This is a mini-meditation I often felt the need to make, and I probably touched upon the subject several times. Actually, this is taken from a clpmisc post of mine (link @ GG) the relevat portion of which I'm reporting here.

Somebody, in an earlier post, wrote:

Versalitily isn't always a good thing. This might be stretching the realms of funky Perl code, but consider the following two programs that will add two numbers.

My reply is as follows:

Well, you're right. However there's a remark I always feel like making when speaking of Perl's TMTOWTDIness: it's true that there's more than one way to do it. But it's also true that for common situations there is often a preferred way to do it. Or a few preferred ways, with different advantages in different respects. So, if you have e.g. to iterate over a range of numbers "the" WTDI is

for ($MIN..$MAX) { # ...
[download]

and if you have to iterate over a handle, then "the" WTDI is

while (<$fh>) { # ...
[download]

Please take all this with a grain of salt, of course.

Perl 6 aims at being even more multiparadigmatic than 5, and to stay at the same time consistent. So thanks to lazy evaluation, you will e.g. both

.say for 1..6;  # and
.say for =$fh;
[download]

Further comments:

• Charlton Wilbur's - More concisely: TMTOWTDI, but some ways are better than others.
• Tad McClellan's - More humorously: There are 9 ways to do the same thing in Perl, and 8 of them are no good!

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