On Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 5:44 AM, Girish Venkatachalam < girishvenkatacha...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Though perl is not as good as python in many ways for some reason perl > has a very strong developer community around it. It has > got a certain way to obtain copious documentation in UNIX man page format. > perl is not as good as python? Good lord, I got not the time for this flame bait. > > And perl's UNIX focus lies in its manpage format for documentation > unlike python's help(<module>) > perl's documentation is not in the manpage format. Perl's document is written in the "POD" format (for "Plain Old Documentation"). It is possible to obtain the documentation using perldoc (not man) and pod easily gives way to turning the same documentation into any format. Yes, its a big advantage, but its not "just" man pages. Given man's popularity and familiarity, for the sake of convenience, some package maintainers choose to also turn the pod documentation into man. > style, though every language has OS bindings perl is a direct copy > when it comes to regex, its > Could you please explain what you mean by "perl is a direct copy when it comes to regex"? > IPC and so on. It is nothing but UNIX in a new flavor. > Perl is a language with an interpreter on top of Unix-like OSes (and windows and mac and many others including real-time embedded OSes). Perl is not an OS. the OS is below perl and does all the hard-lifting, but perl, as do all languages, attempts to let the programmer write an elaborate recipe of achieving something by manipulating the OS underneath, without us having to know about the internals (of interacting with the OS). So it is confusing when you say that the driver is the vehicle, ie., perl is the OS. [snip] Depending on whether the lvalue is singular or plural(scalar or > array), the RHS will be assigned > as the length of the RHS or the list in the RHS itself. > Err... > > For instance, if you write, > > $sca = (1,3,4,5); > > You will see that $sca contains 4. > > $ perl -e '$sca = (1,2,3,4); print $sca;' > 4$ > $ perl -e '$s = (1,3,5,6); print $s' 6 Oops. Its not the length of the array. Its the last element in the array. > But if you do this: > > @a = (1,2,3,4); > > you will be able to assign the whole array. > > This can trip many people, even experienced programmers. One can even > argue it is a bug. > Everything requires a certain approach to learning, learning to deal with a dog is very different from dealing with a dragon. But there are obvious differences in end applications for the two. The question is whether you have learnt that approach fully well and can explain the same to everyone. It is not very helpful to make sweeping statements that only point out problems without providing solutions. Regards, -Suraj -- Career Gear - Industry Driven Talent Factory _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc