Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by goddstream 1282 days ago
The Picol code has always been a fascinating read, until you get to the comment /* XXX: escape handling missing! */ and realise it won't escape/eval stuff inside strings, so you think ha! and roll up your sleeves and get tapping ... then you think ha! I could just improve that bit of code, and ... before you know it the sun's coming up and you didn't feed the dog last night. Speaking for a friend, obviously.
4 comments
antirez 1282 days ago
It happened to me as well, and that was the result: https://github.com/msteveb/jimtcl

Libraries written for Jim Tcl became the foundation of Redis.

link
actionfromafar 1282 days ago
But it’s so simple. All I have to do is divine from what I know of you. Are you the sort of man who would put the nerd snipe source code into his own repo, or his enemy’s? Now, a clever man would put the source into his own repo, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I’m not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the source in your repo. But you must have known I was not a great fool; you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the source in my repo!
link
tzot 1282 days ago
Is my knowledge of English lacking? Am I missing context perhaps? Is this a machine generated comment?
link
krapp 1282 days ago
It's a parody comment based on the poison goblet scene from the movie "The Princess Bride."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMz7JBRbmNo

link
bsder 1282 days ago
This is the same thing that happens in Scheme/Lisp when you note that the tiny thing you're working on doesn't handle dotted pairs so you dig in and ...

The next thing you know your tiny code has tripled in size and now spews so much gark that you have to go optimize your garbage collector and ...

link
zserge 1282 days ago
Huh! Falling into exactly this trap, I ended up writing a tiny Tcl interpreter for the embedded systems years ago: https://zserge.com/posts/tcl-interpreter/
link
tyingq 1282 days ago
It also doesn't do well with strings that have a null character in it. Which would stop basic stuff like being able to copy/read arbitrary files. So, neat, but not practical outside a narrow subset of problems.
link