> On 29 Apr 2016, at 16:05 , Swift Griggs <swiftgri...@gmail.com> wrote: > > While I know exactly what folks mean, I will attempt a weak defense. Perl > has extremely strong string manipulation features, including strong (and > easy) support for PCRE's. Those regex's are the main reason folks recoil > (because of how often they appear inline in Perl code). Also, if you ask > me, most folks beginning to code in a scripting language will produce some > nasty code. Since Perl attracted a large number of beginners, you'd often > run into line noise style code. However, just to play the devils advocate, > Perl can often pack a tremendous amount of logic and functionality in > those regex strings. It's often stuff that'd take dozens of lines of C for > me to reproduce.
The regular expression support in Perl is implemented in C, and are supposedly fairly fast. That didn't stop a Lisp programmer from implementing PCREs in Lisp (that supposedly slow and inefficient language), and getting better performance than Perl :-)
