Note "academic" is implying "Computer Science" not "Engineering" or "IT Education" -- professors who publish research and hope their grad students will grow up to be professors just like them.
The eclectic nature of Perl makes it (a) not well suited to the purist CompSci academic style Perl ... The anti-Lisp (or anti-Scheme) (b) not a small tutorial language Perl ... The anti-Pascal (c) TIMTOWDI makes it hard to assign homework that will exercise the desired new skills ... without so over specifying that the assignment is always trivial. (brian_d_foy has written about the fun of writing assignments for Learning Perl recently.) (I know one student reading ahead in the manuals that caused this problem with PL/I, called Perl/67 by one wit, but he *worked* at it. No, it wasn't me.) (d) Not describable by a simple grammar, Perl ... The Anti-Pascal, anti-Ada, Anti-Java, anti-... A reference BNF grammar is thought essential when teaching beginning intro language since the later course will be writing a boot-strap parser ... And all the intro languages had simple BNFs back when that was the only way to build them. Doesn't mean it has to be that way, but it is assumed. Perl tutorials demonstrate it's NOT necessary, but CS may still believe it. I will be intrigued to hear of theoretical computer scientists, as opposed to applied MIS / IT classes, using Perl. I expect that will be the exception. Bill Not speaking for the firm _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
