On Friday, August 16, 2002, at 08:01 , George Schlossnagle wrote:
> drieux wrote:
>> I have my nagging doubts about
>>
>> use English;
>>
>> when coding in perl...
>
> What are your nagging doubts in particular?
[..]
p0: besides the fact that it just is a fun gag to pull....
step back, read it again, have a small chuckle
say with the rest of the folks
'drieux, get therapy....';
p1: a part of the issue:
I think it's akin to my on going debate with myself
about such things as
use Config;
....
my $os_name = $Config{osname};
vice
my $os_name = $^O;
and where is one 'more readable' as opposed to
'being idiomatic' - a topic I am still mulling.
The former obliges me to go through the whole WhoHa
of doing a 'use foo' - which is rather long, tedious
and annoying, when you step your way through it in
the perl debugger.... whereas the later does not
go through the Gagillion steps merely to get the
one thing one is looking for....
p2: To code in line, or go_sub(@beat_state);
This of course is part and parcel of the whole
'code re-usability'
dialog point - with whether or not one should be
coding with an eye on the 'common bits' that really
should be going into a perl module at some point...
hence where is one safely in the
this is just a script
and when has one fallen off the wagon into the reality
this is a software development process
and hence it should be dealt with like all other RealCode[tm]
using the full on breadth of the idioms of the coding language...
p3: the "whole line-noise style trend" angst
Given that I come from a sed/awk background to begin with,
perchance I am less affected as to what is and what is not
'line noise'
concern about 'special characters' and/or 'special token sequences'.
but I can, and do, appreciate your concern.
things get 'way funky' way too fast in the regular expression
portion of any language - and perl is no exception. The peculiar
part is that perl was developed to resolve the 'complexity' of
developing and maintaining
/bin/sh + awk + sed + grep + ....
and as such it picked up their weirdness on top of everything else.
p4: internalizing a language's idioms
So at one level there is an advantage of 'speaking the native idiom'.
That's how I got my head around the 'original ones' - as well as
wandering off the cliff with gawk before those features were
available 'everywhere' in nawk....
There is the added advantage in perl that we can all do the
perldoc perlvar
to check and see if a thing means what we mean it to mean.
given that I have learned down this path that
I can not do
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my %man_opt = (
darwin => "man -c ",
solaris => "man - ",
freebsd => "man -P cat ",
linux => "man -P cat ",
);
my $man_cmd = $man_opt{ "$^0" };
print $man_cmd . "\n";
but need to 'interpolate it' first with say:
my $osname = "$^O"; # shorter than going the old way through use config
my $man_cmd = $man_opt{ $osname };
I consider the misadventure at least worth the waltz...
ciao
drieux
---
p0.1 - given as I have code samples up on my webPages
where the variable names are in english, and the
content is in spanish and german - languages I have
not used since '74 and '76 respectively - I have some
'issues' with the 'cultural imperialism' of the
use english
that we have just visited the 'unicode' discussion because
the typography of other languages are not a part of ascii
there are some 'globalization' angsts we as a community
need to be better engaged in...
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