pprint, popa3d, Text::Autoformat

[Kragen Sitaker]

Dave Long writes:
> Text::Autoformatum videre volo.  Damian Conway ille qui hoc,
> Getopt::Declarumque scribat.  Conwayae igitur situm spectavi
> sed Text::Autoformatum legere non potui.  Alium tamen inveni;
> legi, risique:

Unfortunately, I don't speak Latin well enough to understand this; I
think you said:

	I want to see Text::Autoformat.  Damian Conway is the one who
	wrote Getopt::Declare. Conwayae igitur situm spectavi, but I
	can't read Text::Autoformat.  Alium tamen inveni; legi,
	risique:

Is this correct?  Could you translate the rest?  :)

> Having the machine infer the "formality" of a human following
> (to a machine) sloppy conventions is also what I believe Jef
> Raskin tried to do with the Canon Cat and Swyftcard.

I don't think I've heard of these before, but I'm reading about them on
the Web.  Very interesting.

> Raskin wonders why, if a computer is such a powerful calculator,
> it is so much easier to have a physical calculator at hand than 
> to bother with invoking another program to do it.  With vi, one
> can type "725 * 12 / .06" and then use "!!bc" to replace it with
> "145000", so perhaps McIlroy's garden hoses were just misplaced
> during the transition to a gui world.  Still, like data lenses,
> but unlike a Pikean plumber, one needs to know that bc works for
> evaluating this text, and not fmt or grep or wget...

What is the Pikean plumber?

For utilities that are entirely harmless, you could simply run each one
on each scrap of text; each utility can simply decide whether or not
the input was valid, and silently fail if it was not.  I don't think
this could reasonably scale to more than a few dozen utilities,
though.

FWIW, on the Canon Cat, it seems you need to hold down "Use Front" and
press "Calc" to calculate an answer for the currently-highlighted
expression; so even on the Cat, you need to know that Calc works for
evaluating the text.

Oberon (and Acme?) allows you to stick bc or its equivalent on a
buttonbar somewhere, so you can click it with a mouse when you want to
invoke it on the selection --- quite similar.

I definitely see the similarity to AutoFormat.

Dan Ingalls' OOPSLA'99 talk mentioned a spiffy Smalltalk method
browser; you would tell it the input should be 3 4 and the output
should be 7; it would tell you that methods +, bit_or:, and bit_xor:
all fit the bill.  (I speak no more Smalltalk than Latin,
unfortunately, so I don't know how Smalltalk spells bit_or and
bit_xor.)

I was thinking I'd build a text-table formatter in Perl the next time I
need to format tables in text.  :)

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
Perilous to all of us are the devices of an art deeper than we ourselves        
possess.
                -- Gandalf the Grey [J.R.R. Tolkien, "Lord of the Rings"]