On 2011-12-24 18:15:34 +0000, Tony van der Hoff wrote: > No doubt it's powerful, and you can do powerful things. The problem is that > the syntax is so ideosyncratic, that I'm so relieved to get someting finally > to do what I need, that I can't be bothered expressing it in a very concise > way.
Well, I have no problems with that, though one should avoid to write unreadable code (but this is true for every language). I think that Perl syntax is not really hard to understand once one has spent some time on it (compare with zsh or sendmail config files... :). > The TMTOWTDI only gets in the way. Who, other than PERL authors could think > up such an acronym? Do it one way, and do it intuitively, would be a better > slogan. Several people will express things intuitively in different manners. That's TMTOWTDI. For instance, some people prefer the OO way, while others will prefer the imperative way. > The "Camel Book" seriously pisses me off, with its silly little asides, > which add nothing to the material. I've never read it. > Give me C, or C++, with its minor ideosyncracies any day. Compiling > is a pain, but it roots out syntax errors before getting anywhere > near to running anything. The problem with C is not the syntax, but the semantics, which may depend on the implementation or be undefined. And you will generally get no warnings about semantics errors. The code may run fine on some platform, but start to fail on a different platform or with different optimization options. Well-known problems that not all developers are aware of: integer overflows, automatic conversions that can change the value (e.g. from signed to unsigned, and this can depend on the platform), memory aliasing... -- Vincent Lefèvre <vinc...@vinc17.net> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.net/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.net/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Arénaire project (LIP, ENS-Lyon) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20111224201603.gf5...@xvii.vinc17.org
