On Fri, 27 Jan 2006, Gregory Hill wrote:
I can't speak for Jonathan, and I'm not a perl hater, but I would say
that perl is (or at least can be) messy because the syntax is too
rich. There are too many ways to express the same thing.
Wow, someone's hit the nail on the head finally. Some people like being
told how to think. Others like to express themselves. I, for one,
quite enjoy the looseness of Perl's syntax. To each his own.
I hear this argument a lot against Perl ("the syntax is too rich") but I
don't see how it leads to unreadable code. I mean, let's say you have a
large project and in one file, code typically uses lots of "[exp] if
[exp]" and "[exp] unless [exp]", and in another file it typically uses "if
([exp]) { }" and "if (![exp]) { }" instead.
Maybe you can argue against this from an aesthetics standpoint, but I
don't see how it makes the code any less readable.
Again, does anyone have any *actual* real-life examples of how Perl's
"more than one way to do it" philosophy leads to unreadable code??
~ Ross
p.s. I'm a Perl-hater too, by the way, lest anybody think I am the Perl
Defender from Hell. I just hate it for completely different reasons, as
I've never seen unreadable Perl code in large, real-world projects.
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