algebaric operations on a RegEx?

[William O'Higgins Witteman]

On Mon, Apr 06, 2009 at 03:02:47PM -0400, Alex Beamish wrote:
>On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 1:58 PM, Lennart Sorensen
><lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>> 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. 

I have to say, I find it somewhere in the middle.  I don't hate it, and
there are still some things I do in it, but mostly I use Python these
last few years.

>> 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 over time making old example code no longer valid syntax).

I can see this as a reasonable criticism, but I prefer this method of
evolution to the Perl approach that all old code should still run on new
interpreters - I think the advantage of interpreted languages is that
you can leave some code in place with the old interpreter as a special
case, and move forward.

>> php is quite nice.  I haven't used it for command line scripts, although
>> it is perfectly possible.
>
>PHP is a nice beginner's language, but it's not much use to me beyond
>doing web pages, so I haven't used it much.

I am finding that on projects of any significant complexity, PHP's
single namespace and wonky library system makes me crazy.  Still, the
fact that you can do just about everything that you need to out of the
box (as opposed to Perl, where CPAN is the double-edged sword of choice)
is a big selling point.  That was/is a big reason for switching to
Python about 8 years ago.

>Perl gets the job done nicely for me -- and I quite like the community support.

As far as I can tell, the Perl community is unmatched for helpfulness,
supportiveness and solidity.  Perlmonks.org all by itself is reason to
use Perl.
-- 

yours,

William

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