matching one time through a loop

[Peter Hansen]

(Previous version cancelled after an accidental "send". :-(  )

"David K. Trudgett" wrote:
> 
> On Friday 2002-05-31 at 09:55:04 +1000, Delaney, Timothy wrote:
> 
> > Seriously here ... by not having regular expressions be an integral part of
> > the language, I believe they become much more understandable. It is always
> 
> There might be something in that. However, having learned Perl before
> Python, I just find it really clunky and slow to do regex stuff in
> Python. I find that I miss the power that direct language syntax
> support for regexes gives me. There's obviously a value judgement
> there, of course: one needs to weigh up ease and speed of programming
> with other factors like cleanness, readability, and so on. Obviously,
> Python comes down on the cleanness/readability side, at the expense of
> programmer productivity in text processing.

I believe "programmer productivity" is significantly _improved_ when 
using Python, _because of_ the emphasis on readability.

A productivity measurement needs to consider not only the time to 
type code but also the time to revise the design repeatedly (assuming 
code-and-fix, which 95% of programmers use) and the time to maintain 
the code.  Code maintenance is a far greater portion of the effort
than mere typing, and I really don't believe any minor time savings 
provided by Perl offset one's losses during maintenance. 

(As you suggest with "value judgement", this could be a religious
issue.  I happen to believe it is not, however, but could be 
demonstrated with a simple study; to my knowledge no one has done 
this yet.)

-Peter