Re: perl's sleep function

[blazar]

It understands it precisely as perldoc -f sleep explains. Now, is there anything you couldn't understand in it?!? Or is it the underscore, what that bothers you? If so, then it has nothing to do with sleep itself. It's just a number literal, and you can put underscores in them to improve readability at your will.

$ perl -le 'print for 1_000_000, 0x1_000_000'
1000000
16777216

[virtualsue]

What is all the ill-natured yelling about? Maybe you need to ease up on the caffeine. I think that our new friend jesuashok deserves patient encouragement rather than abuse. If you can't reply in a reasonable way, please don't reply at all.

[blazar]

Well, if you ask my opinion, you're overestimating the ill-nature-yellingness of my post. OTOH judging from the way it was downvoted it may be that I'm underestimating it instead. This may well have to be with the fact that I'm not a native English speaker, and my English is far from being perfect. Whatever, the fact that the XP of my reply is going up and down and is currently zero may suggest that approximately 50% of the people reading it agree with me.

Indeed I cannot negate that I wanted to be slightly harsh in jesuashok's respects, since I consider this to be a valid educational aid - that is: I did not only yell at him, but also gave actual pieces of information pointing him to the relevant portions of the documentation. But in no way did I want to be disrespectful to him by being overly harsh, and if I conveyed that impression I apologize to him directly.

[Anonymous Monk]

why are so many of the responses here ill-tempered and unhelpful?


I started out programming in Perl a dozen years ago. At the time I thought I just wasn't getting "it" because I couldn't understand a lot of the documentation.


And the comments on the board were always

"WTF??!?!RTFM?!?!?!"




I've grown, learned, matured. And the process, I've had a lot of experience with different languages and different open source programming communities.


Still, I love perl.


Yet whenever I encounter comments like this, with all the extraneous punctuation and the condescending phrasing -- well it makes me first of all glad that I studied women in college instead of CompSci and secondly, ashamed to be associated with such backbiting geeks.


Now please, you people, you know who you are, GTFU.

[Anonymous Monk]

Its from Nov 08, 2005, don't bring back old bull.

[blazar]

I personally believe that the negative overall reputation of this very old node of mine clearly shows that by general consensus it actually was too harsh. In some sense, I apologize for that, and I believe my manners got better since. I still consider the actual question to be both overly stupid and overly stupidly asked, proof which can be the even more negative reputation. Incidentally I did give some actual advice in my reply as well. This, and the person who posted the question, later turned out to be an especially bad member of this community: while it is true that (as the sig of one of our fellow monks claims) one should "examine what is said, not who speaks," knowing who the OP was sheds some light on the annoying carelessness of his question.

If it is of any comfort to you, clpmisc is generally considered to be an even more ill mannered place than PM. Yet I've learnt Perl more there than from any other resource. The subject matter could be discussed ad nauseam, and it often is: to be blindly gentle, no matter what, or to occasionally slap in the face the arrogant newbie, as an educational aid? Who knows...

BTW: I can't understand what you mean with "extraneous punctuation," what is it supposed to be?

[Phatfingers]

Can't you just pick up a dictionary and look up the words "extraneous" and "punctuation" for yourself instead of wasting the time of this forum doing the work for you?!?

Sorry. Just giving an example. The "?!?" at the end of the sentence conveys a sense of disrespect and an attempt at making the recipient feel belittled in public. Emphasizing negative phrases in italics also lends to a sense of contempt. They distract readers from the helpful technical information being sought.