On Tue, Nov 29, 2005 at 08:10:59AM -1000, Jim Thompson wrote: > Tim Newsham wrote: > > >Yet you make good use of pronouns in your english > >compositions. Is it the poor choice of name ($_), the subtle > >(or non-uniform?) rules about what they reference, or just > >lack of familiarity? > > Its mostly the last (familiarity), but the non-uniform rules > are part of it. Perl's syntax gets in my way, and I openly > admit same. It looks like a sendmail.cf file to me.
Perl's over-dependence on punctuation is admitedly tiring. But, would perl suck less if 'use English' and 'use strict' were enabled by default? To be fair, the objectionable perl code I see is due more to the style rather than syntax. Take this snippet from logwatch, a ubiquitous piece of perl code found on most Linux systems: @ServiceList = @TempServiceList; for (my $i = 0; $i <= $#ServiceList; $i++) { $ServiceList[$i] = lc($ServiceList[$i]); } You could more clearly rewrite it as: for my $s (@TempServiceList) { push @ServiceList, lc($s); } .. or more concisely with: @ServiceList = map(lc, @TempServiceList); .. or in python: service_list = [ s.lower() for s in temp_server_list ] .. or in ruby: service_list = temp_server_list.map { |s| s.downcase } -Vince