New radio PIDs, more than 8 characters - "solved"

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi C. E.,

> for a high-level language, [Perl's] syntax is unnecessarily difficult
> and obscure.

Perl's syntax is heavy on notation, but then notation is powerful
compared to the long-hand alternatives, and that's why it's fine in
maths, chemistry, and Perl.  For the occasional visitor, Python's that
way →

Perl uses sigils, a symbol attached to a variable name, but then so does
sh(1) that influenced it.  Many languages do, Ruby, PHP, ..., though not
all the time, e.g. Python has `@foo' to mean it's a decorator function.
Perl also sigils to indicate the type of an identifier, so `$foo' is a
simple scalar variable whereas `@bar' is a indexable list.  Similar
syntax differences allow literals to be given:  `[42, 314, "xyzzy"]' is
a list whereas '{May => 10, Hammond => 11}' is a `hash', AKA associative
array or dictionary.

Perl is no harder to learn than C or Ruby.  They both like notation too,
e.g. the «int foo(int, int (*)(void *, char *), void *);» I wrote
recently.  Perl's easier than PHP because that has far too much
duplication, bad design, and corner cases to memorise.  C++ is also
something to avoid;  too large a language and each coder uses a distinct
subset.  Assembly languages are easy, once you understand a CPU's
workings, but RISC ones like ARM are nice to learn compared to the
twisty passages of x86.

> The whole point of high-level languages, the reason they were
> invented, was make to programming more human-readable and therefore
> more understandable, but Perl bucks that trend.

I think it was to give more expressive power than assembly language by
introduction abstraction, and notation, at the cost of efficiency.
Plenty of Unix programmers with a sh, sed, awk, background found Perl
straightforward to pick up because it distilled their features into a
single language.  It was Perl 4 when I learnt it, and a single
well-written man page described the language and that's all the
documentation there was.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.
https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy