Your reply deserves all the downvoting it can get. He was only asking for help, you know. I don't see how your sniping helped. Cheers.

Fortunately I'm not really worried about karma

"He was only asking for help, you know." I don't know that. If he was only asking for help, where's his code? More than that though, he clearly expresses his intention to "lay it all on you guys"

My sniping could have helped by pointing out (hopefully in a somewhat humorous way) the contradiction in behavior of people who complain about homework posters but help out the "Iraqi soldier" and by humiliating the coder into doing at least a little of his own work next time before posting. However, a few perlmoks seem to have both their common sense and humor dials permanently set in the off position so it probably didn't help in either of those two ways.

There now you can downvote me twice as fast :)

So, I clicked on seventh's user id and browsed the questions he's submitted to Perlmonks over the past year. It appears to me that he is only a casual user of Perl and a rare poster to Perlmonks; moreover, his few and far between questions range across the gamut of perl, from documentation issues to the use of common modules, and don't appear to be related to a semester's work of homework assignments -- nor do they seem even remotely tied to, for example, a Perl programmer's daily job functions.

It does seem blindingly clear that Perl is not his primary (or even secondary) job responsibility, and so he does not have the time to browse and pick content off the web. Nor does he ask enough questions in a twelve-month time period to be anything like a bottom-feeder student sponging off PM.

I admit you made me stop and think when I read your first post. But if even I can figure out that he's most likely sincere -- and I'm not a favorite in these halls -- then you seem to be very out of line with your comments. They were distinctly lacking in tact.

See, here's where careful reading of his post would've helped. He clearly states that he doesn't have much computer/reading time to solve his problem, therefore he is forced to ask for our help (this is the reason he mentioned his location). He then apologizes for this, presumably having in mind comments like yours.

Your post, however, immediately took to sniping, with no substantive criticism, so it seemed you were just looking to vent the day's frustrations instead of actually offering advice, critical though it may be. You actually only got around to saying something potentially useful after my comment.

p.s. I won't downvote you again, I think I made my point already.

It looks like homework, dressed up in a sob-story. Even if the sob-story is true, the poster's lack of the necessary documentation to do his job is his boss's responsibility, not ours. Whining "but I can't read the docs" is *never* acceptable.

It's also not a sob-story particularly well-chosen to garner support. Perhaps he should have said that he's with his girlfriend who lives in Ruralistan and so he only has 300/75 baud interwebnet over a party line.

He didn't actually say he was military in Iraq, nor which side he's on if he is. . . just that he's "in Iraq"

I think we've all seen worse, and more homeworklike, questions. Just my 2c.

Indeed he didn't say what he was doing in Iraq. I wonder why you felt the urge to point that out, cos I certainly didn't consider it to be important. My answer would remain the same regardless of whether he is yankee imperialist swine, a brave fighter from the heroic resistance, or just some poor bastard from baghdad.pm.