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Perl is worse! (was: Python is Wierd!)

Steve Lamb grey at despair.rpglink.com
Thu Jul 27 22:56:21 EDT 2000 
On Fri, 28 Jul 2000 11:17:31 +1000, Anthony Baxter <anthony at interlink.com.au>
wrote:
>Euw! No, the "oh, I know what you want that to be, I'll change it for you" is
>my #1 all-time perl hate. 

    Why?  Has it ever messed up?  It does exactly what you tell it to unlike
the babysitting languages that barf with "Oh, you don't know what you're doing
so I won't let you do it."  

    Before you answer know the difference between it messing up and /you/, as
the programmer, messing up.  

    It is just like me with my problem where a method wasn't being called and
I couldn't figure out why.  It is because I forgot the parens.  Whoops, my
mistake even though I say, for argument's sake, that Python in non-interactive
mode should catch it.  Now that I know what is going on I can recognize it and
move on.

>Particularly when combined with magic linenoise - use the wrong bit of
>linenoise, and suddenly your large complex datastructure is an int. Yaaay.

    The above example applies here.  Once you know what is going on it is all
fairly straight forward.  BTW, your large, complex datastructure isn't an int.
There is no int unless you use int(), just like in Python, or try to stuff it
into someplace that expects something that could be called an int, in which
case it is your fault as a programmer, not the languages, and has nothing to
do with the symbols.

    In fact, I can't really think of how that applies at all since most "line
noise" in perl is in regex (which Python uses PCRE so don't get me started
there) and scalar/array/hash which is amazingly simple to manipulate and keep
track of compared to int, long, float, str, repr (and the difference between
repr and str), tuple, list (and the difference there), directory.  You have
three characters to keep track of, $, @ and %.  If you have mastered types you
can master those three in a virtually typeless context.  Trust me on that.

-- 
         Steve C. Lamb         | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
         ICQ: 5107343          | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
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