algebaric operations on a RegEx?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Apr 06, 2009 at 12:41:39PM -0400, Madison Kelly wrote:
> "hate perl"? Oh, IT'S ON!
>
> :D
>
> Perl's a language you love or you hate. It doesn't seem to have much  
> middle ground. I, personally, love it for it's flexibility. Though I  
> have to admit, it can get pretty cryptic in the hands of someone for  
> whom that is their intention. It enforces no "good behaviour", but  
> instead leaves it to the coder to give a damn or not.

Well the more I use perl the more I start to dislike it.  The syntax
is just awful.  Too inconsistant, too many ways to do the same thing.
Too much magic that makes things that you don't want be legal syntax
yet do nothing useful.  I still use perl, because well I know it.
I do try to avoid all the nifty features that makes perl hard to read.
Many nice languages grow on you with use.  Perl does the opposit after
a while.

Things I dislike are:
push(@myarray,\%foo) [why do I need to do that?]
and then reletated to that:
$foo{'bar'} versus $foo->{'bar'}.  Why does one work and the other not
in this case?  Does perl have pointers and if so when?  Gah!
There are plenty more ugle thigns in perl.

Python is at least more consistant in syntax, although that too is a
language suffering from evolution (too many features have been deprecated
over time making old example code no longer valid syntax).

php is quite nice.  I haven't used it for command line scripts, although
it is perfectly possible.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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