Re: [MacPerl] what's it look like under the hood?

[Ken Williams <ken@forum.swarthmore.edu>]

joel_rees@sannet.ne.jp (Joel Rees) wrote:
>>It sounds from the way you've worded the question that the complex
>>grammars in question are already formulated for easy parsing by a
>>procedural language.  If you already have lex/yacc inputs for a grammar,
>>you'd be crazy to try to refigure them to fit Perl.
>>
>>Perl's strength is that you can specify what you are looking for, in terms
>>of regular expressions, the way you think of them.  You don't have to make
>>a canonical grammar.
>
>Actually, no. But the scripts my company is (presently) using don't make 
>any real use of anything I can perceive as a distinguishing feature of 
>Perl. I mean I can do it with fgets(), woops, strchr() and strstr() in 
>less lines of C. 
>
>I still want a little more motivation to start reading real examples of 
>Perl.

Here: try posting a short snippet of code here (or reasonable approximation
thereof) that you think is probably shorter in C, and I bet you'll get six or
seven different alternatives in Perl that get the job done concisely and
clearly.  Probably more clearly than you anticipate.  There will be a range of
elegance and several different styles.  You'll pick your favorite, and learn
why Perl programming is more fun than most other programming.


  -------------------                            -------------------
  Ken Williams                             Last Bastion of Euclidity
  ken@forum.swarthmore.edu                            The Math Forum



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