Is Perl *that* good?

[Asun Friere]

Skip Montanaro <skip at pobox.com> wrote in message news:<mailman.49.1083084698.25742.python-list at python.org>...
 
> Sure, it's syntactically bound into the language.  There will always be an
> extra constant overhead to enable regular expressions in Python.  That
> doesn't make them any less powerful than the Perl variety.  It's simply a
> pair of different design decisions Guido and Larry made (along with a few
> others).

Sure.

>     Asun> Probably the only time I would reach for Perl rather than for
>     Asun> python is when I knew a task involved a lot of regex (and no
>     Asun> object orientation).
> 
> Why?  I write non-object-oriented Python code all the time.  

What I meant is that if it involves lots of regexp I'd probably use
Perl  If it involved lots of regex AND object orientation, I wouldn't
consider Perl.

> Python/Perl switch you'd still have to shift your mental gears to deal with
> a different syntax, different way of getting at and using functionality that
> isn't builtin, etc.  Even with lots of regex fiddling to do, I think the
> extra overhead of using regexes in Python would be swamped by the other
> differences.  

It's good for the soul to shift your mental gears every now and then.