Re^2: Beginning Problems

in reply to Re: Beginning Problems
in thread Beginning Problems

I hope this was meant as a joke!

I mean, there's nothing wrong with nano if all you have is a terminal connection somewhere, but suggesting this to someone who's apparently new to programming and (to some extent) computers in general? Someone, I bet, used to GUIs?

Jenda
Enoch was right!
Enjoy the last years of Rome.

Comment on Re^2: Beginning Problems
Re^3: Beginning Problems by Anonymous Monk on Jan 25, 2013 at 15:13 UTC
Most of the GUI text editors make it difficult to save in a plain-ascii plain-text format. They tend to use fancy file formats, save as UTF-16, insert byte-order-marks, or have odd newlines. Dropping down to a terminal-based text editor may be easier than teaching someone how to find the options to turn each of these off in a program you haven't used previously. (And anyway, nano sucks. vim is better. And probably easier to learn, too.)	[reply]
Re^4: Beginning Problems by Jenda (Abbot) on Jan 25, 2013 at 23:28 UTC
Beg your pardon? Nobody would suggest using MS Word or anything similar (though we've had a post by someone who used something like that and saved the script in RTF format). I just tested this with Perl 5.8.9 (rather dated, don't you think) and it doesn't care whether the script is 8bit, utf8 with or without BOM, utf16LE or utf16BE. All work fine. Jenda Enoch was right! Enjoy the last years of Rome.	[reply]
Re^5: Beginning Problems by choroba (Monsignor) on Jan 25, 2013 at 23:34 UTC
we've had a post by someone who used something like that and saved the script in RTF format Yes. That was the OP. لսႽ† ᥲᥒ⚪⟊Ⴙᘓᖇ Ꮅᘓᖇ⎱ Ⴙᥲ𝇋ƙᘓᖇ	[reply]
Re^5: Beginning Problems by Anonymous Monk on Jan 26, 2013 at 09:56 UTC
Very well, I did not check whether Perl had trouble with any of those issues, but a lot of other languages do. I've seen people have such problems caused by text editors that are by no means full-fledged word processors (you wouldn't consider TextEdit.app or Wordpad as one, would you), but instead bordering on programmer's editors (Notepad++ or similar). I've helped debug a bug caused by the editor saving a BOM by default [1], and seen problems caused by each one of those things I mentioned. (But when I introduce them to vim, they don't have any of those bugs. They don't exactly get much code written either, for some reason...) [1] may have been php and its header() function	[reply]
Re^4: Beginning Problems by Anonymous Monk on Jan 26, 2013 at 07:33 UTC
(And anyway, nano sucks. vim is better. And probably easier to learn, too.) HA!	[reply]
Re^3: Beginning Problems by mhearse (Hermit) on Jan 27, 2013 at 23:40 UTC
I take your point. Maybe this was a poor suggestion. I tend to see things through my own eyes when I began(1996 using the FreeBSD easy editor). But that doesn't mean everyone else has to suffer.	[reply]
Re^4: Beginning Problems by mhearse (Hermit) on Feb 04, 2013 at 17:02 UTC
Oh, and I agree of course about vi. But when teaching people, I find that they get discouraged.	[reply]


laziness, impatience, and hubris
	PerlMonks

Re^2: Beginning Problems

How do you parse XML?