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

I've got to vote for the missing "hashes" and the equally missing regex (what do you mean I can't vote twice? This is America...oh, never mind).

Heredocs are also nice. Some of the other listed features are not unique to Perl (I'm thinking array slices). qw is nice (it reduces wear on the quote key on the keyboard).

emc

At that time [1909] the chief engineer was almost always the chief test pilot as well. That had the fortunate result of eliminating poor engineering early in aviation.

—Igor Sikorsky, reported in AOPA Pilot magazine February 2003.

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 ikegami (Patriarch) on Oct 19, 2006 at 00:08 UTC
Some of the other listed features are not unique to Perl Few if any are. In fact, the three you say you'd miss the most aren't unique to Perl. Perl is great because is has them all (and much more, of course) and because they are easy to use.	[reply]
Re^3: If I was forced to program in another language, the Perl language feature I would miss most would be: by swampyankee (Parson) on Oct 19, 2006 at 17:20 UTC
I've used awk, which does have hashes and regex. sed has regex, but I'm not sure I'd call it a "language". I know there are others with both features (VBS, JavaScript, Java...) and I could write libraries to replicate either. Leaving out Perl's formats -- I tend to think the format statement in Perl is pretty lame (I find printf much more useful. imho, Perl's format compares quite unfavorably with Fortran's `format`) -- I really would miss most of the features in the poll; I've just used hashes and regex more often than any of the other features, so I would miss them more. emc At that time [1909] the chief engineer was almost always the chief test pilot as well. That had the fortunate result of eliminating poor engineering early in aviation. —Igor Sikorsky, reported in AOPA Pilot magazine February 2003.	[reply]
Re^4: If I was forced to program in another language, the Perl language feature I would miss most would be: by rbi (Monk) on Oct 20, 2006 at 10:53 UTC
Check this out, you may like it: http://search.cpan.org/~itub/Fortran-Format-0.90/Format.pm	[reply]
Re^2: If I was forced to program in another language, the Perl language feature I would miss most would be: by rdm (Hermit) on Oct 18, 2006 at 23:49 UTC
Hashes would be my vote, too. And the die/warn pair. Something so simple, so small, and so handy. -R -Reality might not get out of Beta today. (O.Timas, "Bot")	[reply]