You know, I think I'm to blame for this. The Llama book never mentions the length operator at all, and that was by design. Almost any time I've seen people need the length of the string, they were about to cycle through the string character-by-character (as you might need to do in other languages), and therefore miss the more natural and powerful regular expression operations. Since I teach regex very early on, there's usually no need for length.

The hardest part about a tutorial book is coming up with a teachable, self-consistent, useful subset of the language. Many decisions to be made.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

In reply to Re: How NOT to do it by merlyn
in thread How NOT to do it by jlawrenc

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