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in reply to Re: Re: Synopsis 3 is out
in thread Synopsis 3 is out

You say 'we'. Does that mean that you're involved with Perl developement?

Anyhow, what odes Huffman coding mean?

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Re: Re: Re: Re: Synopsis 3 is out
by TimToady (Parson) on Mar 19, 2004 at 19:52 UTC
    You say 'we'. Does that mean that you're involved with Perl developement?
    Eh? No, I'm only involved in the design. I delegate the development to competent people.
    Anyhow, what odes Huffman coding mean?
    Huffman coding is a compression algorithm that uses letter frequencies to turn frequent characters into a short number of bits and infrequent characters into a longer number of bits. As a compression algoritm, it's not all that great, but we've generalized the concept to mean any conscious tradeoff between the length of a construct and its frequency of use. It's a very important design criterion for computer languages. It's just another version of "Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible." In this case we apply it to the desirable length of tokens in the language. Similar reasoning went into lengthening the bitwise operators for Perl 6, but shortening the junctional ones in their place. We felt that junctional operators were going to be more important than bitwise operators in general, unless you're writing device drivers.
Re^4: Synopsis 3 is out
by Anonymous Monk on Mar 19, 2004 at 21:05 UTC

    Apparently you don't know who you're talking to. Just know that TimToady has done enough to help with 'perl development'. LMAO!

      If you'd look at my homenode, you'd see I'm a relative new member of PM :)
      Update: replaced PM (Personal Message) with /msg, which of course applies more to PM (Perl Monks)
      Update 2: uhm... whatever

        FYI I believe Tim Toady is deeply familiar with Perl.

        cheers

        tachyon