Higher-Order Perl - Transforming Programs With Programs
Author : Mark Jason Dominus
ISBN : 1-55860-701-3
Publisher : Elsevier Inc.
Publication Date : 2005
License Reminder:
| Mark Jason Dominus wrote: |
Higher-Order Perl is copyright ©2005 by Elsevier Inc. Unauthorized reproduction or distribution is absolutely forbidden.
In particular, note that although the text is available for free, Higher-Order Perl is not in the public domain and is not available under a free license of any sort. I distribute it from this web site by virtue of special permission from the publisher. You, most likely, do not have any such permission. |
| Mark Jason Dominus wrote: |
A well-known saying in the programming racket is that a good Fortran programmer can write Fortran programs in any language. The sad truth, though, is that Fortran programmers write Fortran programs in any language whether they mean to or not. Similarly, we, as Perl programmers, have been writing C programs in Perl whether we meant to or not. This is a shame, because Perl is a much more expressive language than C. We could be doing a lot better, using Perl in ways undreamt of by C programmers, but we’re not.
How did this happen? Perl was originally designed as a replacement for C on the one hand and Unix scripting languages like Bourne Shell and awk on the other. Perl’s first major proponents were Unix system administrators, people familiar with C and withUnix scripting languages; they naturally tended to write Perl programs that resembled C and awk programs. Perl’s inventor, Larry Wall, came from this sysadmin community, as did Randal Schwartz, his coauthor on Programming Perl, the first and still the most important Perl reference work. Other important early contributors include Tom Christiansen, also a C-and- Unix expert from way back. Even when Perl programmers didn’t come from the Unix sysadmin community, they were trained by people who did, or by people who were trained by people who did. |
| Mark Jason Dominus wrote: |
Then you can stop writing C programs in Perl. I think that you will find it to be a nice change. Perl is much better at being Perl than it is at being a slow version of C. You will be surprised at what you can get done when you write Perl programs instead of C.
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