From: Patricia Shanahan on
Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote:
> "Alf P. Steinbach /Usenet" <alf.p.steinbach+usenet(a)gmail.com> writes:
>
>> * Patricia Shanahan, on 21.06.2010 21:22:
>>> Simon Brooke wrote:
>>>> On Mon, 21 Jun 2010 08:44:58 -0700, Patricia Shanahan wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I'm looking for an open source project to join. I want to get back to
>>>>> the challenge of non-trivial programming. After years of solo work on my
>>>>> dissertation research, I would like to be part of a team. Also, just
>>>>> doing programming exercises to keep my hand in seems a waste of my
>>>>> skills.
>> With Thunderbird 3.0 the Mozilla folks introduced a lot of undesirable
>> functionality, in particular messing up quoting. When you quote source
>> code, and the original message has "flowed" text format (this is where
>> a space at the end of line indicates a continuing paragraph), then the
>> beast now collapses every sequence of spaces to a single space, except
>> indentation, which it removes completely. It's merely Very Bad for
>> quoting C++. It's completely unaccceptable for quoting Python, where
>> indentation is significant.
>
> Modify python to remove the signifiance of spaces. One good solution
> would be to use parentheses.
>

Even if indentation were not significant in any programming language, it
would still be an important aid to readability and communication in both
natural and programming languages.

Patricia
From: Lew on
tm wrote:
> Your answer shows what I said. Instead of looking at something new
> with an open mind (and discuss the proposed ideas) you concentrate
> on an unimportant paragraph and try to nail me down.
>
> Okay, you won. I was wrong and take the last paragraph back.

"Won"? This isn't a contest.

It's about portraying truth, not misleading and unsubstantiable claims.

It's interesting when people handle disagreement by claiming the other party
doesn't have an "open mind" and issue claims that they're trying to "nail
[one] down", as opposed to considering the argument on its merits. That's
called an argument /ad hominem/.

--
Lew
From: Patricia Shanahan on
tm wrote:
....
> If you want to make a better world and don't fear the language
> competition Seed7 is the right project for you. :-)
>
> Please give me some feedback.
....

Although I have no objection to improving the world as a side effect,
user base and development team are higher priority. Can you tell me a
bit about the users who are depending on Seed7 and the rest of your team?

I spent the last few years doing programming to answer research
questions, so now I want to make sure that what I do is really useful.

For comparison, I know Apache is producing useful stuff, because I've
used some of it. There is obviously a substantial group of people
working on it.

Thanks,

Patricia
From: tm on
On 22 Jun., 14:57, Lew <no...(a)lewscanon.com> wrote:
> tm wrote:
> > Your answer shows what I said. Instead of looking at something new
> > with an open mind (and discuss the proposed ideas) you concentrate
> > on an unimportant paragraph and try to nail me down.
>
> > Okay, you won. I was wrong and take the last paragraph back.
>
> "Won"?  This isn't a contest.
>
> It's about portraying truth, not misleading and unsubstantiable claims.
>
> It's interesting when people handle disagreement by claiming the other party
> doesn't have an "open mind" and issue claims that they're trying to "nail
> [one] down", as opposed to considering the argument on its merits.  That's
> called an argument /ad hominem/.

Excuse me, it was not my intention to insult you. I take that
paragraph back and state that you are open minded and
did not try to nail me down.

Is it possible to talk about the programming language ideas
from my mail now?

BTW: Patricia was searching for a project and I wrote a little bit
about my programming language vision (to give an incentive to
choose Seed7). More information can be found here:

http://seed7.sourceforge.net/faq.htm

I appreciate every feedback.

Greetings Thomas Mertes

Seed7 Homepage: http://seed7.sourceforge.net
Seed7 - The extensible programming language: User defined statements
and operators, abstract data types, templates without special
syntax, OO with interfaces and multiple dispatch, statically typed,
interpreted or compiled, portable, runs under linux/unix/windows.
From: David Segall on
Patricia Shanahan <pats(a)acm.org> wrote:

>I'm looking for an open source project to join. I want to get back to
>the challenge of non-trivial programming. After years of solo work on my
>dissertation research, I would like to be part of a team. Also, just
>doing programming exercises to keep my hand in seems a waste of my skills.
>
>My main requirement is an active project, with a team that works
>together, and multiple users outside the team. I am willing learn any
>required programming languages or libraries, though I am currently most
>fluent in Java.
>
>I have 32 years experience in the computer industry, including work on
>compilers, operating systems, and multiprocessor computer architecture.
>I completed my Ph.D. in computer science at UCSD last December, with a
>4.0 GPA on the coursework.
>
>I would contribute to a suitable project in whatever way would be most
>useful, including programming and bug fixing, but the more technical
>challenge the better.
>
>Any recommendations?

_Please_ add a high quality filter to an existing cross platform news
reader so that I can ditch MS Windows. I know nothing about the
project but Thunderbird seems a likely candidate. The filter should
support killing a sub-thread and regular expressions.