Edward Elliott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > John Bokma wrote: > >> Edward Elliott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >>>>> like "from X import *" which are generally frowned on in python >>>>> while 'use MOD qw(id)' is encouraged in perl. >>>> >>>> Not by me, and I doubt it is in general. >>> >>> Well it's all over the Perl Cookbook. >> >> Yeah, sure, all over. > > 125 occurences in 78 recipes. Sure looks like all over to me.
>> Maybe check the book again. It is used in some >> examples, sure. And it even explains how it works. > > Yep, 125 times. In 78 recipes. Out of 105 total recipes with 'use'. > I'd say a 3:1 ratio is pretty strong encouragement. > >> Don't forget that most >> of the book was written around 1998. Yes, 8 years ago. > > Doesn't matter. Yes it matters. 8 years is a lot of time in IT. In 1998 Perl5.005 was announced (22 July). [1] Which should tell you a lot if you indeed have 3 years of Perl skills. > It's still the standard example reference. People > use it heavily. They don't magically know what parts are now > deprecated. If they are serious with their study they know that a 8 year old book is hardly up to date. I tend to take most IT related books I use that are older then 3-4 years with quite a grain of salt. I am not going to take an 8 year old Java CookBook very seriously for example. >> You can even find examples on my site that use imported functions >> (which I will fix, because I frown upon it :-) ). But I doubt you can >> find a majority in the perl community that *encourages* the use of >> imported functionality. > > I can readily believe that the "community" frequenting the newsgroups, > mailing lists, and blogs don't encourage it anymore. But that's a > tiny fraction of all perl programmers, and most of them have no > exposure to this little clique. Pfft, you are just guessing around now. > For many people, whatever the > cookbook says goes. If it's wrong, update it. Well, contact the authors or O'Reilly. Seriously, are you using 8 year old Python recipes without thinking? [1] http://history.perl.org/PerlTimeline.html -- John MexIT: http://johnbokma.com/mexit/ personal page: http://johnbokma.com/ Experienced programmer available: http://castleamber.com/ Happy Customers: http://castleamber.com/testimonials.html -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
