Re: [Nolug] Crappy Perl Code (was Re: Evo and Outlook)

Mark A. Hershberger wrote:
> Minimal LOC doesn't necessarily mean obfuscated or unmaintainable.
> Lisp is probably the best language out there as far as LOC and no one
> has accused it of being unmaintainable. (Yet?)

I don't know a thing about Lisp, but that may change as I've been using
a lot of AutoCAD lately. I tried to wrestle with Scheme once, with
Gimp, but I got really frustrated with it and abandoned the idea. Must
be my C-style upbringing.
>
> When I say minimal LOC, I'm not just talking about cramming as many
> functions or operators onto as few lines as possible.

Ah, good. But that is a popular way to minimize LOC.
>
> Instead, I'm talking about the capability of the language. If a
> language has constructs that allow you to compactly express some
> concepts, then it reduces the LOC necessary to accomplish your goal.

OK. But in my code, I try to do one, maybe two, things per line. That
way it has a better chance of passing the One Year Later test.

> And my point was that you shouldn't expect a newbie to maintain code
> written by a guru, no matter what the language. Yet, this seems to
> be the subtext of the argument put forth by some people who claim
> that Perl encourages poorly written code.

That was my introduction to Perl. I had to glue some really crappy Perl
to some baddish Perl, and it really really turned me off to the
language. A lot of assumptions were made in both scripts, and it wasn't
apparent becase there was no documentation (not a fault of the language)
and because it was so terse.

BTW, in trying to further understand the use of $_ adn _, I went to
perldoc. I've been looking around for a while, because when I tried to
search for it, I get:

No matches were found for ''.

In the 'new perl 5.8.0 documentation' search, they told me no matches
for "$_"
Is this depreciated or do I need to go buy a book?

-- 
Alex McKenzie     alex@boxchain.com     http://www.boxchain.com
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