On Thu, 31 Aug 2000, David L. Nicol wrote:
> Perl looks, and AFAIK has always looked, like "C plus lune noise" to
> many people.
I think Perl looks like "C plus moon noise" to former C programmers. I
imagine some people see it and think "Csh plus Awk noise". Perl is a lot
more than C-with-scalars.
> strong typing
C's typing is not particularily strong. Witness the common abuse of
"(void *)". Witness enums that are all compatible with integers. If we
want strong typing (I don't) there are better places to look.
> run-time efficiency
C doesn't get run-time efficiency from its syntax, so we can't really
expect to get anything here. It gets it from its compilation
architecture. If you want to build a Perl frontend for GCC I think you
might find a way leverage C's efficiency but you won't get it just by
accepting C syntax.
-sam
