Re: How to Teach Perl to Scholars in the Humanities

Well, if the goal is to teach searching with perl, giving them a tool for searching using regexp's might not hurt. Explain that e+ would mean 1 or more e's, e* would mean as many e's as possible, none is feasible.. etc..

Once that is understood, go onto the concept of variables (and file handles) as well as functions, so that they can open and close files (for reading). finally, something on globs.

But if they are scared, what are you trying to accomplish other than them learning? Are you trying to speed them up? The tool you give them, a language, or a page or program, isn't effective if it isn't well received.

Play that funky music white boy..

Comment on Re: How to Teach Perl to Scholars in the Humanities

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Re: Re: How to Teach Perl to Scholars in the Humanities by cyocum (Curate) on Jan 30, 2004 at 20:36 UTC
That's the issue. I want to break down some of those barriers and show them something useful besides. I used perl to do interesting searches of Annals of Ulster, which is a huge document and the search facilities on it leave much to be desired. I also want to show that computers can be useful tools along side the traditional tools of the Humanities.	[reply]