On Tue, Mar 19, 2002 at 11:57:19PM -0800, Jeremy Zawodny wrote:
> So what is it, really, about Perl that makes it "so different" from
> other languages.
>
> Much Perl code that I've read looks less like Java, C++, Python, or
> VB. It tends closer to C, Shell, awk, sed, etc.
>
> Is it the regular expressions? The MTOWTDI? The use of "->" instead
> of "."? All the funny characters?
Regular expressions never worried me, having grown used to them in vi.
"->" wasn't a problem either, and I preferred its visual distinctiveness
to the almost invisible "." used for OO programming elsewhere. Nor were
all the funny characters or the use of $array[1] instead of @array[1] a
problem. In fact I liked most of the things which are traditionally
considered bad about Perl.
The parts of Perl which did bother me at first were:
$_. I felt much happier with named variables, and didn't really trust
that a language which set $_ when I expected it to do so wasn't also
going to fiddle with it behind my back.
Formats. Having grown up on languages which have few restrictions on
code layout I didn't like the idea of painting a picture of the desired
output. I used printf instead.
Modules not distributed with the core system. It didn't seem quite
right using an extension; it felt too much like the sort of thing I used
to do in my Z80 and MP/M programming days when I'd peek around in the
running OS to get the information I wanted if there wasn't a standard
function to fetch it.
Conditions at the end of statements. Before Perl the only trailing
condition with which I was familiar was C's do{}while construct and
it took some time to shake off the belief that the condition would be
executed last.
Things I loved about Perl right from the start:
Regular expressions, -w, hashes, lists, dynamically sized strings and
arrays, -w, sort, and the fact that for simple tasks I could have a
working Perl solution in less time than it took me to type
#include <stdio.h>
int main(argc, argv)
int argc;
char* argv;
{
--
Matthew Winn ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
