Exactly. And the french language is hampered as well, with their subject before verb method of specifiying things ;-).

Seriously, the use of the sigils in perl may be something that is controversial to newcomers (like the spaces-are-syntax feature of python) and there may be reasons that that approach is not the best, but you are looking at it with PHP eyes. And finding fault in places that are just unfamiliar to you

I get the same feeling when I look at (((((lisp))))) and if I had to program in lisp today, it would probably be a perl program in lisps clothing. And the same phenomenon happens when c or pascal programmers had to adopt c++ years ago and really only programmed c or pascal in the new language.

Using references exclusively because they are needed for a hash of hashes is like saying "I eat rice exclusively because without it you can't make nigiri sushi". Sounds like flame bait to me. Or do you really use only one data structure for all problems ?

Naturally 1987 perl was hampered. It was one of the first of the fifth generation languages and had to invent many of the things the newer languages could later do from the start. If it hadn't evolved it would be history by now. For example object oriented features were build in so that perl could do stuff that most oo-languages do by default. The interesting thing is how seamlessly that was achieved in perl without breaking old stuff.

In reply to Re^3: Only using scalers and references by jethro
in thread Only using scalers and references by stevesnz

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