Perl was the scripting language back then, and Brendan Eich admitted once that he was strongly influenced by Perl (that interview is hard to find now). This influence is more than obvious if you look at the Array methods.

The story goes (IIRC):

He was initially hired to write a Scheme like dialect. Many applications had embedded Lisp engines, like Emacs, AutoCad, Gimp,...

But Netscape made a deal with Sun, and he was told to design something that looks syntactically like Java.

As you mentioned , are strings one important difference, because they are immutable in JS, while in Perl they are a piece of memory at your free disposal.

The lack of pure hashes is (or was?) a big problem in JS.

There are some other issues, but for me is 90% of JS just a mini Perl with Java syntax.

Cheers Rolf
(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery

In reply to Re^2: A comparison of Perl vs. JavaScript -- a reference table. by LanX
in thread A comparison of Perl vs. JavaScript -- a reference table. by taint

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