<Maddas>
Anyhow, google will munch it to HTML for you if you want.
<Eglin>
yeah, but the formatting leaves something to be desired
<Maddas>
Yup.
<Eglin>
I dislike pdfs because the idea is retarded
<Maddas>
What idea?
<ayrnieu>
because PDFs exist for printing, and I always want to read everything online. A format better designed for that (HTML, Texinfo) would help.
<Eglin>
yup
<Maddas>
I find PDF a very decent format to read.
<Eglin>
garbage
<ayrnieu>
I despise them for reading online.
<Eglin>
same
<Maddas>
I don't read online. I download them and read them.
<Maddas>
(Or do you mean "on the computer?"
<ayrnieu>
no searhing, constant troubles with sizing and page-turning.
<Maddas>
)
<Maddas>
It has searching.
<ayrnieu>
eh, of course I mean 'on the computer'.
<Maddas>
I never had any problems with page-turning and sizing.
<Eglin>
the fundamental design goals of pdfs are at odds with those of the user
<ayrnieu>
Maddas - no decent searching. No outside-of-a-GUI-viewer searching.
<ayrnieu>
Maddas - but the horrible navigation makes up for what searching you have.
<Maddas>
Horrible navigation?
<ayrnieu>
Maddas - I do not find online documents sensibly broken by the page.
<Eglin>
Information formats should make data _more_ accessable, not less.
<Eglin>
Adobe wants to protect their content, so you suffer
<Eglin>
It is crap, and I despise that so many people foolishly buy into their garbage
<ayrnieu>
nevermind that my 800x600 monitor can't view any PDF readably without multiple in-page movements.
<Eglin>
yup
<Eglin>
thank God someone else out their agrees w/ me! I'm usually all alone on this one
<ayrnieu>
indeed, only Adobe's PDF-creating software (such that they have) gives the format any benefit over postscript.
<Eglin>
even that is arguable
<Maddas>
PDF was not designed to be viewed with low-resolutions, I agree with that.
<Eglin>
lex et al have their own followings
<ayrnieu>
but since I find creating print-only documents as uninteresting as reading print-only documents, I probably don't have a decent opinion on authoring tools -- except that I'd rather use Texinfo or LaTeX or Lyx and convert.
<Eglin>
*tex et al
<Eglin>
agreed
<Eglin>
PDF should be a presentation tool, not a document format
<ayrnieu>
Maddas - I can read HTML just fine on my Palm, and many useful authoring formats translate to HTML -- I can't even read PDF on my one computer. Perhaps this overly biases me against that format.
<Maddas>
ayrnieu: It certainly would.
<ayrnieu>
not as conveniently, at any rate. I just wish that people would write in LaTeX or something and convert that instead of inventing new worse formats every five years.
<Maddas>
I use LaTeX and generate PDFs from that.
<Eglin>
at any rate... before I started my rant... What salient point were you going to point me toward?
<Maddas>
me?
<Eglin>
yeah...
<Eglin>
what is in the caltech book?
<Maddas>
None, I just wondered why you don't like PDF.
<Maddas>
A (IMO) nice O'Caml tutorial.
<Eglin>
ah, cool
<Eglin>
will sheepishly d/l it, then :)
<Maddas>
But if you don't like PDF/the converted HTML, feel free not to use it!
<Eglin>
hehe
<ayrnieu>
indeed, I like the O'Caml book off of www.ocaml.org
<Eglin>
will look into it.
<Eglin>
thanks
<Eglin>
Just decided to look into ocaml today
<Maddas>
I really prefer the PDF version, since the HTML (the CSS to be more specific) is broken on certain browsers
<Eglin>
Kind of feel like I should be proficient in at least one functional language...
<Eglin>
and nobody writes lisp/scheme bindings anymore
<ayrnieu>
and nobody familiar with O'Caml or Haskell really considers scheme much of a function language -- and nobody considers Lisp one at all.
<Eglin>
oh?
<Eglin>
please explain?
<ayrnieu>
Lisp deserves its own category =) Learn a bit more about O'Caml and see what you think
<Maddas>
ayrnieu: You might have a hard point defending that against Riastradh.
<Eglin>
easier to rule them out of the imperitive class... so they must be functional :)
<Maddas>
There's also logical languages
<ayrnieu>
more useful distinctions exist.
<Eglin>
I'm thinking that logical languages fall into the functional class
<ayrnieu>
Don't think that way.
<Eglin>
How (in broad terms) does ocaml compare w/ haskell?
<Eglin>
ick... the tutorial @ merjis.com in the title is awful
<ayrnieu>
Haskell mostly has lazy evaluation and only strictness by data dependency -- which it uses to force an ordering on IO code. O'Caml mostly has strict evaluation.
<ayrnieu>
I can offer opinions, but I don't really know how to respond to your question.
<Maddas>
Also, Haskell is pure.
<Eglin>
fair enough... not a very straightforward question
<Eglin>
Maddas: How can it interface with non-pure stateful libraries, then?
<Maddas>
You're asking the wrong person :)
<Eglin>
fair enough
<Eglin>
I doubt I worded the question correctly, anyway
<ayrnieu>
Eglin - it probably keeps stateful library functions in the IO monad.
<Maddas>
I would think they use monads, but I don't know anything about monads, so I'd better shut up.
<Eglin>
so, you just mean it doesn't generally have ! functions
<ayrnieu>
I don't follow you, sorry..
<Maddas>
Eglin: I didn't like the merjis.com tutorial either, that's why I pointed you to the other book.
<Eglin>
lisp used to use method! notation to indicate side effects, IIRC
<Eglin>
Maddas: cool... thanks.
<ayrnieu>
Scheme has that, yes.
<ayrnieu>
No, Haskell has plenty of side-effecting functions, it just forces them to reside within the IO monad -- which means that an artificial dependency gets run through the program and orders every invocation of an IO function.
<Eglin>
that makes sense... thanks
<ayrnieu>
artificial data dependency, I mean. Some people like to think of the program accepting the entire state of the world and returning the entire state of the world, with modification-in-place as a proven-safe optimization.
<Eglin>
just wondering how a "pure functional" language could have bindings against c-type langauges
<Eglin>
didn't really consider i/o... same dealio, though
<Eglin>
ayrnieu: Makes sense.
<ayrnieu>
Haskell has many academic papers on such topics, and lots and lots of compiler smarts to make the language work.
<Eglin>
I'm sure
<Eglin>
farewell, all. thanks for the tips
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hi
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salut
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