From: Dave Cross <dave@...>
Date: 2000-12-09T18:40:01+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:6960] Re: Why isn't Perl highly orthogonal?

On Sat, 09 Dec 2000 08:54:13 GMT, Terrence Brannon
<brannon@lnc.usc.edu> wrote:

>
>One day my boss asked me: "how do you get the length of an array in
>Perl?" So I told him:
>
>scalar @array;
>
>But of course what irked me is how unintuitive and irregular Perl is
>and how this forced my boss to ask me something like that.
>
>LENGTH $string => length $string
>LENGTH @array  => scalar @array
>
>PORTION $string => substring $string, $offset, $length
>PORTION @array  => @array[$offset..$offset+$length]
>
>In other words, conceptually similar operations do not map to the same
>name in Perl. Why does this make Perl a better and not worse language,
>than the intended replacement to Perl, Ruby, which is in fact highly
>regular in all places where Perl isn't, with the above being just a
>few examples? 

The length of a string and the number of elemetns in an array really
aren't the same thing at all, so it makes sense to me that I find them
in different ways. The same goes for substrings and array slices.

Thinking of these concepts as similar seems to meto be a hangover from
C, where strings are arrays of characters, but surely we've moved on
since then.

Maybe your boss is a C programmer?

Dave...

-- 
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