Hi, Dermot <paik...@gmail.com> writes:
> I, personally, don't think perl is any trickier than any other language. > Larry, > who studied linguistics, borrowed a lot of syntax from C and the unix shell to > keep things familiar. For regexes there was no blueprint and the grammar is a > little terse. I like to think that is out of necessity rather than design. If > you're > new to programming/scripting, it will not take you long to figure out ! mean > negation. For some reason, regex have a bad reputation among a class of programmers. I am not suree if it is because they never took the time to understand them or what, but is seems to be like a cult against regex. In my line of work, I find regex highly valuable and would loose a lot of time if I could not use them. Another thing that may be considered tricky is that Perl has many ways to do one thing. So if you are facing an unusual syntax for something you do commonly, it can throw you out: for example I sometime use "unless" instead of "if not" because I find it suiting better for what I am trying to write, but people will argue that "unless" is useless. But "unless" is closest to my natural language thinking (puts programmin language closer to English language). > What surprises me about this thread, and others on this list, is that there is > little or no reference to the excellent documentation that Perl has. 30-ish years ago, I printed the Perl Refereence Guide (basically the perldoc), I got it paperback bound and that had been my main documentation since. It was for Perl Version 5.000 Best regards, Olivier -- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: beginners-unsubscr...@perl.org For additional commands, e-mail: beginners-h...@perl.org http://learn.perl.org/
