Re: Learning Perl as a First (programming) language

[Abigail-II]

Well, you are forgetting a my $i if you want to have equivalent code. I maintain the code is nearly identical - there's a few lines more in C, which look a lot for such a short program, but it wasn't linear in the size of the Perl program. Had you have had 100 of such loops, you'd have had the same amount of extra lines.

I never claimed that C would have been a better choice than Perl. Instead, I said that I didn't consider C a good first language either. IMO there's only one reason to learn C before learning Perl and that's because there's so much of C in Perl. It makes you a better Perl programmer.

Abigail

[talexb]

Well, you are forgetting a my $i if you want to have equivalent code.
No, :) I purposefully left it out, in order to demonstrate the point that Perl will autovivify a variable for you, while C will just throw an error. I also purposefully did not use strict or include the she-bang line.

--t. alex

"Mud, mud, glorious mud. Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood!"
--Michael Flanders and Donald Swann