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On 12/12/06, Daniel Pittman <daniel@xxxxxxxx.xxx> wrote:
> Robert Rothenberg <robrwo@xxxxx.xxx> writes:
> > On 11/12/06 23:12 Peter da Silva wrote:
> >>>> One reason I'm down on Perl is that an awful lot of stuff that
> >>>> I find hateful in the shell is stuff that Larry Wall faithfully
> >>>> replicated in Perl....
> >>
> >>> Such as?
> >>
> >> The things I mentioned several messages back, most expecially the ad-hoc
> >> syntax and complex macro-style variable substitution.
> >
> > What's complex about it? I *wish* Perl had complex macro-style variable
> > substitution.
>
> This is simple:
>
> format "~A ~A ~A" a-string an-array a-hash
>
> This is complex:
>
> print "$astring, @anarray, %ahash"
>
> Well, in fairness, this is actually the relative complexity:
>
> print "$astring, an array of length ", (scalar @anarray),
> "a hash with ", (scalar keys %ahash), "elements."
>
> ...or, worse, this:
>
> eval format "~S" an-array
>
> compared to this:
>
> string = '(' . join(', ', @anarray), ')'
> eval string
This is all very confusing to me. The examples dont do the same thing at all.
> ...assuming that you have only simple scalars in @anarray; if you don't
> the second example fails miserably.
So then you wanted:
use Data::Dumper; $string=Dumper(\@array);
> Perl suffers from wanting to be any number of things, and by adding
> extra complexity and indirection to achieve it. It guesses what you
> want. It has stupid interpolation defaults, but you can't bypass them.
Ah, what?
$"="whatever array seperator i choose";
$,="whatever print argument seperator i choose";
> It has a crazy level of complexity, well beyond anything useful, in the
> way you can describe variables and pass them to, say, a formatted output
> generator.
Still confused here. How is the behaviour complex again?
About the only hateful thing in this I can think of is that $" applies
inside of qr// type constructs. It would be so nice if there was some
other var for that scenario and that it would default to '|'
Yves
--
perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/"
There's stuff above here
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