-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At some point hitherto, [EMAIL PROTECTED] hath spake thusly: > >1. Perl seems to favor supporting a variety of features with obscure, > >meaningless, two-character variables that might be clearer with flags > >or arguments to functions that make use of it. > > Define obscure please.
Try m-w.com. :) Or, I'll save you the trouble: 1 a : DARK, DIM b : shrouded in or hidden by darkness c : not clearly seen or easily distinguished : FAINT 2 : not readily understood or clearly expressed; also : MYSTERIOUS While definition 1 amuses me the most, definition 2 is what I'm talking about. It's not that the meaning isn't documented; it's that it's not clear from the reading, and memorizing the meanings of a couple of dozen two-character variables, particularly for use with a language which touts having no artificial limits, seems backward and archaic. Here are two ways to do (more or less) the same thing, one in C and one in Perl: setlinebuf( file ); $| = 1; Which is clearer to the inexperienced reader (but experienced programmer)? Which is easier to remember, for the average person? There is nothing to $| to attach any meaning to it... Programming Perl seems to almost, but not quite recognize how painful these things are to learn, by offering mnemonic devicess for each of them. But Perl hackers seem to favor this kind of variable, using them often when there's no need to. > Everything in the perl language is tediously and breathtakingly > documented and quickly accessible to any system on which perl has > been installed using either the 'man' or 'perldoc' commands. Again, it's not about documentation. It's about design. > >Whereas in many ways, Perl seems to have gone > >out of its way to work like other common Unix tools/languages (shell > >scripting, C, sed/grep), in others it seems to go out of its way to do > >things in such a way as to be as confusing as possible. > > Example? Structures come to mind, though they're not as bad as some things I've come across (can't recall what though). I thought I already gave that, but I guess I didn't. > >2. The people who like to program Perl seem to have a propensity to > >prefer to write code which takes advantage of all the obscure > >features, and generally to write code which is unreadable. > > Well, I guess it depends upon how well you know the language. I can > say the same for just about any language I've ever looked at. > For example, the C code in libc is about as obscure undecipherable as > it gets :) Well, there are certainly people who like to write obscure C as well. It just seems to be part of the Perl culture... I've seen far less readable Perl than C. In fact, I'd say the most readable Perl I've seen was in Learning Perl, and some of that I thought looked kinda gross too. It is as if unreadability was designed into the language. - -- Derek Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED] - --------------------------------------------- I prefer mail encrypted with PGP/GPG! GnuPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D Retrieve my public key at http://pgp.mit.edu Learn more about it at http://www.gnupg.org -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE9YlYbdjdlQoHP510RAujqAKCzFvzLIlnNViBmR3bnAuyUO2yAogCgjZv4 TH7aJx4+lIQCj74Bmp88ycU= =twNK -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
