use Perl

• That's not all... (Score:2)

  by bart (450) <bart.lateur@pandora.be> on 2005.01.22 9:01 (#37729) Journal

  Yes there are more annoyances. From the top of my head:

  • Very inconsequent in naming the built-in functions. Sometimes, there's underscores between the word parts, sometimes they're just concatenated. There's no fixed rules for the word part orders. Sometimes, related/similar functions have vastly different names: strtolower(), strtoupper(), ucfirst(), ucwords(), mb_strtolower().
  • Some keywords require parens, while others can do without: for example:

    echo "foo";

    works without problem, but you do need the parens in

    die("foo");

  • and the well know age old "there's no variable scoping, apart from function level scoping" complaint. If only file-level scoping was supported, I'd already be a much happier man. Now, if you do

    foreach($array as $id) {
        ...
    }

    at the top level, your global $id will have been cluttered.

  And there's zillions more...

  There seems no way (at this part of the book) to distinguish the difference between a scalar and an array. They both use the $ sigil.(page 27)

  You should think of it as the array and the array ref being equivalent. You cant have both a $foo and a @foo as both are the same variable: $foo.

  In addition, treating a string as an array results in characters being picked out of the string, like Perl's substr. Well, almost:

  $x = "foobar";
  $x[3] = "XYZ";
  echo $x;

  prints "fooXar".

  There is an array() function. (page 27)

  Yes, and there's no "[ ... ]" shortcut, like in Javascript. (And in Perl.)

  There is more than one sort function. (page 28)

  Yes, and the array_multisort() [php.net] is nothing short of a nightmare. The API is very difficult, every column is a separate array, and there's no way to have it sort on a variable number of columns. Just give me the unified and very powerful sort BLOCK LIST from Perl, any day.

  Reply to This

  • Re:That's not all... (Score:1)

    by Beatnik (493)

    I'll probably get those all of those items on my next few chapters. Only made it to page 29 so far :)