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in reply to Re: Perl 5.10: switch statement demo
in thread Perl 5.10: switch statement demo

You can use when in a for loop: 
for (@items) {
    when (/^[A-Z]/) {
        say "Found a proper noun?  $_";
    }

    when (/[,.]/) {
        say "This word has punctuation:  $_";
    }

    say "This word seems uninteresting:  $_";
}

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Re^3: Perl 5.10: switch statement demo
by LighthouseJ (Sexton) on Dec 20, 2007 at 18:43 UTC
    I guess that's kind of my point. The really useful and powerful things in todays computing industry like Perl, UNIX, even RISC processors all merely provide you with a basic set of tools and rely on you (the user) to put the simple tools together to make a useful mechanism.

    Stuff like adding a named "switch" statement or needing a "when" keyword just complicates it unnecessarily IMO.

    I had a discussion about this with an Oracle DBA. Needless to say we maintained our differences of opinion.

    "The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why." -- `man perl`
[reply]
      Well, I wasn't really trying to make a polemical point. You just gave me a convenient excuse to draw attention to a feature of the switch implementation that I thought people might be interested in hearing about. :-)

      Needless to say, though, I don't agree with you. If I did, then I wouldn't have implemented the switch feature, presumably! It sounds odd to me to hear Perl described as a "simple tool". What I like about it is precisely the opposite: the fact that it's rich and interesting, and usually has More Than One Way To Do It.

      Java is a simple language, but it's difficult to write a useful Java program that is simple. Perl is not a simple language, but it is a language in which it's possible to write simple programs.

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