in reply to Let's face it, Perl *is* a scripting language

Never having used Perl 4, I'd be really interested to see half a dozen or so examples of P4 -v- P5 code to demonstrate your point. I've acquired a passing awareness of some of the differences through osmosis. Eg. Hashes and arrays couldn't be nested? Though why not escapes me, when the both contain scalars and refs are scalars. Unless there were no refs in P4?

I guess my point is that for the old hands who did several years of P4 before the last 10 (?) of P5, your "Stop writing P4" argument may be enough, but for all those (like me, and maybe 30%, 40%, 50% (more?) of current users), that only came on board since P5, it alludes to something that seems like it probably makes sense, but without examples of what we are doing to offend you, the allusion is only fleeting. It lives in "Yeah! Right on! Like, you mean like... um... er"-land

Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.
Lingua non convalesco, consenesco et abolesco. -- Rule 1 has a caveat! -- Who broke the cabal?
"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".
In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.
  • Comment on Re: Let's face it, Perl *is* a scripting language

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: Let's face it, Perl *is* a scripting language
by Ovid (Cardinal) on Aug 08, 2006 at 12:48 UTC

    You can read some of the differences in this old perlfaq.

    Just imagine trying to build a scalable system without lexical variables! When I did that in COBOL, we had horrible variable names like WS-GLJ0030R-ACCT-LIMIT to avoid collisions. Real fun! Oh, and in Perl 4, you had true globals by forcing variables whose names began with underscores into main::. This is often a convenience and you can see remants of this with variables like $_, $1, and so on. However, for programming larger systems, encouraging user-supplied globals is bad.

    Cheers,
    Ovid

    New address of my CGI Course.

[reply]

      So as someone else who started, many years ago, with Perl 5 ... I'd have to say, doesn't this take away from your argument? I've seen my share of "not great" perl, and most of it still used lexically scoped vars (AIUI Perl 4 used typeglobs a lot more too ... but that's also something I don't see).

      If anyone said "oh, isn't that just a scripting language" to me recently, I'd be tempted to reply "What, like Java?"

      --
      James Antill
[reply]
Re^2: Let's face it, Perl *is* a scripting language
by gellyfish (Monsignor) on Aug 08, 2006 at 12:25 UTC

    For historical interest the examples from the first edition of "Programming Perl" can still be found here. There were no references, lexical variables or "use" for starters. But I think you'll get the flavour from the examples.

    /J\

[reply]
Re^2: Let's face it, Perl *is* a scripting language
by krisahoch (Deacon) on Aug 08, 2006 at 13:23 UTC
[reply]

In Section Meditations