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Reminder that everything is temporary except C and Make

@shac

The year is 2230. Climate change has ravaged the Earth. Our alien overlords, allied with our rogue AIs, rule with iron fists over the small bands of humans that roam the nuclear wastelands. C programmers start considering using C11 features without warning users about compiler requirements, but decide against it.

jwz

@lorddimwit Just today I accepted a patch making XScreenSaver's minimum compiler target be ISO C99 instead of ANSI C89. Didn't want to rush into anything.

@jwz

BTW I’m literally on a plane right now flying to Vegas to give a talk where my second slide is a quote from you. I hope this does not cause too much distress.

@lorddimwit I just hope it's a zinger

@jwz

The talk is about implementing regular expression engines.

I apologize in advance.

@lorddimwit @jwz You’ve discovered your text editor isn’t a sufficiently robust IDE. So you switch to emacs. Now you have two problems.

@lorddimwit @jwz
If you're doing regexps, you might be interested in the "Xerox Finite State Morphology" tools (XFST). The primary site seems to have disappeared (at XRCE) but I found this: ling.helsinki.fi/kit/2002k/ctl and the book web.stanford.edu/group/cslipub

After using XFST, Unix regexps seem both cryptic and underpowered; XFST can do operations such as composition, subtraction, union, negation, etc. The tools also can heavily compress the automata, so that a dictionary with part of speech and inflection information is more compact and faster than a hash table without the inflection info.

As an example, you can define a general rule that says a noun's plural is done by adding "-s", compose that with an automaton that changes "x-s" to "x-es" (and "ch-s" to "ch-es", etc.) and to another that changes "oxes" to "oxen". All within a single automaton.

www.ling.helsinki.fiXRCE MLTT: Finite-State Lexicon Compiler

@lorddimwit
It's possible that Ron Kaplan took the tools to the Powerset division of Bing in ~2006. If you want me to try to find out the status of things, I can try (no promises).

@jwz @lorddimwit
Please post the flames you're going to get for destroying someone's Crucial Irreplaceable Workflow You Monster.