On Fri, Jul 11, 2003 at 02:43:46PM -0400, Casey West wrote: > I decided to read the documentation from the complete beginner POV. I > decided that I would check 'man perl' to start, which gave me a list > of documents. Then I figured, I'm new to the language, I'll start by > reading it's syntax. So I check 'man perlsyn' and the second sentence > of the description of Perl begins a horrible downward burning spiral > vortex of death that confused me to no end. Then, I read it again > from my real POV and realized the second sentence of the description of > Perl begins a horrible downward burning spiral vortex of death that > confused me to no end. > > Times have changed, we don't have to convince anyone anymore, we are > on top. The patch below tries to minimize the burning vortex of death.
I put in a patch for a new perlsyn intro a few months ago which I believe was lost in the larger "That which is better left unsed" argument. http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-05/msg00649.html While Casey's patch is purely deletive, leaving a very bland introduction, this attempts to express the more important points of Perl's syntax. Free-form (whitespace not terribly important), optional syntactic elements (DWIM), and borrowing from other languages. Like Casey's patch, the note about comments is moved into its own section. The information about specific differences between Perl and other languages is moved to perltrap where it belongs. Here is the introduction the patch introduces for your easy evaluation. NAME perlsyn - Perl syntax DESCRIPTION A Perl program consists of a sequence of declarations and statements which run from the top to the bottom. Loops, subroutines and other control structures allow you to jump around within the code. Perl is a free-form language, you can format and indent it however you like. Whitespace mostly serves to separate tokens, unlike languages like Python where it is an impor- tant part of the syntax. Many of Perl's syntactic elements are optional. Rather than requiring you to put parenthesis around every func- tion call and declare every variable, you can often leave such explicit elements off and Perl will figure out what you meant. This is known as Do What I Mean abbreviated DWIM. It allows programmers to be lazy and to code in a style which they are comfortable. Perl borrows syntax and concepts from many languages: awk, sed, C, Bourne Shell, Smalltalk, Lisp and even English. Other languages have borrowed syntax from Perl, particu- larly its regular expression extensions. So if you have programmed in another language you will see familiar pieces in Perl. They often work they same, but see perl- trap for information about how they differ. -- Nature is pissed. http://www.unamerican.com/
