pprint: "...thank small children who sleep at night."

[Brian L. Troutwine]

The heading comment to pprint reads:

# This is a simple little module I wrote to make life easier. I
didn't
# see anything quite like it in the library, though I may have
overlooked
# something. I wrote this when I was trying to read some heavily
nested
# tuples with fairly non-descriptive content. This is modeled very
much
# after Lisp/Scheme - style pretty-printing of lists. If you find it
# useful, thank small children who sleep at night.

Is the last sentence an obscure reference or in-joke? Can someone
explain it? I don't get it.

 

[Brian van den Broek]

Brian L. Troutwine said unto the world upon 19/09/06 05:30 PM:

The heading comment to pprint reads:

# This is a simple little module I wrote to make life easier. I
didn't
# see anything quite like it in the library, though I may have
overlooked
# something. I wrote this when I was trying to read some heavily
nested
# tuples with fairly non-descriptive content. This is modeled very
much
# after Lisp/Scheme - style pretty-printing of lists. If you find it
# useful, thank small children who sleep at night.

Is the last sentence an obscure reference or in-joke? Can someone
explain it? I don't get it.

Maybe it is an in-joke or reference that's blowing past me. But, I
would assume that the author has kids whose sound sleep at night left
him or her the time to code the module.

Best,

Brian vdB

 

[Paul McGuire]

Brian L. Troutwine said unto the world upon 19/09/06 05:30 PM:

Maybe it is an in-joke or reference that's blowing past me. But, I would
assume that the author has kids whose sound sleep at night left him or her
the time to code the module.

Best,

Brian vdB

Why don't you write the author and ask? His name and e-mail are right in
the header, just before the lines that you cited.

-- Paul

 

[Steve Holden]

Why don't you write the author and ask? His name and e-mail are right in
the header, just before the lines that you cited.

Knowing Fred, he was probably too busy earning a living to write the
code during the day and too conscientious to leave his kids alone to
write it during the evening.

Good job, Fred (Fred is *way* under-appreciated).

regards
Steve

 

[Fredrik Lundh]

Is the last sentence an obscure reference or in-joke? Can someone
explain it? I don't get it.

do you have small kids? tried doing serious programming while they're
still awake?

</F>

 

[John Salerno]

thank small children who sleep at night.

That seems like the kind of sentence that could become a tagline or
something, and you just have to be in the know to understand where it
comes from.

 

[Adam Jones]

The heading comment to pprint reads:

# This is a simple little module I wrote to make life easier. I
didn't
# see anything quite like it in the library, though I may have
overlooked
# something. I wrote this when I was trying to read some heavily
nested
# tuples with fairly non-descriptive content. This is modeled very
much
# after Lisp/Scheme - style pretty-printing of lists. If you find it
# useful, thank small children who sleep at night.

Is the last sentence an obscure reference or in-joke? Can someone
explain it? I don't get it.

My guess is that he had to write a pretty printer so his cursing and
general frustration and reading nasty nested tuples wouldn't wake the
kids.

-Adam