RE: Mysterious the ways: == and eq

Thus was spake...

For a typeless language...

Perl is anything but a typeless language.

You can't store a hash into an array variable.
You can't store an array into a scalar.
You can't dereference a hashref as if it was a coderef.
... and so on.

I don't know where this "typeless" stuff comes from. Perl is very strongly typed. Just because "scalar" is a type that includes things that other languages call "strings", "characters", "numbers", and "references", doesn't mean that "scalar" isn't distinct type!

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

Comment on RE: Mysterious the ways: == and eq

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RE: RE: Mysterious the ways: == and eq by mdillon (Priest) on May 26, 2000 at 08:58 UTC
sorry to be a pedant, but i figure it's only fair since you tend to be one with respect to Perl (and many including me are grateful for it). the word 'spake' is not a past participle, it is only a preterite verb form. it only appears as the head verb in a clause, like so: "Thus spake Fr. Harry G. Monk: Perl is typeless".	[reply]
RE: RE: Mysterious the ways: == and eq by eduardo (Curate) on May 26, 2000 at 04:41 UTC
while i agree with you, that perl is a very typed language... the person is complaining not about the inability to compare things of different types... what died here is the comparison of a scalar against a scalar, the system died not because we were comparing different types! The system died because we were comparing the same type, with a different value... that, you have to admit, on some level... seems "bad"	[reply]
RE: RE: RE: Mysterious the ways: == and eq by eduardo (Curate) on May 26, 2000 at 04:45 UTC
ok, that's the word i was looking for... orthagonality... language fails the "test" of a good language (according to my programming language theory book) at this point ( the eq == discrepancy) perl is NOT orthagonal...	[reply]