in my career of a perlprogrammer for four years now I've very seldom written cgi-Scripts or the like (Just sometimes when I needed a userinterface or something to visualize data. count < 20). I mostly use perl for data-munging, interfaces between datasources or systems and such stuff.

I am a proud member of the german webforum www.perl.de, and there is about the same... I often have to remind the people that perl is more than just cgi. I've seen answers to questions like "How can I read parameters into variables" as the following:

use CGI qw(:standard); 
my $var = param("name");
[download]

Best regards,
perl -le "s==*F=e=>y~\*martinF~stronat~=>s~[^\w]~~g=>chop,print"

I used to exclusively use Perl for CGI, but I've found that PHP is much more useful for that application.

I cannot believe that any experienced Perl programmer can be able to like PHP in any way. Have you not experienced the usefulness of strict? Do not you like having modules? Do you like all the parameters being global variables?

Anyhow, if "code-in-html" is why you choose for PHP, please have a look at PLP, which is perl-in-html.

- Yes, I reinvent wheels.
- Spam: Visit eurotraQ.

For some reason set register_globals and register_argc_argv to off in php.ini and use error_reporting(E_ALL) or die!* doesn't have the same ring to it as use strict;.

For me PHP is only really bareable if I do everything in a very strict OO style. The language got off to a really bad start when it comes to language design and is still trying to catch up. They just don't have the big guns behind them like Perl. I think of it as Perl's idiot younger brother. I love it, but still... so much country is covered in CPAN. Over in PHP land it's a wide open prarie, full of bad uns and varmits waiting to be taimed by a few brave souls.

()-()
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* p.s. Actually do this and most PHP libraries, such as PEAR or Sourceforge, will start choking up blood. A lot of bad habits have built up over the years.

Lets not get into a religious debate here... but know that I programmed webscripts in Perl for 2 years before I found PHP, and became quite adept at the language for what I used it for. (no master, by any means... but I learned it to the point that I stopped having to look at language references more than once a week or so)

Many perl hackers haven't seen enough "mature" PHP code to form a valid opinion about it. They see the quick hacks that some of PHP's features allow... but I don't use any of those now. My PHP skill is now far superior to my Perl skill, and the PHP code that I write is cleaner, tighter, and safer than my Perl code. Also, I grew up on C. PHP almost exactly copies C syntax, which keeps me happy.

Stuff like automatically setting GET, POST, and cookie variables as global is a really bad idea, and a huge security hole. Do you let your users arbitrarily set variables in your scripts? I didn't think so. Neither do I. My PHP code wouldn't generate even a single warning if there was a strict option in PHP.

Hmm.. this argument seems to be lacking a through knowledge of PHP. Though not modules, using PHP includes with self contained classes emulates this functionality quite easily. and I'm assuming your strict argument and global are the same. Kinda moot there but variables are not all "global" in PHP. Quite frankly PHP is much easier for many cgi functions than perl, that being said Perl is more powerful and obviuosly has the advantage of being much more mature a language. I just find your arguments weak.