Re^4: Hidden features of Perl

(Pre-edited to protect silly peoples' silly sensibilities.)

You're clearly trying to (pee) on that thread by saying that Real Computer Scientists who Love Functional Programming find it all beneath them. I could go on and on asking what being self-taught or being an (oh my (furry) (Gosh)!) imperative programmer has to do with various entries (try "Binary "x" is the repetition operator:"), but it would probably be a waste of time in this programmer (disk)-size war.

And the DATA filehandle is no more esoteric than a print statement.

This is so deliberately obtuse that I don't know how to respond. Let's try a short play:

You: John, please print this.
John the Secretary: Okay
...
You: John, does DATA refer to: (1) all the lines after __DATA__ in the current file; (2) all the lines after DATA; (3) a file named DATA; (4) none of the above?
John: ???

(Fruit). Sometimes I know which words to chant for approval, but just can't bring myself to say them.

Comment on Re^4: Hidden features of Perl

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Re^5: Hidden features of Perl by Porculus (Hermit) on Jun 23, 2009 at 14:00 UTC
We can all make things look complicated. You: John, does "print" refer to: (1) putting ink on paper; (2) adding some data to an output buffer (possibly encoding it first) that will, when flushed, be pushed into an output stream that will probably result in its being stored in a file or displayed on a computer monitor, but is, in fact, highly unlikely to involve ink or paper? John: ??? DATA is not a standard feature of modern programming languages, but it's really not that strange in the grand scheme of things. There have been plenty of other languages that do provide equivalent features, right back to the good old 8-bit BASICs found in every techie home throughout the 1980s. And, more to the point, __DATA__ is a pretty common feature in the Perl world. It's a standard tool in nearly all the test suites I've ever seen, both on CPAN and in proprietary internal code. I'd go so far as to say that if I was giving a job interview to someone who claimed to be an experienced Perl developer, but didn't have the faintest inkling that __DATA__ had a special meaning, then I'd fail them on the spot.	[reply]

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Re^5: Hidden features of Perl
by Porculus (Hermit) on Jun 23, 2009 at 14:00 UTC

We can all make things look complicated.

You: John, does "print" refer to: (1) putting ink on paper; (2) adding some data to an output buffer (possibly encoding it first) that will, when flushed, be pushed into an output stream that will probably result in its being stored in a file or displayed on a computer monitor, but is, in fact, highly unlikely to involve ink or paper?

John: ???

DATA is not a standard feature of modern programming languages, but it's really not that strange in the grand scheme of things. There have been plenty of other languages that do provide equivalent features, right back to the good old 8-bit BASICs found in every techie home throughout the 1980s.

And, more to the point, __DATA__ is a pretty common feature in the Perl world. It's a standard tool in nearly all the test suites I've ever seen, both on CPAN and in proprietary internal code. I'd go so far as to say that if I was giving a job interview to someone who claimed to be an experienced Perl developer, but didn't have the faintest inkling that __DATA__ had a special meaning, then I'd fail them on the spot.

[reply]