in reply to Re^3: Some Insights from a Traveler Between Languages
in thread Some Insights from a Traveler Between Languages

My experience is similar. There are some things I have misunderstood in Perl and confused myself, but they are not the typical things, because my language background is atypical. I too started in BASIC, then later Inform (hence most of my ideas about OO) and subsequently elisp. (Ironically, I did not get my ideas about FP from elisp; I never understood FP in elisp but have picked it up (err, some of it) since I learned Perl.)

This is an important point in this thread, because it illustrates that what constitutes a "trap" utterly depends on what language you think in, what semantics you are used to. The first time I saw someone posting on here about the print($a+$b)*$c; trap, I thought he was out of his mind. I had no idea why he was multiplying the result of the print by a scalar in void context, or what it was he intended to accomplish by doing so, because I don't think in C. (I figured it out eventually, partly by looking at some of the answers to his question, but it was quite a surreal moment when I first looked at his code.) Is that a trap? It sure as death and taxes wasn't a trap for me. It's only a trap if you are accustomed to thinking in a certain fashion, which is not universal and happens not to be the least bit Perlish. It's a common trap *mostly* because so many people come to Perl from a C or C-like language background; otherwise, it would not be a trap at all.

I don't think it's possible to eliminate all the traps for people coming from other languages, because each other language will have its own set of traps. When you move from one language to another, you should expect to get caught by a few of these misunderstandings until you learn to think in the new language. As long as you're still thinking in another language and translating, you're going to get confused sometimes. That's unavoidable.

"In adjectives, with the addition of inflectional endings, a changeable long vowel (Qamets or Tsere) in an open, propretonic syllable will reduce to Vocal Shewa. This type of change occurs when the open, pretonic syllable of the masculine singular adjective becomes propretonic with the addition of inflectional endings."  — Pratico & Van Pelt, BBHG, p68

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Re^2: Some Insights from a Traveler Between Languages
by skyknight (Hermit) on Apr 26, 2005 at 13:45 UTC
    I don't quite agree with that sentiment. That "trappiness" of any given language feature is indeed a function of your linguistic background, but that's not the only thing at play. You can also have pitfalls that are entirely internal to a language simply because two syntactically similar operations have subtle but important semantic differences. I think the whole () / [] distinction serves as a decent example of this. In Python, such a flub is not possible, whereas in Perl it most certainly is.
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      You honestly believe that having different meanings for parens versus brackets is inherently a "trap"? You must be using some kind of really bizarroid font, if they're not easily visually distinguishable. Where I sit, ( and [ look as different as i and |. I really think the problem you ran into has a lot more to do with expectations you brought back from Python. Comma and semicolon, or comma and period, have different meanings as well. Is *that* a problem? (No, I don't mean the scalar comma operator; that's a problem for a different reason, because people expect the other comma operator's semantics, not because anyone confuses it with the period.)

      You admitted in your original post that you had been using a language that assigns one semantic to the brackets, then switched back to Perl, which assigns them a rather different semantic, and got caught expecting the semantic you would have had in Python. I posit that this is exactly the sort of scenerio where Perl's use of brackets will trip anyone up: when you expect them to have a different semantic, one that was assigned to them in another language you've been using. Do you know anyone who was tripped up by this in any *other* circumstance?

      As far as "subtle but important" semantic differences, I can only say that calling the difference between an array and a reference to an array "subtle" is like calling the difference between a bibliographic entry and the corresponding book subtle. The concept of references is absolutely crucial, one of the very basic fundamentals of computer programming, right up there with flow control IMO; if it seems subtle to you, you're going to have much larger problems than confusing parens and brackets.

      "In adjectives, with the addition of inflectional endings, a changeable long vowel (Qamets or Tsere) in an open, propretonic syllable will reduce to Vocal Shewa. This type of change occurs when the open, pretonic syllable of the masculine singular adjective becomes propretonic with the addition of inflectional endings."  — Pratico & Van Pelt, BBHG, p68
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