Re: Bind Module for Perl

[Sergei Steshenko <sergstesh yahoo com>]

--- On Fri, 12/31/10, Florian Ragwitz <rafl debian org> wrote:

> From: Florian Ragwitz <rafl debian org>
> Subject: Re: Bind Module for Perl
> To: gtk-perl-list gnome org
> Date: Friday, December 31, 2010, 7:17 AM
> Jens Luedicke <jens luedicke gmail com>
> writes:
>
> > I recently started to do some Perl hacking again and
> missed a few
> > syntactic notations I knew from C++.
>
> FWIW, those notations exist in C++ mostly because the
> language doesn't
> have proper closures, which Perl does have.
>
> > The syntax is basically the same. My approach is just
> a little
> > different (maybe with a little more overhead). The
> syntax offered by
> > Class::bind is probably more readable (which is very
> important to me).
>
> Readability is important. However, you might want to
> consider that a
> very fundamental feature of the Perl language is quite
> likely to be
> *much* more readable to Perl programmers than a module
> reinventing that
> feature so one can do the same thing with different
> syntax.
[snip]
.

Exactly. C++ is a _very_ unreadable language; to prove this here is a
simple task to implement in C++ - translate the following _legal_ code
in Perl:

#------------------------------------------------------
my $some_coeff = 1.5;

my $hash_ref =
  {
  yet_another_hash =>
    {
    one => 1,
    two => 2
    },

  array_of_hashes =>
    [
      {
      name => 'John',
      address => '1 Mary st'
      },

      {
      name => 'Paul',
      address => '5 James st'
      }
    ],

  a_method_with_two_closures =>
    do{
      my $another_coeff = 3.0;

      sub # anonymous subroutine
        {
        my ($x) = @_;

        $some_coeff * $another_coeff * $x; # the returned value
        }
      }
  };
#------------------------------------------------------

into C++. You'll see how horrendously user unfriendly C++ (syntax) is.

I.e. you'll first of all see how difficult is to write all this in C++.

You'll see how much extra characters (what Perl bigots call "character
noise") you'll need to introduce into your C++ notation.

Perl is not "C" and actually was not meant to be, and it's good. Nor Perl
is C++, and one of fundamental differences is that in Perl constructor
_does_ return a value.

As my first exercise in C++ I tried to implement Perl hierarchical data
structures, and after that I realized how inconvenient C++ is.

Regards,
  Sergei.