I am rewriting a Perl program in Ruby to see the difference.
Follows is a segment of the Perl program:

while (<>) {
	if (/1999/) {
		($date, $hour, $name, $id) = split;
		print "$date:$hour:$name:$id\n"
	}
}

And follows is the counterpart in Ruby:

while(gets())
	if /1999/
		date, hour, name, id = split
		print "#{date}:#{hour}:#{name}:#{id}\n"
	end
end

I am not sure which one, Perl or Ruby, is more readable here. This is a 
curious observation: to get rid of the $ on one line, one has to pay #{} on 
the following line. Is this the principle "pay it now, or pay it later ... 
with interest!" ?

Dat
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