Vince Hoang wrote:
On Tue, Nov 29, 2005 at 08:10:59AM -1000, Jim Thompson wrote:
Tim Newsham wrote:
Yet you make good use of pronouns in your english
compositions. Is it the poor choice of name ($_), the subtle
(or non-uniform?) rules about what they reference, or just
lack of familiarity?
Its mostly the last (familiarity), but the non-uniform rules
are part of it. Perl's syntax gets in my way, and I openly
admit same. It looks like a sendmail.cf file to me.
Perl's over-dependence on punctuation is admitedly tiring. But,
would perl suck less if 'use English' and 'use strict' were
enabled by default?
I have no clue. Likely "use strict" is an improvement, if only for
orthogonality.
To be fair, the objectionable perl code I see is due more to the
style rather than syntax. Take this snippet from logwatch, a
ubiquitous piece of perl code found on most Linux systems:
@ServiceList = @TempServiceList;
for (my $i = 0; $i <= $#ServiceList; $i++) {
$ServiceList[$i] = lc($ServiceList[$i]);
}
You could more clearly rewrite it as:
for my $s (@TempServiceList) {
push @ServiceList, lc($s);
}
.. or more concisely with:
@ServiceList = map(lc, @TempServiceList);
.. or in python:
service_list = [ s.lower() for s in temp_server_list ]
.. or in ruby:
service_list = temp_server_list.map { |s| s.downcase }
or lisp
(setq service_list (mapcar #'string-downcase TempServiceList))
