On Tue, 20 Aug 2002, at 10:45am, Derek D. Martin wrote:
> Programming Perl seems to almost, but not quite recognize how painful
> these things are to learn, by offering mnemonic devicess for each of
> them.
use English;
That is not just an idle comment; it refers to the fact that Perl does
recognize that these variables *are* cryptic, and provides a mechanism to
As for why many people still use the funny-character variables: It is
partly because 'use English' carries a performance penalty for some
implementations, but mostly because the funny-character variables came
first.
> Here are two ways to do (more or less) the same thing, one in C and one in
> Perl:
>
> setlinebuf( file );
> $| = 1;
Here are two days to do (more or less) the same thing, one on Unix and one
on MS-Windows:
findstr foo myfile.txt
grep foo myfile.txt
Without knowing either of the two OSes, which is more self-documenting?
Which is more obscure?
> Well, there are certainly people who like to write obscure C as well. It
> just seems to be part of the Perl culture... I've seen far less readable
> Perl than C.
I think a large part of Perl's reputation for being line noise is that
Perl makes heavy use of regular expressions, which *do* look like line noise.
Fortunately, however, Perl provides a mechanism for that, too, and is the
only languages I know of that does -- the /x modifier allows one to embed
whitespace and comments in a regular expression.
--
Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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