- Think of Babbage 's engines

- Eric Drexler has shrunk rod logic: using carbon nanotubes as

nano-sized levers, he' s made mechanical logic gates

- Can 't I use rod logic for Perl?

- I created a straight line language that could charitably be described

as "Readability suboptimal"

[ He demonstrates a language that' s made of nothing but straight - line

characters -- _ , - , [ , ] , < , > , \ , | , / . It makes Perl look like

a storybook for first grade readers in comparison . ]

[ Discussion of positrons -- electrons with positive charge -- and

Feynman diagrams . One of the consequences of drawing the release

of a positron on a Feynman diagram is that they are travelling

leftwards on the "time" axis . They are going backwards in time !

He then showed an application that takes the idea of particles

travelling backwards in time and applied them to variables .

The end result ? Positronic variables ! ]

- use Positronic :: Variables

- They come into existence at end of block , and travel backwards

in runtime

- With a positronic variable , you can declare a variable that

holds values you 'll need later, and they' ll travel back in time

where your program "catches up" with them later

- Makes the square root finding algorithm so much easier !

- The trick is that positronic variable programs get run through

a preprocessor that repeatedly runs through the app

- This will works only on programs with convergent algorithms

- "I will eventually develop a positronic debugger,

and I have been using it."

- And finally , if you look at everything I talked about this evening ,

you have the title of this talk explained : "Temporally Quaquaversal

Virtual Nanomachine Programming in Multiple Topologically Connected

Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces…Made Easy.

===

Q & A

- Earlier at lunch with Richard Dice, I told him: " There 's no crowd like

a Toronto crowd." You' re wonderful , thank you !

- What 's up with Perl 6?

- For the past few years, there have been on average hundreds

of doc changes committed

- This year, there are fewer than 100

- What does it mean? That we got it right

- And yes, Larry' s implementing

- Which means that we are in a new phase in the development

of Perl 6 : the end phase "

- This is going to be an awesome language

- I've been working with early releases of Perl 6, and I've noticed

how irritating it is to go back to Perl 5

- Now let me talk about Perl 5.10

- There are many improvements that are largely about making life easier

and programming less annoying.

- Consider the say function -- simple, but not having to add a newline

and the end of print strings makes a lot of difference

- That's the whole point -- they looked at the really basic stuff

that we do all the time and made it simpler

- Another example, the " //" operator, called "defined or". It

returns the left argument if it 's defined, otherwise

it returns the returns the right argument

- At long last, Perl has a switch statement!

- Does any of this stuff lend itself to multicore?

- Junctions and superpositions are a natural fit for multiprocessors

- With languages that have junctions, it should at least be possible

to automatically farm junction operations to parallel processors

- How hard was it to write your modules based on quantum physics?

- Easier than you think

- What helped what that I had the quantum physics metaphor to guide me

- The trick is to understand the metaphor,

and implement it consistently

- Remember: quantum mechanics is one of the most rigorously

tested systems we' ve ever conceived

- Are positronic variables another way of implementing

constraint - based programming ?

- YES !

- In fact , this is a good time to explain why I do all this

odd stuff , taking concepts from quantum physics and then applying

them to Perl