On 2/6/07, Smylers <[EMAIL PROTECTED] > wrote:
Jonathan Scott Duff writes:
> ... I can see the need for a pragma to help out the Pascal or Fortran
> programmers start all of their arrays at something other than 0.
Those sort of crutches in programming languages (let's help folk who
know some other language -- meaning they end up programming in some
hybrid of the two languages) often turn out to be a mistake. Think of
Pascal programmers #define-ing begin and end as { and } in C, or
WordBasic being 'localized' into French, or C<use English> in Perl 5.
Sure, but I wouldn't kick out another man's crutches just because I
think he doesn't need them. Nor would I deny a man some crutches
because I have a philosophical objection to his limp.
Part of this is cos they are mostly unnecessary: there are so many
fundamental and much deeper differences between Pascal and Perl that any
Pascal programmer who's managed to learn about and cope with all the
weird and wonderful things that Perl offers isn't going to struggle with
the relatively superficial difference in array subscripts.
If you say so. I've seen code that uses perl to get it's job done but is
clearly written in a very C-ish way. Not *needing* to learn about and cope
with all the weird and wonderful things that Perl offers is one of its
strengths IMHO.
-Scott
--
Jonathan Scott Duff
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
