Nice paper.

I studied turing for a while and about the only thing that I liked was the error messages (an area that perl seems to be weak in) and the fact that loop iterators could _not_ exist outside of the loop. The latter at first glance was a pain in the butt, but after very little usage became very convenient and intuitive (that variable is transitory...)

I hated the collections tho'. They may have been able to catch errors that are common amongst beginners but to do lots of things that would be natural in Pascal or C was a total nightmare (I was one of a few students in the class that had any real prior experience with C and Pascal, which may have been part of the problem). You ended up writing things in a totally cryptic way just to work around the restrictions (an experience that I repeated years later with VB and its lack of anything usefully close to a reference or pointer, you ended up using variant arrays to simulate pointer structures). I suppose Perl being the opposite (having very few restrictions, and the ones that are there you dont tend to notice) that makes me such a fan(atic).

Im curious though, it seem to that your first rule, that of avoiding syntactic homonyms and synonyms would be diametrically opposed to perls philosophy of TMTOWTDI. Is this a correct reading of your point? How does perl stand up as a teaching language and how do you feel that perl meets your seven rules?

Thanks for a very interesting paper,

Yves / DeMerphq
---
Writing a good benchmark isnt as easy as it might look.

In reply to Re: Re: (ichi) Re x 4: Apocalypse 5 and regexes by demerphq
in thread Apocalypse 5 and regexes by c-era

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