DHA arrived in town yesterday, and it seemed rude not to present him with the usual Perl mongers welcome of a shower of TVRs at The Penderel's Oak. Unfortunately for Dave he arrived to find the a collection of Perl Mongers firing on less than all four cylinders. Let me explain...
You see, I've found a more scary concept than a group of Perl Mongers shouting at you at the same time...A group of Perl Mongers all shouting "Come to another pub" at the same time, which is what it transpires was actually happening as I left last night. Apparently there was a party that headed off to another drinking establishment of dubious repute last night at closing time. Some of our contingent finally caught the night bus home at 2.45am and still made it into work at the right time.
So Dave was presented with a sorry rabble sitting in the pub gingerly sipping pints of lemonade and nursing their hangovers. Acme saved the day by making the international sign for the donut (which apparently meant something) and then dragging us all off for a curry at what isn't the Red Pepper anymore.
During a conversation about Odd Textbooks, Dave recalled seeing a book on Object Orientated Lisp. I explained that I'd played about with OO in Lisp (in a toy way) when I was back at university and it wasn't quite as crack filled an idea as it sounds, honest guv'nor. Unimatrix suggested the concept of Functional assembler (with registers being set with call by need.) Marcel then moved the concept onto symbolic calculations (in Perl, on paper) and then I talked about how there are no decent tools for manipulating equations commonly available. Robin turned up and then asked us if we really believed in numbers...
Pure insanity aside, muttley talked (between repeatedly berating me for not helping him with some DNS changes) about some potential improvements to journal to mail. Acme talked about converting other ASTs to parrot (but then he always was an assembler junkie at heart.) I complained to richardc about some code he'd written that was evaluating a ten digit number in simple numeric context (and then failing on my mere 32bit computer.) He (rightly) pointed out he'd written it in the am (the annoying one after you get up, not the one before you go to bed) so what did I expect. We came up with the concept of a string object that acts like a normal scalar but blows up if you try it in numeric concept (though the wonders of overload.) It's probably already been done (or it can't be.)
London Transport managed to ruin the end to a perfectly good evening by not delivering us a number 19 bus for half an hour, and then delivering us a full one we couldn't get on. Grr, London Transport minus minus.
