It is probably fallacious to say, "I learned Perl" (or any other programming language). Nobody can learn any nearly infinately complex thing in its entirety in a finite amount of time with finite intellectual resources. (No insult intended: Only Stephen Hawking lacks the finite qualifier to intellectual resources. *smirk*) But you can learn enough to accomplish what you want to, in style, while having fun at the same time.

And it is always correct to refer to Perl, the language, as Perl. The executable itself is called perl (or perl.exe on a Microsoft infected system). And PERL refers to nothing I know of, though the higher gods have been known to say that Perl (whos letters are P.E.R. and L.) stands for Practical Extraction and Report Language, as well as, Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister.

So you'll avoid getting the gods, saints, and understudies in a tizzy by avoiding referring to Perl, the language, or perl, the program, as PERL.

Regarding your second question:

Programmers must always worry about finite resources, and professors should worry about absolute statements with infinate ramifications (no pun to RAM intended).

Increased memory usage leads to increased memory swapping, a decrease in finite resources available to other simultaneously running programs, and in fact, a flat out exhaustion of avaliable memory. In small programs, perhaps memory usage is less of a concern. But it is the aggregate of many small blocks of code that come together to create true bloatware such as Microsoft Internet Explorer and Visual Basic libraries themselves.

Memory usage also can relate to speed in that moving a meg or two around takes more time than a byte or two. Memory usage relates to speed in that slurping in a 2gb file to read a 100 byte section two kilobytes into the file is a much more time consuming process than just reading in what you need.

And memory usage has many other ramifications as well. It cannot be assumed that different levels of memory usage will not have different effects on speed, as well as other measures of efficiency and performance.

That said, sometimes a more memory intensive method happens to be an easier method. Slurping in a whole 50k file to look for and edit the 10th line might happen to be the programming-quickest way to accomplish a particular task. But any selected method of solving a problem should weigh all of the side effects.

Dave

"If I had my life to do over again, I'd be a plumber." -- Albert Einstein