i have to agree with the other posts that the terseness of some of the syntax is a pretty poor way to compare two languages.

especially when all the examples are chosen with a bias. let's look at some other aspects of the syntax:

#perl
$foo .= $bar;
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#python
foo.append(bar);
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# perl
$foo =~ s/\W//g;
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#python
import re
foo = re.sub(foo,'\W','')
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my point is that with contrived examples, you can probably argue it any way you want. with perl's flexibility i've found that i can write overall shorter programs in perl than in python even if some of the individual statements are longer.

if all you care about is terse syntax, you'll love colorForth: here's an IDE driver written in one page of code.

anders pearson