Wow, nostalgia day here in the Monastery. Ok...

I fell in love with perl 4 as a better scripting language than awk when I discovered it had a debugger - so the pink camel quickly supplanted the grey awk book on my desk... holy cow, ten years ago now.

Shortly after I had wedged a horrible two-dimensioned array into a perl 4 script using split and join, I discovered that what I considered a kluge was in fact the canonical FAQ answer to "how do I create a two-dimensioned array?" But the FAQ promised this would become much easier in the soon-to-be-released Perl 5, thanks to references.

No question about it, Perl 5's references were the biggest change. They opened the door to the complex data structures needed for real-world tasks. They formed the basis of Perl 5's objects, which in turn helped spur the meteoric growth of CPAN.

References. Couldn't live without 'em today.

Peace,
-McD