[LUAU] language...

[Vince Hoang]

On Tue, Nov 29, 2005 at 08:10:59AM -1000, Jim Thompson wrote:
> Tim Newsham wrote:
>
> >Yet you make good use of pronouns in your english
> >compositions. Is it the poor choice of name ($_), the subtle
> >(or non-uniform?) rules about what they reference, or just
> >lack of familiarity?
>
> Its mostly the last (familiarity), but the non-uniform rules
> are part of it. Perl's syntax gets in my way, and I openly
> admit same. It looks like a sendmail.cf file to me.

Perl's over-dependence on punctuation is admitedly tiring. But,
would perl suck less if 'use English' and 'use strict' were
enabled by default?

To be fair, the objectionable perl code I see is due more to the
style rather than syntax. Take this snippet from logwatch, a
ubiquitous piece of perl code found on most Linux systems:

  @ServiceList = @TempServiceList;
  for (my $i = 0; $i <= $#ServiceList; $i++) {
     $ServiceList[$i] = lc($ServiceList[$i]);
  }

You could more clearly rewrite it as:

  for my $s (@TempServiceList) {
    push @ServiceList, lc($s);
  }

.. or more concisely with:

  @ServiceList = map(lc, @TempServiceList);

.. or in python:

  service_list = [ s.lower() for s in temp_server_list ]

.. or in ruby:

  service_list = temp_server_list.map { |s| s.downcase }

-Vince