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July 03, 2005

Get thee to a ... monestary

It's official, I'm joining a monestary.

Perl has been refered to as a 'write only' language, in as much as it can be completely impenatrable. But then so can C. The regular expressions have a lot of appeal. Thus far, it seems readable, though I rather suspect this is because the programmers I've been reading have stuck to a convention. Perl will let you get away with all sorts of things that would make a maintenance programmer weep (yes, so does C).

I don't think Perl will displace C (and offshoots) as my favourite language. You must run horses for courses, and there are some things that it is perfect for. I find it impossible not to warm to a programming language where the following is valid and runs:


#!/usr/bin/perl
APPEAL:
listen (please, please);
open yourself, wide;
join (you, me),
connect (us,together),
tell me.
do something if distressed;
@dawn, dance;
@evening, sing;
read (books,$poems,stories) until peaceful;
study if able;
write me if-you-please;
sort your feelings, reset goals, seek (friends, family, anyone);
do*not*die (like this)
if sin abounds;
keys (hidden), open (locks, doors), tell secrets;
do not, I-beg-you, close them, yet.
accept (yourself, changes),
bind (grief, despair);
require truth, goodness if-you-will, each moment;
select (always), length(of-days)


# listen (a perl poem)
# Sharon Hopkins
# rev. June 19, 1995

Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at July 3, 2005 12:08 AM

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