Those </> things exist as an optimisation, they remove the need for backtracking and give a huge performance boost within the method I'm currently using.

Sure it's been around for a long time, I just personally believe it's properties have not yet been fully explored or utilised, and attempts to do so in such things as Microsoft XaML and horror of horrors Coldfusion, have so far been lame, constrictive, unimaginative and overly verbose.

I believe the approache itself has merit and that a much better result can be attained. I bet Microsoft had a team of dozens and spent millions on R&D for XaML, and it still sucks... I've spent £0.00p on aXML and I'm working alone. My solution isn't perfect, it's not fast enough yet but I'm just one guy and I have limits.

As for looking on CPAN about templating engines I can name a number of them without stopping to look. I just don't like the idea that you have to build an interpreted templating mini-language system on top of the interpreted fully fledged language which is Perl itself. I'm all for separation of concerns, but I'm also for Keep it Simple.

Why does it have to be an improvement, why can't it just be an odd little tangent? I'm sensing a real culture of competitiveness here which I am neither interested in nor currently capable of being part of.

Said the Tortoise to the Hare, your solution is very fast... but I will arrive at that destination at the end.

Besides, improvements are relative concepts, and improvements in one direction can often be detriments to other directions. If you compare aXML with XaML it's nearest cousin I've been able to find, then you see aXML is vastly superior. That's comparing apples and apples. If you want to know how much better of an Orange aXML is compared to say catalyst, then I'm sorry but it's not a fair comparison!

Slang there for instance is great for applying small markup masks to hash value stashes, it's very fast and the new version which I haven't released yet allows you store and reference the result with what I'm calling a glue argument.

Perhaps given your huge and vastly superior knowledge of CPAN, you can direct me to an equally simple and powerful little tool that does the same thing, preferably one whose source code has no dependencies and is less than 5KB in size.

There you just admitted it! QUOTE : we're simply not impressed with what you're posting END-QUOTE ... in other words, we are high and mighty on a high horse of superiority and unless you do things the way we do them, then your sub-human and worthy of scorn derision, begone.. untermensch, troll, I'm just going to anonymously click you down without even so much as talking to you as your so far beneath _ME_...

That my friend is called BIGOTRY. One of the things I like most about Perl and the world of Perl is the core concept of TIMTOWTDI, a concept which unfortunately is touted far more frequently than it is followed.

There you go with your quick to judge, we know best and are perfect narcissistic attitude.

I have programmed systems in the following languages :

• x86 ASM
• C
• Pascal
• Prolog
• Lisp
• Ada
• Fortran
• Cobol
• Perl
• PHP
• ASP
• Java

Of that list only 3 of them have been any fun. Specifically, C ASM and PERL.

I've been around a lot longer than you realise, and I suspect I'm quite a bit older than you realise. But then making assumptions and attacks based on them is something you high and mighty can get away with whilst simultaneously condemning in others. That my dear colleague, is called Hypocrisy.

President clinton, and who was it, Monika Lewinsky? At that specific point in time I was flunking college by doing far too many all night caffeine powered sessions competing with an student friend of mine to see who could make the fastest texture mapper / gourad shader. (I won).

Whilst my head was in the clouds of fixed point maths, negotiating with multidimensional arrays and counting clock ticks for ASM commands in the inner loops, my COBOL assignment was forgotten about (and with it went my career).

Still it was a blast, and personally I blame Denthor of Asphyxia for setting me off!

Mmmmm polygons line by line... write a word not a byte, double the speed!

Coming back on topic, why would I waste my time by studying things that are obsolete? This was the same gripe I had with COBOL, in 1996 it was already obsolete, so why on earth would I want to study it?

Most of the computing world thinks Perl is obsolete, and won't study it. Now personally I think there is room for someone to write some sort of rosetta stone book for all the various approaches which exist in Perl. The mantra is supposed to be easy things easy, hard things possible... but lately with all the additions that have been made and the complete cluster-frack of ways to do it, easy things are not easy anymore. How many times have you had to fight CPAN when it won't install without force? How many times have you typed install "foo", only to have to wait half an hour while all the dependancies are installed... this is not simple.

It might seem simple when you have all the requisite knowledge and know how to fix any errors that occur during installation, but for the rest of us mere mortals, learning Perl and the "kosher" methods prescribed by the gods, is an uphill experience with constant battles and frustrations and digging for nuggets of information. Against that backdrop its no wonder Perl's marketshare continues to decline.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't blame Perl at all for this. There was a time when Perl was entirely a procedural language, simple, elegant and the best way to get results quick. Overtime all the fads like OOP have been bolted on layer after layer, and it's only recently that things have started to get better with things like Moose.

Do you really think that if Perl as it stands is so perfect, that Larry is mistaken in wanting to break nearly everything and remove all the layers of "cruft" that have grown around it? Do you think he's doing that for the sake of his health? Wake UP and smell the coffee. Perl is being slowly choked to death by creeping vines of complexity, and I'm sorry but as far as I'm concerned your lovely Perl5 based frameworks and solutions are on the verge of becoming obsolete, as Perl 6 looms closer, and a complete rethink of EVERYTHING is not only warranted at this point but absolutely vital to the future of the language.

Just read that bit about inexperienced noobs, f*** you and the high horse your riding.

QUOTE: astonished at your own cleverness END-QUOTE.

Well that bring's me to my own point.

Your projecting your own high and mighty superiority all over what I'm doing without having a clue as to my situation, background, reasons or motives. Your making assumption after assumption, and your showing off the fact that outside of your mighty knowledge of Perl and the "kosher" methods, you are infact extremely narrow-minded, bigoted and hypocritical.

Take your humble pie, and insert it in your meatspace waste fuel ejection pipe. Good day.