Interesting thread on comp.lang.perl.misc

[Jeff Pinyan]

On Aug 13, Michael P. Reilly blah blah blah:

> So what is the best forum?  Good question.  The best would be to find
> papers by reputable persons who fairly judge the languages.  You got a
> very good response from Tom C.  Read what he says; he's fair about both
> languages.

I program both Perl and Python.  I'm in clpmisc and clpython.  What do I
do when such debates come around?  I ignore them.  I do, however, be sure
to make well researched and as unbiased comments as I can if I do happen
to say a sentence or two.

Many people find python's whitespace dependency to be stupid.  I love it.

Many people find perl's leading symbol characters (@$%&*) to be stupid.  I
love them.

I wish Perl had Object.Attr OO functionality as in Python.

I wish I could change a string in-place with a function.*

But I like the two languages.  Holy wars are not for me.


* meaning:

def func(str):
  # something modifying str 

str = "foo"
func(str)
print str # prints... "bar", for example

In Perl, you can modify arguments to subroutines:

sub func { $_[0] = "bar" }
$str = "foo";
func($str);
print $str; # prints "bar"
func("jeff"); # that's an error, you can't change a constant

Ok.  That's it for me. :)

--
jeff pinyan    japhy at pobox.com  japhy+perl at pobox.com  japhy+crap at pobox.com
japhy's little hole in the (fire) wall:       http://www.pobox.com/~japhy/
japhy's perl supposit^Wrepository:       http://www.pobox.com/~japhy/perl/
The "CRAP" Project:                 http://www.pobox.com/~japhy/perl/crap/
CPAN ID: PINYAN           http://www.perl.com/CPAN/authors/id/P/PI/PINYAN/