Here’s my peace proposal: Putin goes out a window, and Zelenskyy gets to be Tsar of the traditional territory of the Kyivan state.
No relation to the sports channel.
Here’s my peace proposal: Putin goes out a window, and Zelenskyy gets to be Tsar of the traditional territory of the Kyivan state.
Yep. I was thinking of Heinlein’s 1952 The Rolling Stones, where the person doing the timing calls out commands to the person controlling the engines, like an old-timey sea captain. (And in German, despite being an English-speaking family, because rocketry is German, donchaknow: Brennschluss!)
In some mid-20th-century science-fiction novels, people in the 21st century are piloting rockets by manual control, using slide rules to calculate trajectories.
There was the original 1947 UN plan for the partition of Palestine, for one. You can read in that article about which groups accepted and rejected it.
Bill & Ted is “Be excellent to each other, and party on, dudes!”
Either Thomas Jefferson had two first names, or Jefferson Davis had two last names.
“What the user needed” / “What management demanded”
Anyone with even one level in monk automatically counters this with an Ānāpānasati save.
Trade is ancient. Consider: People have been ordering products from abroad, relying on promises and reputations, since the days of Ea-nāṣir. It’s always depended on trust, which is why we still know the name Ea-nāṣir.
On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog … until you tell them.
Good catch! Typo. Fixed.
Regex is good for a few very specific things, and sysadmins used to use it for goddamn everything. If all your server logs are in lightly-structured text files on a small number of servers, being able to improvise regex is damn useful for tracking down server problems. Just write a shell loop that spawns an ssh
logging into each server and running grep
over the log files, to look for that weird error.
These days, if you need to crunch production server logs you probably need to improvise in SQL and jq
and protobufs or systemd assmonkery or something.
But if you actually need a parser, for goodness sake use a parser combinator toolkit, don’t roll your own, especially not with regex. Describing your input language in plain Haskell is much nicer than kludging it.
(This is the “totally serious software engineering advice” forum, right?)
Yep. This is why online recipe sites put a whole goddamn personal essay before the actual recipe: if someone scrapes the page and copies it, they’ll scrape the (copyrightable) essay as well as the (non-copyrightable) recipe.
Whatever you do, don’t get in a time machine back to 1998 and become a Unix sysadmin.
(Though we didn’t have CL-PPCRE then. It’s really the best thing that ever happened to regex.)
The answer given in the spoiler tag is not quite correct!
According to the spoiler, this shouldn’t match “abab”, but it does.
This will match what the spoiler says: ^.?$|^((.)\2+?)\1+$
Any Perl-compatible regex can be parsed into a syntax tree using the Common Lisp package CL-PPCRE. So if you already know Common Lisp, you don’t need to learn regex syntax too!
So let’s put the original regex into CL-PPCRE’s parser. (Note, we have to add a backslash to escape the backslash in the string.) The parser will turn the regex notation into a nice pretty S-expression.
> (cl-ppcre:parse-string "^.?$|^(..+?)\\1+$")
(:ALTERNATION
(:SEQUENCE :START-ANCHOR (:GREEDY-REPETITION 0 1 :EVERYTHING) :END-ANCHOR)
(:SEQUENCE :START-ANCHOR
(:REGISTER
(:SEQUENCE :EVERYTHING (:NON-GREEDY-REPETITION 1 NIL :EVERYTHING)))
(:GREEDY-REPETITION 1 NIL (:BACK-REFERENCE 1)) :END-ANCHOR))
At which point we can tell it’s tricky because there’s a capturing register using a non-greedy repetition. (That’s the \1
and the +?
in the original.)
The top level is an alternation (the |
in the original) and the first branch is pretty simple: it’s just zero or one of any character.
The second branch is the fun one. It’s looking for two or more repetitions of the captured group, which is itself two or more characters. So, for instance, “aaaa”, or “abcabc”, or “abbaabba”, but not “aaaaa” or “abba”.
So strings that this matches will be of non-prime length: zero, one, or a multiple of two numbers 2 or greater.
But it is not true that it matches only “any character repeated a non-prime number of times” because it also matches composite-length sequences formed by repeating a string of different characters, like “abcabc”.
If we actually want what the spoiler says — only non-prime repetitions of a single character — then we need to use a second capturing register inside the first. This gives us:
^.?$|^((.)\2+?)\1+$
.
Specifically, this replaces (..+?)
with ((.)\2+?)
. The \2
matches the character captured by (.)
, so the whole regex now needs to see the same character throughout.
If someone doesn’t understand the difference between swearing at and swearing around, that’s a shitty environment.
In one of my better workplaces, the expression was “you can cuss the hardware, you can cuss the software, but don’t cuss your teammate.”
And yet a dump rump is still worse.
“… and he was aiming for John Connally.”