Ron Johnson wrote:
Oh, I agree - just with regret, because it is a language that wears very well for one's personal use. I presented this script as a good example of both Perl's good and bad points (which are often the same thing).It's this magic that makes things hard to maintain.
It's a little bit different with Perl, because the cleverness is built into the language, it is well-documented, and it is accepted or even preferred idiom. I.e. people who learn Perl tend to automatically learn these things if they read the standard books. That being said, a Perl programmer has a way better chance of tweaking Java code in an emergency than the other way around.So, even one-off q&d should be written "non-cleverly".
OK, that's enough of the yacking from me on this off-topic. Long live Debian, Kevin Murphy