Assume that Perl has what you need

[petdance]

Consider this an add-on to my previous meditation "A corrolary to TMTOWTDI".

I'm digging into PL/SQL and I'm reading Oracle PL/SQL Programming by Steven Feuerstein. On page 31 of this 1,000-page monster, there's a section entitled "Assume that PL/SQL has what you need."

Programmers who are new to PL/SQL often make the mistake of starting their coding efforts before they are sufficiently familiar with everything the language has to offer. I have seen and heard of many instances where a developer spends valuable time writing procedures or functions that duplicate built-in functionality provided by PL/SQL.

Please don't write a function that looks through each character in a string until it finds a match and then returns the index of that match in the string. The INSTR function does this for you. Please don't write a function to convert your string from uppercase to lowercase by performing ASCII code-table shifting. Use the LOWER function instead.

Maybe that's the essence of it all. Maybe the key idea is for newbies to "assume that Perl has what you need."

Discuss.

xoxo,
Andy

%_=split/;/,".;;n;u;e;ot;t;her;c; ".   #   Andy Lester
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