language aesthetics

[Fernando Perez]

Nick Vargish wrote:

> "Ulrich Petri" <ulope at gmx.de> writes:
> 
>> There is a saying in german: "Das rollt mir die Fußnägel hoch..."
> 
> I have no idea what that means, but:
> 
>     sub swap (*@_ is rw) { @_[0,1] = @_[1,0] }
> 
> Is going to be giving me nightmares tonight. :^)

Nothing like the readability of python:

In [64]: def swap(L): L[1],L[0] = L[0],L[1]
   ....:

In [65]: a=[3,4]

In [66]: swap(a)

In [67]: a
Out[67]: [4, 3]


That page just confirms the wisdom of having moved away from perl a few years
ago :)  I still use it occasionally, for small, tight things were a couple of
quick regexps are all it takes to get a job done.  

But reading that page gave me the feeling that perl is going down a road which
leads straight to madness, in an orgy of syntax and notation like the
programming world has never seen before.  Oh well, we'll see...

Cheers,

f.