Re: What's so unique about Perl?

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Re^2: What's so unique about Perl? by adrianh (Chancellor) on Jul 04, 2005 at 15:48 UTC
Regexes and Hashes as a native part of the syntax. Functional programming tools like grep and map. Closures. Closures. Closures. CPAN. CPAN. CPAN. OO when you want it, procedural when you want it. Closures closures closures. Regexes. CPAN.... Inline::C, POD, CPAN... Perlmonks. Native hashes, grep, map, closures, OO/procedural combos and inline docs are hardly unique to Perl! Having them all in one place - maybe :-)	[reply]
Re^3: What's so unique about Perl? by demerphq (Chancellor) on Jul 05, 2005 at 08:30 UTC
Maybe I should have mentioned regexes a few more times :-) Seriously tho, you are right, having them all in one place wrapped up in a nice bundle is the real advantage. Having said that I think its arguable that Perl's single most important conceptual advance was/is the seamless integration of regex tools into the language. And Perl6 is apparently taking this to the next level (or is it three levels higher? :-) I guess its possible that other languages had similar before perl (AWK maybe? SNOBOL?) but Larry did some subtle things to his implementation that really made a difference to its ease of use and general uptake. Its no surprise that "perl compatible regulare expressions" are now standard fare accross the industry. For those not aware of what im refering to, think about pattern escaping in regexes, the original libraries by Kernigham (or was it Ritchie, i can never remember) had capturing braces escaped because it was felt that the main use of regexes would be for parsing C code by C programmers for subroutine signatures. According to legend Larry thought that was dumb and switched it, to the benefit of all of us. He also invented the (?:) notation afaik. Whatever. The point is that if Perl is remembered for anything in the history of computer lore a hundred years hence im pretty sure it will be its role for moving regular expression tools from the esoteric to the commonplace. --- $world=~s/war/peace/g	[reply]
Re^4: What's so unique about Perl? by adrianh (Chancellor) on Jul 05, 2005 at 13:29 UTC
Seriously tho, you are right, having them all in one place wrapped up in a nice bundle is the real advantage. Even there Lisp had most of this all together long before Perl (depending on your definition of "nice" :-)	[reply]