meditation? Most used perl keywords

perl-diddler has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I was trying to find the right google-fu to find out if there's been any studies or compilations of which keywords (as being the things in perlfunc, primarily), are used the most.

I mean I doubt that 'sin' is used as often as 'sort', that opendir is used as often as 'open'.

Some orderings, like those, are only "simple" to surmise because the usability of the terms varies so widely.

Things that are really operators, likely, should be tallied separately, though a composite list might be of some interest -- but use of parens or '+' is probably farm more common than '**' or '&', and certainly, including ';' would hardly useful.

Anyone know of such a study (or google-term to pick it up! ;-)).

I suppose one could start with a loose ordering, like sort >= sin, sin>=atan2(?), grep>=reverse... then generate some partially ordered list using that, but that could easily become more subjective.

Anyway, ideas?... Should I have put this under meditations? ;)

Comment on meditation? Most used perl keywords

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Re: meditation? Most used perl keywords by LanX (Saint) on Apr 27, 2014 at 05:47 UTC
I doubt there is much use of these infos ... > Anyway, ideas? mirror a minicpan and grep-count the sources on your harddisk. FWIW, my bet is `my` will win. Cheers Rolf ( addicted to the Perl Programming Language)	[reply] [d/l]
Re: meditation? Most used perl keywords by AnomalousMonk (Archbishop) on Apr 27, 2014 at 06:24 UTC
As Woody Allen's mother might have said, "What is it your business?" I'm curious to know if anything motivates your curiosity other than pure curiosity. (Not that there's anything wrong with curiosity...)	[reply]
Re^2: meditation? Most used perl keywords by perl-diddler (Chaplain) on Apr 28, 2014 at 18:03 UTC
Well, not sure, but I wouldn't count 'my' as a library function built-in but as more of a declaration. Things like sort/printf/grep/map...splice/vector/join. 's' and 't' are specifically included under operators, so they wouldn't count. I might count "-f" and it's kin w/stat.... It's hard to think of a program without some output like print. I dunno if the formatting cousins s/printf would be as popular or if that is just my fetish. Given the long history of doing statistical analysis on language, and especially w/perl's architect having a linguistics background I find it a bit surprising no one has ever analyzed perl. I could do it on CPAN, but we all know that is not representative code -- being designed as library addons it would lack things that a "main" prog would have like selecting program options (use warnings/unicode... etc), and doing some sort of I/O to interact with a user. I didn't really want to make a project out of it...but if I want it done... it may be a while...	[reply]
Re^3: meditation? Most used perl keywords by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Apr 28, 2014 at 18:48 UTC
…I find it a bit surprising no one has ever analyzed perl. What would you do with the knowledge if you had a perfectly detailed index/concordance before you? I have a difficult time imagining any use for it and therefore would only be surprised if someone had sunk their time into developing it. I’d like to be surprised though. I could do it on CPAN, but we all know that is not representative code… I have only once in 15 years written any Perl professionally that is publicly available—happens to be on the CPAN—and this is standard. So there is no valid corpus of representative code for anyone to examine as huge tracts of the data you find relevant are private.	[reply]