On Jun 25, 2009, at 4:37 PM, Roger Leigh wrote:
On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 08:30:33AM +0200, Javier Barroso wrote:Hi, 2009/6/25 明覺 <shi.minjue@gmail.com>:I do not have time to read your replies about another discussion anymore for they are useless, and I do not feel happy with all you debian guys, so I leave this mailing list, also debian has no attraction to me anymore, I will stop using it from now. As I have decalared, I will build my own OS and applications by a "Only One Programming Lanuguage" way. Good bye! :)Your original question was about installing debian without perl, it isnot possible now. If you want to do it, you would have asked in debian-devel, because debian users can't do anything with this issue.Given the ghastliness of maintaining Perl code, rewriting it in C++ does have a certain attraction. However, one first has to understand what the code *does*, and a few thousand lines of uncommented regular expressions are a fairly impenetrable mess!
I was teaching myself 6502 Assembler in college while I was taking a course on the Vax 11/780. My instructor had a rule in Assembler: EVERY line of code HAD to have a comment. Most people had lame comments, like, "Transfer from register to memory." I had learned from reading Nibble Magazine, which published programs for the Apple ] [, ][+, and //e computers so if I had a task to do, I'd put in comments like, "Take the given value and add the offset we need, then transfer it to use as an index." That might be split over 2-3 lines of code, but the teacher commented that he liked my comments because it made it clear what the program was doing. That was enough to start a lifelong habit. I don't comment every line now, but I use block comments for sections and subroutines and that habit has made my life MUCH easier.
Also, by the time I started using Java, I had learned that many times when I write something, I'm revisiting later and have forgotten it, so making sure my Javadoc comments were clear enough that I wouldn't have to dig up the code just re-enforced that. I'm still surprised at the number of uncommented regex stuff I see in Perl. If I'm using a regex that has ANY degree of complexity (other than pulling out, say, one string with a wildcard or two), then I comment that line of code specifically.
I've been thankful, many times, for the habit that teacher created with his requirements.
I might add that it's not just Perl, it really depends on who wrote the code. Uncommented code can be a nightmare in ANY language!
Hal