Keith Devens .com

Perl inflexible with abstractions

Because of Perl's extreme DWIMmetry, and use of different syntaxes for similar things, it winds up being often less flexible from an abstraction standpoint than more regular languages like even Java are capable of being.

For instance, you can do a while(<FOO>){} loop with an open filehandle. If you open a filehandle like this: open $foo, 'filename' - then you can do it like: while(<$foo>){}. Perl will also let you read from an array like this: while(<@foo>){}, but because Perl insists on using different syntaxes for these things, I can't make the subject of the same while loop be either an array or a file (or a socket, etc.).

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22:20 (utc-4)