pprint, popa3d, Text::Autoformat

[Dave Long]

> ... Could you translate the rest?  :)

vide infra.
 
> What is the Pikean plumber?

Rob Pike, "Plumbing and Other Utilities"
<http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/plumb.html>

> For utilities that are entirely harmless, [run them all.]  
> I don't think this could reasonably scale to more than a
> few dozen utilities, though.

Worse yet, what if one wished to allow further composition of 
utilities, for the case where "selection | foo | bar" would be 
meaningful?  It may suffice to allow the user to decide what
subset of utilities ought to be currently active, and that may
keep numbers down into the half-a-dozen range or under.

> FWIW, on the Canon Cat, ... hold down "Use Front" ...

It looks like you found a much better Cat reference than I've run 
across.  URL, please?
 
> 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.

Which is where users would like to see it greyed out when not 
applicable, which leads to your previous paragraph about validity 
checking.  (Is lexical validity sufficient?  I'd think most users 
would be satisified if not being greyed did not often lead to error 
messages, and power users would wish that an item never be inactive
if it really were a possible action.)

> I speak no more Smalltalk than Latin ...

3 bitXor: 4, probably.  Anyone for Parvusdicere-LXXX?  
anObject doesNotUnderstand: aMessage -> res epistulam nonIntellegit

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

"Who what when where" tables?  Surely to follow the lines of this
thread, you'd rather build a text-table parser instead? :-)

-Dave

This is what I meant to say:

    I'd like to see Text::Autoformat.  Damian Conway wrote it and
    Getopt::Declare.  Therefore I looked at Conway's site, but
    couldn't read Text::Autoformat.  However I found another, read
    it, and laughed.

    (erratum: sed -e "s/sed Text::Autoformatum/sed desideratum/")

Take my Latin cum grano salis, though.  Like the canonical japanese
T-shirt, my enthusiasm for foreign languages often far outstrips my 
ability.  After half of two introductory texts, I can puzzle out a 
bit of poetry, and remain stumped by most literature.  I have some
Caesar, which is supposedly in a "clipped, direct, military style".
What that description really means is that, unlike Cicero, who might 
take a couple of hundred words per period, Caesar can get to the end
of a sentence in only a few dozen words.

At least I'm not subjecting you to Greek; it's all APL to me.