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Postings from May 2000
Horsley Tom wrote: > > I dunno, I am not sure I buy it. Can you give us an example of > > well-written Perl code that would be very difficult for > > another reasonably > > competent Perl programmer to maintain? > > That's easy - pick any random piece of code from CPAN. > (or just from the well written subset :-). The odds are > high that it uses some idiom you aren't familir with and > will stop you in your tracks when you are trying to > debug through it in detail. "stop you in your tracks"?? why not read the manual when you find an "idiom you aren't familir with" and figure it out? i'm barely an intermediate-level programmer and i've had no trouble figuring out any (non-obfuscated) Perl code. > I'm not saying this same problem doesn't exist in all > other languages, just that perl has so many ways to do > things that the problem is much larger. my experience has been the opposite, due to the tremendous quality of the manual. in other words, if you don't understand something, RTFM, and then write small test programs if you can't figure it out from the manual. i would like to see an example of code from CPAN that can't be understood by an intermediate Perl programmer by reading the manual. -- Steve Lane <sml@zfx.com>