Craig Berry wrote:
> Excellent advice, but often harder to follow than it should be. Think of
trying to explain to a VMS
> newbie why the RMS system services are not to be found in the System
Services Reference
> Manual, the CVT$ routines are in the "RTL Library (LIB$)" even though
they don't begin with LIB$,
> while the STR$ routines are in their own separate manual, and so on.
No argument from me on this point, and it was an omission. A lot of
questions can be answered by "RTFM". The problem is, where in the "FM" is
the information? This isn't limited to Perl, and I try not to give such
answers without an actual reference. I think what actually happened was
that I was trying (perhaps unsuccessfully) to make the "Perl isn't DCL"
point, while not stepping on anyone, recognizing the huge cultural
difference between the two languages, and give at least a small leg up on
approaching the problem. Then I looked at the time, said something like
"omygosh - I've been fiddling with this note for _how_ long?" and closed it
out without the extra thought.
Because I learned Perl as a way to use (mostly) the same scripts under VMS
and Windows (and to have a scripting language that was more functional than
.BAT files and less prone to security problems than VBScript), my solution
was to install ActivePerl and either use their web-based docs or search the
document folder. I suppose
$ SEARCH PERL_ROOT:[*...]*.POD "search_string"
would be the equivalent of the latter, but if the search string is "<>" you
get about thirty files, and you have to wade through them to see which hits
are relevant. And even when you have found the right part (as you will if
you look, since Perl's documentation is pretty complete), you still don't
know which of the many possible Perl idioms that solve the problem is the
correct one in your case.
> Finding out where the <> operator is documented took me longer than I
care to admit. You have to forget
> about the fact that it's something that implicitly does reads on
filehandles and remember that first and
> foremost it's an operator and is documented in a manual entitled "Perl
Operators and Precedence."
Been there, done that. My algorithm is:
1) try perldoc -f
2) scratch my head, cuss the obscure names of the documentation files and
the difficulty of finding the docs on core functionality that _isn't_ a
function, and then try (in some order, not necessarily this one):
perlop (Operators and Precedence),
perlvar (Predefined variables),
perlfaq (frequently-asked questions),
the SEARCH utility, or some equivalent
Tom Wyant
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