> Built-in support for lists: I think the swap idiom demonstrates that: ( $b, $a ) = ( $a, $b );, though Lisp seems to take this support to an impressive level.

I think here you are falling into a definition trap!

You are showing a Perl list assignment...

But IMHO in LISP-context list mostly means linked list, Perl doesn't support this datatype cause most features can be efficiently mimicked with it's arrays (push, pop, ...).

You may remember that MJD simulated linked lists in his book with chained arrays of two element [$value,$a_ref] where $a_ref always pointing to the next chain link.

One advantage of linked lists over arrays come when splitting them for concurrent processing.

Cheers Rolf

( addicted to the Perl Programming Language)

In reply to Re^2: Perl's functional features compared with Ruby by LanX
in thread Perl's functional features compared with Ruby by gunzip

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