The continuing hard drive worries.

PHP is the spawn of the Devil.

And on a more sensible note, it isn't always installed.

Just looking through the Python docs. Too few examples and too much reliance on some BNF to describe a language feature. Shouldn't use that at all for an informal description, IMO. PHP site much more straightforward. I take the point about PHP function names and sometimes argument ordering, however.

Look, I can write FORTRAN in any language, OK?

Tsk, tsk. Can't tell the difference between encryption and encoding.

Quite so. OTOH, my opinions make me a very good living.

Since you were talking about Linux, where you were coming from is of little relevance.

It was, since OS X was where I developed my app. I agree that Ubuntu, at least, appears to come with neither PHP nor apache, rather to my surprise. I found the same on Windows but that was more to be expected.

Since I have 15k lines of working PHP I'm not about to rewrite it.

In message , Clive George writes

Well, Toshiba had an Ubuntu netbook - I bought one. The hardware was horrible, though.

In message , The Natural Philosopher writes

Yes, but not normally for 'proper work'.

And you never blamed the users?

And you never praised the installation/maintainers?

I don't honestly see much difference. There are many things I don't like about Windows, but I've got many things here that don't work with Mint.

Why doesn't Mint have a virtual keyboard that integrates, when every Android device takes it for granted?

I'm beginning to regret starting this thread:-)

I agree there's a danger of descending into language or platform wars but we've manfully avoided that.

Indeed. It is the language however I sue most of the time fr web pages simply because it is the most popular.

Like Mysql, its sufficient unto the day of you avoid all the bloat thats been built that doesn't work very well and stick to simple conditionals and loops and avoid object oriented BS like the plague.

easy enough to install both apache and PHP

Slightly less easy to get all the extensions working.

Because android is designed for machines that have virtual keyboards?

And linux-the-desktop (android is linux too) is designed for real keyboards?

You might just as well say ''why doesn't android come with fan control software'

let's just say that all languages are in essence crap, and some are even more crap than most. But they are all faster to write than assembler.

And even a crappy language can be persuaded to do what you want, unless its pascal* of course.

Pascal dont like casts one little bit.

That was the easy part. Finding I now had apache 2.4 rather than 2.2 was a bit taxing, but that all runs now and my app sends/receives mail. Looking at Python now.

In standard Pascal, there is no "return" statement, and each string of different length is a different type. Also, IIRC, the language defines nothing about I/O (print, write, and the like), meaning that different implementations vary in this regard. BICBW, it's 40 years ago now.

good luck ;-)

That was the killer.

I needed to make a Union of every possible type of disk sector one might in fact encounter,

That seemed to be beyond TurboPascal.

I the end I did what I consider to be the finest piece of programming I ever did: I rewrote 10,000 lines of inoperative pascal in C and actually got it to work, and interfaced to and IBM system in two days in a hotel room in Orleans.

And had to sue the tosser who I did it for to get paid.

Also, IIRC, the language defines

Pascal was written by an academic, therefore its perfect(ly useless).

Good for teaching, perhaps, back then. Trouble is all those new graduates then went into industry and started pressuring for Pascal. Or doing startups and offering Pascal as the main language available.