>>>>> "JZ" == Jeremy Zawodny <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

  JZ> The fact that it is documented doesn't change that fact that it's
  JZ> obscure.  (I wish more people understood that.)  I suspect that
  JZ> many of the folks who frequent this list have been wearing their
  JZ> Perl blinders long enough that it doesn't just doesn't *seem*
  JZ> obscure anymore.

if i ever saw someone getting a string length in real code with tr/// i
would kick them hard. on the other hand counting the number of newlines
in a string is a valid use of that effect. in fact there is no other
simple and fast way to count newlines in a string but tr///.

but when golf is played, then all those neat side effect and obscure
points are part of the game. i think most golfers are well aware about
the difference between that and production code. and yet, people do
learn useful ideas from golf answers which when expanded out to normal
looking code are very cool and could be used in production.

  JZ> Think back to when you were first learning Perl.  Or regular
  JZ> expressions.  They're documented but you still find yourself
  JZ> thinking "damn, this is obscure..."  Are you wrong?

not obscure. the stuff is right there in front of your face. maybe
harder to learn in some ways. i have a hard time judging that as i was a
classic perl learner. i knew c, shell, awk, sed, unix, grep, regexes,
lisp, before i learned perl. so my fright level was miniscule and i
can't compare it to others. i jumped into the deep end and was swimming
right off with no outside help but the pink camel. my first perl project
code still looks decent (even if convoluted as it was doing complex data
structures in perl4). i did a lightning talk on it at yapc 2001. i am
not ashamed of the code quality, just the hoops i jumped through as i
didn't have perl5 yet. :)

uri

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