On Thu, 31 Mar 2005 15:09:46 -0600 "Jeremy Fowler" [email protected] wrote:
Perl? Might as well be writing code in Mandarin Chinese. The multitude of symbols and one character keywords sacrifices legibility for less typing. Perl is not for the faint of heart or the beginner. I for one hate having to keep a whole library of O'Reilly books by my side while I code. A good language should be intuitive and not require a ton of syntax memorization. Python is better, but not by much.
You do know that you can write easily readable Perl don't you? Just because those weird variables like $_, $', $*, $/, etc exist doesn't mean you have to use them. In fact they already have built in "english" equivalents.
I've always seen Perl's ability to do this much like Unix. It gives you enough rope to hang yourself with, it's your choice whether or not to use that rope. ;)
Anyone who uses the shortcuts does so knowing they are sacrificing readability and maintainability. This, as I've said one more occasions than most people probably want to hear, is the fault of the programmer not the language.
While you can write:
open(IN, $ARGV[0]);
while(<IN>) { chomp; $_ =~ s/A/B/oig; print; print "\n"; } close;
You can also write:
my $filename = $ARGV[0];
open(IN, $filename) or die "Cannot open input file '$filename': $!\n";
while( my $line = <IN> ) { chomp($line); $line =~ s/A/B/oig; # Replace all As with Bs
print "$line\n"; }
close(IN);
--------------------------------- Frank Wiles [email protected] http://www.wiles.org ---------------------------------