Sorry about the tardy reply. I was actually thinking about how to put my thoughts on the matter into words in the intervening period. The intent I tried to convey seemed so obvious from my perspective that I had to reorient a bit to see what needed to be explained. My failing, not yours.

Basically, I'm not saying that languages having versatility and power (like Perl's) is necessarily rare. Rather, I'm saying that the sort of versatility and power you get with Perl (as opposed to types of versatility and power you don't get with Perl, like Ruby's excellent object model and the full range of Lisp macro capability) is generally rare in other languages. Language features like proper lexical closures (my favorite Perl toy these days) are not widely accessible in many other languages.

Besides, there are a few languages out there that I wouldn't really call particularly "versatile" or "powerful" except within very narrow ranges of use, such as PHP, Javascript, and QBASIC.

print substr("Just another Perl hacker", 0, -2);
 - apotheon
CopyWrite Chad Perrin

In reply to Re^2: Principle of Inclusion by apotheon
in thread Principle of Inclusion by apotheon

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