Evolution vs intelligent design..

Normally I would not write about the things of this type, but I figured it is a cool oddness worth mentioning: apparently, on MS Windows you can make the "echo" command not interpret its arguments by appending the dot to it. So, the "echo. /?" outputs the "/?".

Don't rush to blame anyone - because the blog entry itself has an interesting ending - which is one of the reasons I think it was worth mentioning here:

"This is what happens when a language develops not by design but by evolution."

I'd put it a bit in a different way though - "This is what happens when the evolution of the language is not foreseen by the original design". The key thing is to try to not make the flexibility at a price of a complexity. On the other hand, it's amazing what one can do using the free tools out there. I've used the snacc at some point in time - it's a pretty cool beast. Albeit, I must admit that reading up about all those different kinds of seemingly overengineered things is probably a bit daunting. Of course, there's XML and all these newly derived formats...Boo. Too many angle brackets :)

Nonetheless, all of those are just special cases of distorted S-expressions :-) - so designing in terms of those might be actually the best approach.

So, I'll go off to install Lisp, and meantime you can go and read some wizdom.

p.s. Of course, any wizdom is subjective :-) - so don't forget to have other views as well :)