Re: tlug: Perl 5 kickstart

[Karl-Max Wagner <karlmax@example.com>]

> BEWARE - Perl5 is also much stricter about syntax.  Many perl4 programs
> will not run under perl5 because of things like having @ that isn't
> backslashified (any @ inside a string must be backslashified in perl5, not
> so in perl4).
Correct. In general. Perl IS picky about synthax - just I never
had any problems with it because I abstain from doing any of
those "nice tricks" that tend to become a problem. I try to
write code as readable as possible - even without comments it
should be halfways understandable.
> If you know C, the O'Reilly camel book is all you need to learn perl.  At
> least, that's how i learned perl.  Make sure you get the blue camel book
True. Me, too....
> and not the pink one, though (I don't thnk you can get the pink one
> anymore, actually... that was the one made in the days of perl4).
I learned it with the old one. The new one is better. However, I
am still of the opinion that the manpages are better. They are
remarkably well done and IMHO replace all those books. I
consider them suitable even for beginners.

Actually I printed them out and put them into a file. I use them
a lot when programming.

My biggest package so far was a package to fill up all sorts of
forms. This is more difficult as it sounds if you know that most
forms don't follow any standard of layout to begin with. There I
used mdularization and object oriented techniques extensively to
make maintenance easier.

I also am interested in Tcl. However, Tcl is far less powerful
than Perl. In Perl you have an enormously powerful architecture,
one line does the work of many lines in other languages. Perl
programs tend to be very short for their funcctionality.
However, you have to think a bit more at each line you write.
The stuff however tends to be fast even without a helluva lot of
optimization.

However, Perl has some stupid limitations: for example, you can
only pass one array into a module you use in a package included
using require. This caused me quite a few headaches already.....

                                Karl-Max Wagner
                                karlmax@example.com
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