(Ovid - accidental obfuscation?)Re: Perverse Unreadable Code

[Ovid]

I strongly sympathize with your point of view. There are clearly those out there who write code that is not meant to be read. On the other hand, sometimes unreadable is churned out as a matter of course. From a program I'm currently writing:

%author = map  { /^\d{6}$/ ? $_ : [ split( /\|/, $_, 2 ) ] }
          map  { split( /=/, $_, 2 ) } 
          grep { /^\d{6}=[^|]+\|/ } <FH>;

Frankly, I can't say that I'm happy with the illegibility that this code presents to the average programmer. Heck, a few months ago, I wouldn't even have been able to read it. Now, however, I sat down and simply wrote it out. There was only one bug (forgetting the third argument to split) and it worked fine.

While I'll need to stop and read through that when I come across that again, it really seems to be the most straightforward "Perlish" way of writing that. Further, once one develops a high comfort level with Perl, such constructs become (dare I say?) natural.

Much of the trouble that people have with such things stems from the large amounts of punctuation. This has the unfortunate side-effect of steepening Perl's learning curve. Your patience in learning such things, though, will reward you handsomely in the long run as your ability to harness the full power of Perl develops.

Side note: do any monks use English for any production code? I've heard about the module and see how it makes Perl more legible, but I've never seen anyone actually use it.

Cheers,
Ovid

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