On Sun, 15 Apr 2007 18:25:19 +0200, Xah Lee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Laziness, Perl, and Larry Wall > > Xah Lee, 20021124 > > In the unix community there's quite a large confusion and wishful > thinking about the word laziness. In this post, i'd like to make some > clarifications. > > American Heritage Dictionary third edition defines laziness as: > “Resistant to work or exertion; disposed to idleness.” > In this context I think you can safely take it to mean: Don't work hard, work smart. Avoid repetitious work. If somthing seems to elaborate find a more efficient way. In a course I took on verifiable programming I found working with Hoare logic extremely tedious. So I started using rewriting loops as recursive procedures and using induction instead. It took about a quarter of the time as the invariant of a loop fell out rather naturally this way. I failed the course, but when I took the course over again a year later I noticed that the book had been rewritten and now half the book was dedicated to Generator Induction. (Seems the professor noticed I failed in a interesting way and figured out it was not so stupid after all.) Naturally I had no problems the second time ;) This is just one example but it should convey the idea. -- Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
