On Thu, 7 Jun 2001, Dave Thomas wrote:
> Mathieu Bouchard <matju / sympatico.ca> writes:
> > Just like Ben, I write Perl in a style quite indistinguishable from
> > SmallTalk and Ruby.
> I admire your discipline. I always found the overhead of creating
> classes tipped the balance away from writing the small helper classes
> that I write in Smalltalk and Ruby.

Because the overhead of writing classes in Perl is as large as the
overhead of writing methods, calling methods, and accessing instance
variables, I tend not to notice at all. Everything is twice longer than
the Ruby equivalent =)

Ruby:   @foo
Python: self.foo
Perl:   $self->{foo}

and once all misguided coding-standards are in effect,

Perl:   $self->{'__foo'}

> I must not have expressed myself well, as I was actually arguing that
> we _not_ make the language favor a particular style of coding.

I'm sorry. My error.

matju