History
The first known online appearance of the Schwartzian Transform is a December 16, 1994 posting by Randal Schwartz to a thread in comp.unix.shell, crossposted to comp.lang.perl. (The current version of the Perl Timeline is incorrect and refers to a later date in 1995.) The thread began with a question about how to sort a list of lines by their "last" word:
adjn:Joshua Ng adktk:KaLap Timothy Kwong admg:Mahalingam Gobieramanan admln:Martha L. Nangalama
Schwartz responded with:
#!/usr/bin/perl require 5; # new features, new bugs! print map { $_-> } sort { $a-> cmp $b-> } map { } <>;This code produces the result:
admg:Mahalingam Gobieramanan adktk:KaLap Timothy Kwong admln:Martha L. Nangalama adjn:Joshua Ng
Schwartz noted in the post that he was "Speak with a lisp in Perl," a reference to the idiom's Lisp origins.
The term "Schwartzian Transform" itself was coined by Tom Christiansen in a followup reply. Later posts by Christiansen made it clear that he had not intended to name the construct, but merely to refer to it from the original post: his attempt to finally name it "The Black Transform" did not take hold ("Black" here being a pun on "schwarz", which means black in German).
Read more about this topic: Schwartzian Transform
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“All history and art are against us, but we still expect happiness in love.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Every member of the family of the future will be a producer of some kind and in some degree. The only one who will have the right of exemption will be the mother ...”
—Ruth C. D. Havens, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)