It isn't so much that Perl's designers ignored good semantics, but that the language wasn't really designed at all.

I think that misses a much more interesting issue (and is potentially insulting as well). Perl is a very different type of language from C. The fact that it may not do the same types of optimizations as C compilers can do to the same degree that C compilers can do doesn't necessarily mean that Perl had no design stage nor that the Perl developers are lazy or ignorant.

By giving up the "compile once and for all and that's that" step, Perl has traded some potential optimizations for additional flexibility. I don't think that's an accident.

In reply to Re: Trinary Operator Semantics by chromatic
in thread Trinary Operator Semantics by hardburn

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