I think some of the success of Perl is due to its complex and quirky but expressive syntax. Sure, Lisp is logical and elegant, but all those parentheses can get painful after a while (at least to me). In a similar way, having "redundant" ways to access things in Perl, such as $, @, substr, etc. makes code easier to read to people who like Perl (obviously, Perl detractors who say that it's line noise won't agree ;-).

In reply to Re: Representing all data as Lists by itub
in thread Representing all data as Lists (Perl7?) by rje

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