* Peter da Silva <[email protected]> [2006-12-16 14:35]: > >When we were first taught programming (in Pascal), some > >students complained the language was using English. The > >professor responded that "computer languages don't use > >English. They use arbitrary keywords that just happen to > >resemble English words". > > Yes, but Perl's *different*, right? It's not one of these > heartless mathematical programming languages, it was designed > by a *linguist*.
That doesn't mean it's supposed to be English, only that it's supposed to take linguistic principles into account. > Am I bitter? Me? Maybe. Permanently scarred by Perl 4, anyway. That explains a lot. Much as I like Perl 5, that's in no small part because I stay away from the Perl 4 era parts of the language. Perl 4 is... not very nice, to be charitable. (Although I suppose it's much like what you said about POSIX sh: the alternatives of that era were even more hateful.) Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
