Talk:1421: Future Self

# Dear Future Editor
# As author of the first explanation, I know of what I write. Perhaps minus the snarky code-commenting.
# But I've a feeling there's a better way of writing it, and possibly a different context that I've missed.
#
# ...so over to you.141.101.99.7 08:20, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

The last paragraph was written with assumption no other content is here yet (because there wasn't) - can someone incorporate it correctly with the rest, please? 141.101.89.217 08:19, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

(Dealing with edit conflict) Let me check what you mean. 141.101.99.7 08:20, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Ahah! Yes, we were both dealing with edit conflicts, only in different orders (me in here, you in the main article). I think I'm going to let a third party resolve the explanation, it'd probably be best.141.101.99.7 08:23, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

aaaand dodged by yet another editor 108.162.249.206 08:47, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

I'm not sure I totally agree with the sentence: "The parsing function seems to have lasted one year longer than expected by the younger Cueball." Younger Cueball expected that the parsing function would fail on or after 2013, which is pretty accurate if it failed in 2014. Djbrasier (talk) 14:22, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

"It's at least 2013" parsed to me as "this will certainly work until part-way through 2013", so the fact that the message in a bottle is uncovered in 2014 says a year longer than worst expectations. OTOH, an alternate interpretation would be "this can't fail before 2013". Maybe, just maybe, Past Cueball (and we don't know how long ago Past Cueball wrote this) is smart enough to say that, so... Who knows.

(Also, related to what @Artyer below says, I've reconsidered my ideas about this. Maybe Past Cueball is actually just going "I wonder what it was like in Iceland?", but of course Present Cueball has a guilty conscience about this never coming to pass and takes the innocent comment badly. And I'm also seeing a lot of cynicism about Regexps... Using regexps is usually the best way to allow easy 'rekludging'. Indeed, import pattern-strings from a plain-text flatfile, branching options with and the like with sufficient power from an external flat-file and you needn't touch the code at all, just modift the associated "config file". Again, this is something I've done, for frequently permutating sources. But, even without, with access to the source code hard-coded regexps aren't necessarily the disaster.) 141.101.99.7 20:16, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

There's nothng wrtten about the trip to Iceland that cueball was plannng to go on (procrastination caused him not to). Maybe something like "in this case, it was that cueball knew he wouldn't go on the trip he planned" but I rewrote it like 5 times, and it didn't work. —Artyer (talk) 16:45, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

I think the sentence about context free and regular grammars over-interpretates this a bit. First of all, there are many regex engines which support back-references, thus allowing more than regular grammars; second of all, a "kludged" parser very often assumes that the input is grammatically correct and just wants to extract the required information. --108.162.254.32 17:01, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

The first 'h' is backwards in the line " The parse function finally broke" 20:18, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

It appears to be a capital-H (not technically chiral, unlike a small-h), to match the capitality of the long-standing standard of XKCD writing and the rest of the writing on this comic, but somehow obscured/over-smeared by the preceding "T". Image editing error, of some kind? Other characters' anti-aliased fringes quite happily run into their neighbours without similar artefacts. See the "TU" out of the first line's "FUTURE". On the other hand, the effect repeats in the "THAT" at the end of the "DEAR PAST SELF" text, except with a token two-pixel 'riser' remaining in this case. See also "# THAT TRIP TO ICELAND?" at the end and "THIS FILE" near the beginning. A style element?

And to address the Incomplete-Tag's current question about the word "snark", please change it if you don't like it or know what that means (I suppose I'd say "snide and sarcastic" would be a good 'back portmanteau' explanation as to its intended usage). 141.101.99.7 20:43, 15 September 2014 (UTC)