On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 21:39, Dave Tang<d.t...@imb.uq.edu.au> wrote: > Hi everybody, > > I constantly read about Perl's powerful regular expression matching and > string manipulation operators, and how it is superior to other programming > languages in this aspect. snip
* Regexes are first class citizens in Perl, in other languages you must use a library that feels out of place * Perl tends to innovate in regexes, adding features (the most popular non-Perl regex library is PCRE, PCRE stands for Perl Compatible Regular Expressions) * Perl is weakly typed, which reduces the amount of code you must write. In strongly typed languages you spend a lot of time casting variables into the desired type. * Many of the operators like the readline operator (<>) are setup to do what you want with a minimum level of effort, such as a bare readline operator creating the default UNIX filter style (read from stdin if no files are specified on the commandline, otherwise open each file passed on the commandline and read from each of them in turn). * The, much maligned, set of special variables also makes this easy (for instance, $ARGV is set to the file currently being read by the construct in the last point). -- Chas. Owens wonkden.net The most important skill a programmer can have is the ability to read. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: beginners-unsubscr...@perl.org For additional commands, e-mail: beginners-h...@perl.org http://learn.perl.org/
