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in reply to When I'm arguing with a fool...

Proverbs 26:4-5:
Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will be like him yourself.

Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes.

I'm not terribly good with implementing nondeterministic logic myself, but I think we could do it with the following snippet:
my $folly = $fool->folly; if ( fork() ) { # child process answer( $folly); } else { # parent process answer( not $folly ); }

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Re^2: When I'm arguing with a fool...
by papidave (Pilgrim) on Sep 07, 2007 at 21:43 UTC
    I had some time to think about it, and realized that my code isn't valid. My earlier example depends on a race condition to select one state or the other. What I _should_ have done is implement a solution that acts both ways without interference:
    my $folly = $fool->folly; my $tabby = new Cat( owner => 'Schroedinger' ); answer( $folly ) if ( $tabby->alive ); answer( not $folly ) unless ( $tabby->alive );
    The problem I've been running into is that the first time I call Cat::alive(), the quantum decoherence collapses, and it only invokes answer() once. Does anyone have a method for measuring the "alive" state of $tabby without actually looking into the box? I think I need to modify the implementation of sub alive() ...

      use Quantum::Superpositions:

      use Quantum::Superpositions; sub You::answer_according_to_his_folly() { any( 0, 1 ) } not $you->answer_according_to_folly($fool) or $you->be_like($fool); $you->answer_according_to_folly($fool) or $fool->be_wise_in_own_ey +es();
      A word spoken in Mind will reach its own level, in the objective world, by its own weight