C Parsing Quotes

Remember that code is really the language in which we ultimately express the requirements. We may create languages that are closer to the requirements. We may create tools that help us parse and assemble those requirements into formal structures. But we will never eliminate necessary precision—so there will always be code.

books speak the truth our mouths are too afraid to voice, our minds too cluttered to parse out.

Of the seven Archons that had combined to form the Milky Way mind, Orion had been the Archon whose verve and remorseless drive inspired and frightened and tempted the others into cooperation. Of the twenty-five Authorities forming the long-lost Orion Arm, the Benedictine was the most significant and influential of the ancient forefathers. The Benedictines were combination of three Dominions, issuing from the Collective at the Praesepe Cluster, the Abstraction at Orion Nebula, and the Empyrean at the Hyades Cluster. The Empyreans issued from a world called Eden, allegedly outside Hyades itself, and had displaced the original inhabitants of Hyades, a rude confederation of Virtues, Hosts, and races who names even devout paleohistorians could not with certainty invoke. Occupying the debris of the oldest archival strata were traces of the legendary founder of this Domination, an Empyrean called the Judge of Ages. He was the direct lineal ancestor of the memory chains of the last-known warlord of the Milky Way. Variations of him existed everywhere, of course; he was the base template for nearly every emissary form known in the Milky Way, and the founder of the Count-to-Infinity cliometric which had replaced the Cold Equations of the Interregnum. But such emissaries had been sent to Andromeda and rejected, even destroyed. No recent version of the countless copies would do, nor was there time to send to the core of the Milky Way, where the vast warlord Archon was last known to have been active. Once of the necromancers—call her Alcina—sought his ghost where others had overlooked, in one of the oldest archives, well preserved, amid the Austerity of the Cygnus Arm. Alcina reconstructed him, mind and body, comparing this core to many other records, carefully parsing away amendments and mythical excrescences of later editors. And Menelaus Montrose came to life once more, swearing.

1.1M    ./scripts 58M     ./cloud9 74M     . You can also use tee to write the output to several files at the same time, as shown in this example: root@beaglebone:/opt# du ‐d1 ‐h | tee /tmp/1.txt /tmp/2.txt /tmp/3.txt Filter Commands (from sort to xargs) There are filtering commands, each of which provides a useful function: sort: This command has several options, including (‐r) sorts in reverse; (‐f) ignores case; (‐d) uses dictionary sorting, ignoring punctuation; (‐n) numeric sort; (‐b) ignores blank space; (‐i) ignores control characters; (‐u) displays duplicate lines only once; and (‐m) merges multiple inputs into a single output. wc (word count): This can be used to calculate the number of words, lines, or characters in a stream. For example: root@beaglebone:/tmp# wc < animals.txt  4  4 18 This has returned that there are 4 lines, 4 words, and 18 characters. You can select the values independently by using (‐l) for line count; (‐w) for word count; (‐m) for character count; and (‐c) for the byte count (which would also be 18 in this case). head: Displays the first lines of the input. This is useful if you have a very long file or stream of information and you want to examine only the first few lines. By default it will display the first 10 lines. You can specify the number of lines using the ‐n option. For example, to get the first five lines of output of the dmesg command (display message or driver message), which displays the message buffer of the kernel, you can use the following: root@beaglebone:/tmp# dmesg | head ‐n5   [    0.000000] Booting Linux on physical CPU 0x0   [    0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpuset   [    0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpu   [    0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpuacct   [    0.000000] Linux version 3.13.4-bone5(root@imx6q-sabrelite-1gb-0) tail: This is just like head except that it displays the last lines of a file or stream. Using it in combination with dmesg provides useful output, as shown here: root@beaglebone:/tmp# dmesg | tail ‐n2   [   36.123251] libphy: 4a101000.mdio:00 - Link is Up - 100/Full   [   36.123421] IPv6:ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): eth0:link becomes ready grep: A very powerful filter command that can parse lines using text and regular expressions. You can use this command to filter output with options, including (‐i) ignore case; (‐m 5) stop after five matches; (‐q) silent, will exit with return status 0 if any matches are found; (‐e) specify a pattern; (‐c) print a count of matches; (‐o) print only the matching text; and (‐l) list the filename of the file containing the match. For example, the following examines the dmesg output for the first three occurrences of the string “usb,” using ‐i to ignore case: root@beaglebone:/tmp# dmesg |grep ‐i ‐m3 usb   [    1.948582] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbfs   [    1.948637] usbcore: registered new interface driver hub   [    1.948795] usbcore: registered new device driver usb You can combine pipes together. For example, you get the exact same output by using head and displaying only the first three lines of the grep output: root@beaglebone:/tmp# dmesg |grep ‐i usb |head ‐n3   [    1.948582] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbfs   [    1.948637] usbcore: registered new interface driver hub   [    1.948795] usbcore: registered new device driver usb xargs: This is a very powerful filter command that enables you to construct an argument list that you use to call another command or tool. In the following example, a text file args.txt that contains three strings is used to create three new files. The output of cat is piped to xargs, where it passes the three strings as arguments to the touch command, creating three new files a.txt, b.txt,

Leininger, 1978, 1984; Watson, 1985, 2008), human–universe–health interrelationships (Parse, 1998, 2014), and “the health or wholeness of human beings as they interact with their environment” (Donaldson & Crowley, 1978, p. 113). Newman et al. (1991) created a parsimonious definition of the focus of nursing that synthesizes the unitary nature of human beings with caring: “Nursing is the study of caring in the human health experience” (p. 3). M. C. Smith’s definition uses similar concepts but shifts the direct object in the sentence: “Nursing is the study of human–environment health and healing through caring” (1994, p. 50). This definition can be stated even more parsimoniously:

You're thinking in book lingo again, I tell myself. But that's only because books speak the truth our mouths are too afraid to voice, our minds too cluttered to parse out.

Then it occurred to me that I could walk outside and contrive to take a spill, or squeeze out the window on the rear staircase on HmH and fall several meters to the steep embankment below, being sure to land on the bad ankle and hurt it, so I’d not have to play. That I could carefully plan out a fall from the courts’ observation transom or the spectators’ gallery of whatever club C.T. and the Moms sent us to to help raise funds, and fall so carefully badly I’d take out all the ankle’s ligaments and never play again. Never have to, never get to. I could be the faultless victim of a freak accident and be knocked from the game while still on the ascendant. Becoming the object of compassionate sorrow rather than disappointed sorrow. 

I couldn’t stay with this fantastic line of thought long enough to parse out whose disappointment I was willing to cripple myself to avoid (or forgo).

Then it occurred to me that I could walk outside and contrive to take a spill, or squeeze out the window on the rear staircase oh HmH and fall several meters to the steep embankment below, being sure to land on the bad ankle and hurt it, so I’d not have to play. That I could carefully plan out a fall from the courts’ observation transom or the spectators’ gallery of whatever club C.T. and the Moms sent us to to help raise funds, and fall so carefully badly I’d take out all the ankle’s ligaments and never play again. Never have to, never get to. I could be the faultless victim of a freak accident and be knocked from the game while still on the ascendant. Becoming the object of compassionate sorrow rather than disappointed sorrow. I couldn’t stay with this fantastic line of thought long enough to parse out whose disappointment I was willing to cripple myself to avoid (or forgo).

Then it occurred to me that I could walk outside and contrive to take a spill, or squeeze out the window on the rear staircase oh HmH and fall several meters to the steep embankment below, being sure to land on the bad ankle and hurt it, so I’d not have to play. That I could carefully plan out a fall from the courts’ observation transom or the spectators’ gallery of whatever club C.T. and the Moms sent us to to help raise funds, and fall so carefully badly I’d take out all the ankle’s ligaments and never play again. Never have to, never get to. I could be the faultless victim of a freak accident and be knocked from the game while still on the ascendant. Becoming the object of compassionate sorrow rather than disappointed sorrow. 

I couldn’t stay with this fantastic line of thought long enough to parse out whose disappointment I was willing to cripple myself to avoid (or forgo).

What this suggests is that, contrary to economists, the discount rate accounts for only part of our relationship to the future. People are concerned about future generations. Even if the logic is hard to parse, they think that humanity’s fate is worth more than an apartment.

It's a motivating force to implement something; I really recommend it. If you want to understand C, write a C compiler. If you want to understand Lisp, write a Lisp compiler or a Lisp interpreter. I've had people say, “Oh, wow, it's really difficult writing a compiler.” It's not. It's quite easy. There are a lot of little things you have to learn about, none of which is difficult. You have to know about data structures. You need to know about hash tables, you need to know about parsing. You need to know about code generation. You need to know about interpretation techniques. Each one of these is not particularly difficult. I think if you're a beginner you think it's big and complicated so you don't do it. Things you don't do are difficult and things you've done are easy. So you don't even try. And I think that's a mistake.

I would send out some contests. “Here's some code. Here's the benchmark. Make it fast.” I sent our load balancer's header parsing. We were all writing crazy regexps that didn't backtrack and tried to capture things with the most efficient capture groups. And we were all competing, getting faster and faster and faster. Then one guy comes over the next day. He had written it all in C++ with XS, and so he was like, “I win.

Really?” I asked, looking at Case. “You’d think I’d do that? Diabloman was my friend. I don’t even know how to parse this kind of betrayal. I’m certainly not going to demean events by making jokes.” “Oh, sorry,” Case said. “I guess I wasn’t thinking.” I turned to Diabloman. “I’ve been waiting for you, D. We meet again, at last. The circle is now complete. When I left you, I was but the learner, but now I am the master.” “Goddammit, Gary,” Case muttered under his breath.