Michael Carman <mjcarman / home.com> writes:

> Terrence Brannon wrote:
> > 
> > [C]onceptually 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 [...]
> 
> Heh. Careful, there! By whom is Ruby intended to be a replacement to
> Perl? ;)
> 
> Most of the responses have centered on your example, not the subject of
> your question. Perl is non-orthogonal by design. From 'perldoc perl'
> 
>     "The language is intended to be practical (easy to use,
>      efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant,
>      minimal)."

well, thanks. This clears things up. I do recall reading this many
years ago when first finding Perl.

> 
> IIRC, Larry Wall has referred to Perl as being a "diagonal" language.
> Instead of forcing a rigid method of doing things, Perl provides you
> with options and allows you to choose the most natural (i.e. idiomatic)
> method. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is largely a matter
> of preference. If you want a minimal language, then it's awful. But if
> you want to be able to write an arbitrary piece of code quickly and
> concisely, then it's wonderful.

You aren't kidding. Everytime I have a text-processing task, my brain
goes into Perl-mode and I rip right through it. Now of course, afer
it's done, I can engage in the armchair philosophy that led to this
question. 

> IMHO, orthogonality is overrated. It sounds nice on the surface, but you
> invariably end up with a situation where you have to write some ugly
> hack to get around the restrictions of the language.

Yeah, or you end up doing a whole lot more typing before the task gets
done.

-- 
Terrence Brannon
Carter's Compass...
    I know I'm on the right track when by deleting code I'm adding
    functionality.