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Old 24th May 2008
ocicat ocicat is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by anomie View Post
Yet every time I've decided to learn/practice with perl, it has seemed arcane and kludgey to me. I know it rocks (I'm told so repeatedly)...
Perl's heritage starts with shell programming & blenderizes several constructs from C (amongst several other sources...). Given that its expressiveness is greater than what is offered by most other languages, Perl code can be hard to fathom (for example, study the examples from The Perl Journal's elite...), plus, consider how well regular expressions are so well integrated into the language. It can be hard at times knowing where the Perl specific code ends & regular expressions begin. At the same time, a well structured Perl script can be found in a single (yet convoluted... ) regular expression.

As my own proficiency in Perl has grown, the code I write has gotten denser, & the higher the probability that others will give up trying to understand all the nuances. As most of the Perl I write is only for my own benefit, this doesn't really matter, however, the point remains that Perl can help speed up a lot of work especially when it comes to parsing & translating text.
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