Re: If I was forced to program in another language, the Perl language feature I would miss most would be:

Whoa, that poll is mean! It's like asking a kid "whom do you like more, your mum or your dad?" :)

--shmem

_($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo.  G°\        /
                              /\_¯/(q    /
----------------------------  \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."·
");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}

Comment on Re: If I was forced to program in another language, the Perl language feature I would miss most would be:

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Re^2: If I was forced to program in another language, the Perl language feature I would miss most would be: by grinder (Bishop) on Oct 17, 2006 at 19:32 UTC
Heh, quite true. I posed the question because I was interested in what it is that makes Perl so "powerful". At work we are looking at reducing the number of programming languages we use (LotusScript, VB, ASP, Perl, PHP and Java). We'll be getting rid of LotusScript (since we have pushed up against the technical limits of Lotus Domino in general) and PHP, leaving Perl for systems work and VB/.Net or Java for applications work. The argument is that there are no drag'n'drop design tools for laying out Windows screens (à la VBA, which, it has to be said, lets you knock out simple Windows apps pretty quickly). And I realised that there are a number of things that set Perl apart: trailing commas and the quoteword operator and even heredocs. Once you no longer have them around, you realise how much they damp down syntactic noise. I'll miss this aspect of Perl the most. I am also amazed how the votes for each poll item is currently more or less proportional to the textual length of the poll item. Seems the longer the description of the feature, the more people like it! I didn't expect that. • another intruder with the mooring in the heart of the Perl	[reply]
Re^3: If I was forced to program in another language, the Perl language feature I would miss most would be: by Anonymous Monk on Oct 23, 2006 at 12:03 UTC
Heredocs aren't uniquely Perl. Larry sto^H^H^Hborrowed the idea from the shell. Trailing commas are allowed in other languages as well. The qw operator is what the shell does by default. I don't think anything on the list is something unique to Perl. Not even formats. Now, if there was an entry "all of the above", then you'd be talking about something uniquely to Perl.	[reply]