IMHO, you guys are not taking a good approach to "convince his friend to use Perl". Point is that you try to 'golf' a pretty simple function, which causes it to lose readability, and that is very bad when maintenance is needed.

Surely, things can be made shorter in Perl than in Pascal, but shorter in places when Perl really has an advantage, like regexes, list processing and hashes (and many more, of course). I'm in no doubt that a Golf guru can knock the friend's whole 8-page program into a 512 byte block, but that is hardly the point.

On the contrary, you should show the friend how Perl can make things more clear and natural, and win where complex operations (which need to be implemented in Pascal) are used.

Good luck and happy Perl-ing

In reply to Re: Converting pascal code to perl by spurperl
in thread Converting pascal code to perl by Popcorn Dave

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