Re^7: how to deal with incorrect command line argument

[muba]

Nah, barely. The line of code just shows what Perl is good at: using minimalist building blocks, combining into something actually meaningful.

In itself, the ternary operator ?: is not so surprising. It makes its appearance in many languages, such as C, C++, C# (I believe), Obj-C (I believe), Java (I believe), JavaScript, and likely many more.

Statement modifiers also aren't very mention-worthy, in that many languages in the C-family allow you to

if (THIS)
    THAT;

Whereas Perl requires the curly braces around it:

if (THIS) {
    THAT;
}

But not if you write it as

THAT if THIS;

So statement modifiers are just one of those things in Perl's syntax that make Perl Perl, however it's not something we don't know in one form or another from other languages.

[marinersk]

Yeah, I remember the ternary iffrom C; didn't use it very much. I'd rather write code that a new developer can read slightly more englishly, and the braces, newlines, and indentation give a fair bit of intuition to where the code is going.

I know I carry a lot of that prejudice into my Perl, but I rarely get complaints about my Perl being unreadable (only my variable names, which I staunchly continue to lay out in my peculiar 3x2 format -- but the code itself almost never gets complaints).