Re: Some Help for a Report About Perl

One distinguishing trait of Perl (I think this is unique in programming languages) is that Perl has context.
Upon my first encounter with Perl (coming from languages with "context-free" grammars) I thought this were a design flaw, but it is intentional - Perl is designed after natural languages - and some of the advantages are described by chromatic in his book.
The linked chapter also contains information on other points that make Perl stand out.

Comment on Re: Some Help for a Report About Perl

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Re^2: Some Help for a Report About Perl by eyepopslikeamosquito (Archbishop) on Nov 02, 2017 at 08:10 UTC
Agreed! As per the quotes below. :) Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics and semiotics that studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning -- Pragmatics (wikipedia) Neither is the soul of Perl, which rests in the realm of pragmatics -- Linguist Larry Wall (aka TimToady) in Re^2: What's wrong with Perl 6? Perl has further been described as an "OO language", where "OO" means, not "object-oriented", but "operator-oriented" -- as per the classic Periodic Table of the Operators. Note that Perl can easily support many more operators than most conventional programming languages because alphabetic operators in Perl (e.g. `lt`) are easily distinguished from variable names because variables must start with a sigil (e.g. `$` or `@` or `%`).	[reply] [d/l] [select]

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Re^2: Some Help for a Report About Perl
by eyepopslikeamosquito (Archbishop) on Nov 02, 2017 at 08:10 UTC

Agreed! As per the quotes below. :)

Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics and semiotics that studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning

-- Pragmatics (wikipedia)

Neither is the soul of Perl, which rests in the realm of pragmatics

-- Linguist Larry Wall (aka TimToady) in Re^2: What's wrong with Perl 6?

Perl has further been described as an "OO language", where "OO" means, not "object-oriented", but "operator-oriented" -- as per the classic Periodic Table of the Operators. Note that Perl can easily support many more operators than most conventional programming languages because alphabetic operators in Perl (e.g. lt) are easily distinguished from variable names because variables must start with a sigil (e.g. $ or @ or %).

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