Re: Let's face it, Perl *is* a scripting language

[BrowserUk]

Never having used Perl 4, I'd be really interested to see half a dozen or so examples of P4 -v- P5 code to demonstrate your point. I've acquired a passing awareness of some of the differences through osmosis. Eg. Hashes and arrays couldn't be nested? Though why not escapes me, when the both contain scalars and refs are scalars. Unless there were no refs in P4?

I guess my point is that for the old hands who did several years of P4 before the last 10 (?) of P5, your "Stop writing P4" argument may be enough, but for all those (like me, and maybe 30%, 40%, 50% (more?) of current users), that only came on board since P5, it alludes to something that seems like it probably makes sense, but without examples of what we are doing to offend you, the allusion is only fleeting. It lives in "Yeah! Right on! Like, you mean like... um... er"-land

[Ovid]

You can read some of the differences in this old perlfaq.

Just imagine trying to build a scalable system without lexical variables! When I did that in COBOL, we had horrible variable names like WS-GLJ0030R-ACCT-LIMIT to avoid collisions. Real fun! Oh, and in Perl 4, you had true globals by forcing variables whose names began with underscores into main::. This is often a convenience and you can see remants of this with variables like $_, $1, and so on. However, for programming larger systems, encouraging user-supplied globals is bad.

[nevyn]

So as someone else who started, many years ago, with Perl 5 ... I'd have to say, doesn't this take away from your argument? I've seen my share of "not great" perl, and most of it still used lexically scoped vars (AIUI Perl 4 used typeglobs a lot more too ... but that's also something I don't see).

If anyone said "oh, isn't that just a scripting language" to me recently, I'd be tempted to reply "What, like Java?"

[gellyfish]

For historical interest the examples from the first edition of "Programming Perl" can still be found here. There were no references, lexical variables or "use" for starters. But I think you'll get the flavour from the examples.

/J\

[krisahoch]

You can also look at this Excellent Perl 4 Resource >:-D