On Thursday 01 May 2008 08:52, Randall R Schulz wrote:
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Well, I'm probably overstating it. Perl is immensely practical, but it's offensive from a programming language theory standpoint and from a programming-in-the-large perspective it will lead you down the garden path to impenetrable and unmaintainable spaghetti code.
I think I must retract that last statement, about "the garden path to impenetrable and unmaintainable spaghetti code." Perl 5 does have a good module system, and if you use it well, you can probably manage medium scale systems in Perl. But it does not really support either object-oriented programming or polymorphism (as far as I know), so it still isn't going to work well for programming large systems, I don't think. Also, I think it's data abstraction capabilities are quite limited. On the other hand, it is apparently possible to do higher-order programming in Perl, and that's not nothin': "Higher-Order Perl" <http://www.amazon.com/Higher-Order-Perl-Transforming-Programs/dp/1558607013> And here's a good one, bringing this all back to the original question. The author of "Higher-Order Perl" is Mark Jason Dominus (don't make me enter his Chinese name—I can't even write my own, not even in Pinyin) who is also the author of the man page "perlreftut - Mark's very short tutorial about references". So David: "man perlreftut" to get a tutorial that goes directly to your question about those Perl expressions that once confused you.
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Randall Schulz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org