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Re: [ba-unrev-talk] Humble pie in academia


And it has my beloved pattern match operator (=~) from
Snobol/Icon!!!    (01)

     X =~ /...somePattern.../ --- true if the pattern is found in string X    (02)

And it wisely uses "==" for a boolean test, instead of the assignment
operator, "=".    (03)

This is really great stuff. It looks like the best possible combination
of Java, Perl, Python, Awk, and Icon....    (04)

It's even got coroutines/function pointers. TOO cool. (It's been so
long since I could write them, though, that I'm going to have to figure
out how/when to use them from the beginning. But what I recall is
that on those rare occasions that a function pointer is needed,
*nothing* else works as well...)    (05)

On the other hand, they implemented Perl's default $_ variable,
which takes values and acts as a parameter automatically.
Personally, I find that unfortunate. It means that programs will
only be understandable by those who are familiar with that
particular piece of magic. (I know it has made many a Perl
program difficult for me to read.)    (06)

Hmmm. One more thing. Now that I've got to the discussion of
classes and overridding methods, I see O-O concepts being
introduced with very little in the way of explanation. For an
old-school programmer used to prodedural languages, I'd still
recommend the o-o concept chapters of my book. (I'll have to
see if I get IDG to let me put them on the web.)    (07)