On Dec 21, 2006, at 12:47 PM, David Cantrell wrote:
On Mon, Dec 18, 2006 at 10:52:39AM -0600, Peter da Silva wrote:
In Perl, a "/" may be an operator or a literal terminator. That would
be like making +" the string concatenation operator in C. In any other
language you'd be laughed out of the standards committee for proposing
such a thing. Perl hackers violently defend it.
Bullshit. The C standards committee is just fine with having at least
two meanings for * and &, and no doubt others that I can't think of off
the top of my head.
That's just operator overloading, that's light-years away from such
horrors as this hypothetical "plus-quote" operator [eg: (a +" "hello")]
that's the kind of nasty syntactical botch that Perl hackers think is
so bloody cool.
The only case in C where the same symbol is used as a terminator and as
an operator is in the comment syntax, and that IS hateful, and you'd be
hard pressed to get anyone who really understands C to defend these
kinds of 35 year old mistakes in the language. That's NOT excluding
Dennis Ritchie, by the way.
