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Postings from May 2003
On Wed, 14 May 2003 00:55:06 CDT, Dave Rolsky wrote: >References to perltrap should be enough for people coming from a strong >sed/awk/C/Befunge background, but for others, especially people learning >Perl as a first language, or second after PHP/Python/Javascript/VB/etc., >they are just distracting. Not convinced. IMHO, the primary job of the Perl reference documentation is to describe the language fully and adequately. This includes discussion of the motivation behind language features, their history and their lineage. Second-guessing whether a particular class of user may or may not find such information distracting is not on the agenda. If you want to help the people who don't know any of the languages that perl borrowed heavily from, why not write separate primers or tutorials that do just that? Why "dumb down" the reference documentation? And I'd say perltrap is focussed on pitfalls, not rationale for language features. The latter belong right where the language features are being introduced. Sarathy gsar@ActiveState.com