Thomas Wittek skribis 2007-05-14 0:42 (+0200): > excessive use of special characters (/\W/).
This seems to be "I don't like regexes". Ignoring for now that Perl 6 regexes will be more verbose and thus easier to read for someone without much prior exposure to them, what would you suggest as an alternative to regex matching? One of the common alternatives is to iterate over a list of characters, possibly using an index. Would you say that a screen page full of such code is easier to read and maintain than a single regex on a single line? Many languages have regexes, even the cleanest among them. And they're all as messy as Perl's. They're often more verbose on the outside, which can result in something like foo.match(/foo/) instead of foo =~ /foo/, but the /foo/ part is most important here. If you don't recognise what that is, it doesn't matter if ".match" or "=~" was used. Many languages have regexes, but Perl was probably the first to apply them heavily in "normal" programming. And nowadays, they're so ubiquitous that it's hard to find a language without Perl-ish or "Perl compatible" regexes. Why do you think this is? I think it's kind of funny that indeed exactly the most cryptic part of Perl's syntax is copied to so just about every modern programming language, while at the same time Perl is constantly criticized for using "special characters" so much. No, special characters aren't a problem. They are the fundament of a very powerful and expressive syntax. Just don't try to understand a screen full of them all at once -- realise that in another language, the first three lines would sometimes already fill the same screen, and adjust your reading speed. On the other hand, the overall structure of a program is often more obvious, exactly because so much more fits in one screenful. In Perl it is often not needed to refactor something to many tiny subroutines with verbose identifiers, just for legibility. One thing stays true, though: Perl is very hard to read for someone who doesn't know Perl well enough. But that's practically true for almost language, be it Python or Japanese. -- korajn salutojn, juerd waalboer: perl hacker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://juerd.nl/sig> convolution: ict solutions and consultancy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
