I greatly appreciate the encouraging off-list e-mails I have
been getting the past few days. The fact that no-one on this
list knows I'm taking a vacation has me breaking my vow to
not touch any device more complex than a media appliance
until I return and resume normal operations may 28, to ward
off any paranoia which otherwise would probably result from
my disappearance (he wrote, full of hubris.)
Here's my parting assignment: when I return I expect someone
to have set up a mailing list and associated fund towards the
end of buying back Larry's soul from whoever he apparently
sold it to, since I can come up with no other explanation
for the abrupt deprecation (as clarified by Dr. Conway) of
accesses to items within containers prefixed with an indicator
referring to the item rather than the nature of the container.
I don't think p5 is broken in regards to single-length slices.
It's like an industrial power drill that will spin you around
instead of freezing if it gets hung up on something. Roadkill
like the kid who got suspended from high school after neglecting
to pay attention to his fortune-slurping function, which then put
exactly the first line of `fortune` on his web page, giving
his principal a very odd impression of his values, is the price
for industrial strength.
Special handling of single-length slices, for instance making them
return value-but-true, is interesting as a removable training wheel,
but there has to be a simple way to remove them -- like having
use trainingwheels
be an alternate invocation recommended for the beginner.
And about the whole throwing-out-baby-in-one-grand-bathwater-disposal-motion
trope, I'd like to say that my conception of what the volunteer
participants on the p6 lists have been about is neither giving baby
a brain transplant nor grooming him, but rather building a replacement
baby which we can then sneak into the former baby's crib, without the parents
noticing anything is up until, like young Clark Kent, he suprisingly
bites through his spoon.
