This serves to remind me that when comparing Perl with other languages you can never ignore the psychology.
A lot of people I know would consider the DCL equivalents of hashes and arrays to be a bit advanced or even obscure, but in Perl these are beginners' topics. Similarly, I've worked in places where a person would be considered a DCL expert if they knew all the ins and outs of the symbol and logical name expansion mechanisms - string interpolation in Perl isn't normally considered an issue, at least until regular expressions come up. I think if I were to summarise the psychological differences between Perl and DCL (or Perl and most other languages) I'd say Perl was "helpful" and DCL was "unhelpful". We've seen two ways of implementing a hash in DCL, so while it seems that in DCL "There's More Than One Way To Do It", both ways of doing it are unhelpful! Sandy Fleming http://scotstext.org/ > -----Original Message----- > From: Tom Edelson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > Sent: 04 September 2002 16:44 > To: Thomas R Wyant_III; [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: RE: Perl vs. DCL (was RE: Set Default not Working) > > > You can create as many logical name tables as you want, and you > can specify that a new one will have, as its parent table, > another of the ones you created. So you can build a tree > structure of name tables. I think this could be used to > implement a hash of hashes, even one with multiple levels. > > However! I never meant to suggest that anyone (except a > masochist) would choose to do this in DCL, if they had the choice > of doing it in Perl. It's a curiousity, like a dog walking on > its hind legs. I was feeling pleased with myself for having > noticed that it should be possible. But its only practical > importance would be to someone for whom Perl wasn't an option. > > / Tom Edelson >
