Is Perl *that* good?

[Wallclimber]

>     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.  To make the
> 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.  In addition, as Jamie Zawinski suggests, regular expressions
> are not always the best choice.

I have to agree with the original poster. My *only* complaint about
Python are not regex search, but regex search and replace operations.
Perl   : s =~ s/(\w+)\s*=\s*(\d+)/$2 <= $1/g;
Python : regex.sub(s, "(\w+)\s*=\s*)\d+)", (lambda m: m.group(2)+" <=
"+m.group(1)))

I didn't try this out so there might be some syntax problems in there,
but you get the idea. Is there a 'nicer' way to do this in python?
Using 'group' and lambda functions is really quite messy. (An,
obviously, in real life usage, the replacemant function can be much
bigger...)

I'd be most grateful if somebody could show me a cleaner way to do
this.

Thanks,
Tom Verbeure