Hi --

On Fri, 17 Mar 2006, thoran / thoran.com wrote:

> Hello Again Good Folk of Rubydom,
>
> I was searching for a library in Ruby which I wasn't sure existed, and
> sometimes I'll go looking to see if Perl has something.  (And when
> doesn't it?)  When I find that something in Perl it'll often lead me to
> something that does exist in Ruby because of a re-implementation which
> has the same name or makes reference to the Perl version as its
> inspiration, such as was the case with Mechanize recently.
>
> Anyhow whilst doing so, I came across this file:
> http://search.cpan.org/src/SIMON/Acme-OneHundredNotOut-100/OneHundredNotOut.pm,
> which contains this little gem:
>
> "You know those little snippets that Google and other search engines
> display when you
> search for some terms? They contextualise the terms in the body of the
> document and highlight them in a snippet that best represents how
> they're used in the document. This is actually a really hard problem,
> and it took me several goes to get L<Text::Context> right. It uses
> L<Text::Context::EitherSide> as an "emergency" contextualizer if it
> can't get anything right at all, but the algorithm itself is a bit of a
> swine.
>
> <paragraph continues, but separated for emphasis>
>
> "I actually had to prototype this module in Ruby to get my
> thinking clear enough to code it up in Perl..."
>
> Does this seem a little muddle-headed to anyone!?

Maybe I still haven't had enough caffeine... but it doesn't sound
muddle-headed to me.  I'm actually not sure what aspect of it you
mean.  I certainly wouldn't second-guess Simon Cozens, who has written
more than 100 Perl modules, if that's how he felt he wanted to
proceed.


David

-- 
David A. Black (dblack / wobblini.net)
Ruby Power and Light, LLC (http://www.rubypowerandlight.com)

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