Andrew Rodland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> What about BASIC? Aren't all the little kids today raised on BASIC? :)
I don't know about the kids _today_, but for about twenty years
starting circa 1980 most home computers came with exactly one
programming language tool, and it was BASIC -- line-number BASIC
initially and QBasic later. A lot of the programmers who cut their
teeth on BASIC never made the transition to C, because C as a language
is so primitive compared to BASIC (not in terms of absolute
capabilities or performance but in terms of the amount of abstraction
provided) that it felt like stone knives and bearskins. Perl came
along and is actually even more high-level than BASIC, and a number of
us picked it up and never looked back.
aside-->
(As for me, in between BASIC and Perl I also picked up Inform and
Emacs Lisp, which are also much higher-level languages than C. I
tried on two separate occasions to make myself learn C (plus two
_additional_ attempts at C++) before I finally realized I don't
actually *want* to maintain legacy code written in a low-level
language, anyway. I also tried Python and PHP, but they didn't
take because I kept thinking how much easier things are in Perl.)
<--backtotopic
So yeah, there are a lot of BASIC-influenced people writing Perl code.
However, I don't think using <> for something other than not-equal is
going to be a big deal. Perl5 doesn't use <> for not-equal either,
and picking up a differently-named operator or two is *NOT* the hard
part of learning a different programming language. It's the paradigm
differences that will get you, and Perl6 is going to stand in good
stead there because it supports most of the paradigms out there to one
degree or another.
--
$;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b->()}}
split//,"[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ --";$\=$ ;-> ();print$/
