
Scripting until the wee hours
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"Foobar!" he exclaims.
>
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(Just a thought.)
>
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Rhyming and meter add
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new dimensions but require
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skill. Free
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verse only needs an over-
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active
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return key.
Hackers (and readers of The New Hacker's Dictionary) will recognize an echo of
"The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer" posted to USENET by Ed Nather on May 21,
1983. It was just a prose narrative, but successive transfers through USENET
and other media transformed it into free verse, (which I personally find
reminiscent of The Education of T C MITS).
The Third Edition of TNHD and the web site both note,
[1992 postscript -- the author writes: "The original submission to the net was
not in free verse, nor any approximation to it -- it was straight prose style,
in non-justified paragraphs. In bouncing around the net it apparently got
modified into the `free verse' form now popular. In other words, it got hacked
on the net. That seems appropriate, somehow." The author adds that he likes the
`free-verse' version better...]
( Jargon File, version 4.2.3, 23 NOV 2000,
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/The-Story-of-Mel.html )
It sounds like we need a jargon term for the conversion of prose to free verse
by e-mail line width variations.
As this relates to AppleScript, I'll just quote the first "stanza"
A recent article devoted to the macho side of programming
made the bald and unvarnished statement:
Real Programmers write in FORTRAN.
Maybe they do now,
in this decadent era of
Lite beer, hand calculators, and ``user-friendly'' software
but back in the Good Old Days,
when the term ``software'' sounded funny
and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes,
Real Programmers wrote in machine code.
Not FORTRAN. Not RATFOR. Not, even, assembly language.
Machine Code.
Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers.
Directly.
Now, who advocates avoiding double-tells using raw event codes????
--
Scott Norton Phone: +1-703-299-1656
DTI Associates, Inc. Fax: +1-703-706-0476
2920 South Glebe Road Internet: email@hidden
Arlington, VA 22206-2768 or email@hidden