*laugh* Enjoy the rush of learning my friend, and when you do as I did - look
up at the letter to a peer that you have "re-edited" to more clearly
emphasize your thoughts and realize you have just written a Perl class module instead -
you will know that the "bug" has you in it's grip. At that
point, give up all hope of enjoying any other language - because their
expressive capabilities are dwarfed by the endless nuances Perl so easily allows.
The ease of rapid deployment, prototyping and support that Perl (with CPAN)
offers can not be matched by any other that I have seen (after 25 years of
programming) and most importantly - there are people all around that speak it
and <word usage=carefully>fanatically</word> support others learning
it. - people like the fine Monks of the Abbey.
side note - when my "letter incident" happened, I had quite
the blast then trying to explain why I thought it was so funny to my
co-workers - only to be stared at with incomprehension. At that point I
realized, Perl is a different sort of language, and that all my C/C++
(and now C#) knowledge would only initiate the learning process for me, but was
really not all that helpful at all. Perl requires you to set aside a few
preconceived notions about programming I think.
*G*