19 Larry Wall Quotes on Syntax

Larry Wall quotes on syntax

2. And don't tell me there isn't one bit of difference between null and space, because that's exactly how much difference there is. :-)

32. If I allowed 'next $label' then I'd also have to allow 'goto $label', and I don't think you really want that... :-)

51. > (It's sorta like sed, but not. It's sorta like awk, but not. etc.) Guilty as charged. Perl is happily ugly, and happily derivative.

72. So far we've managed to avoid turning Perl into APL. :-)

90. True, it returns ' ' for false, but ' ' is an even more interesting number than 0.

130. I surely do hope that's a syntax error.

145. That gets us out of deciding how to spell Reg[eE]xp?|RE . . . Of course, then we have to decide what ref $re returns... :-)

152. There's something to be said for returning the whole syntax tree.

170. And other operators aren't so special syntactically, but weird in other ways, like 'scalar', and 'goto'.

183. I suppose you could switch grammars once you've seen 'use strict subs'. :-)

215. If this were Ada, we'd simply doc it as 'erroneous'.

216. So I'm thinking about ??, or !!, or //, or \, or whatever. But I think I like ?? the best so far. Or the least worst.

264. /* This bit of chicanery makes a unary function followed by a parenthesis into a function with one argument, highest precedence. */

274. The autodecrement is not magical.

276. When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi.

291. :I also discovered Larry's First Law of Language Redesign: Everyone wants the colon.

292. Larry's 2nd Law of Language Redesign: Larry gets the colon.

299. Interestingly enough, since subroutine declarations can come anywhere, you wouldn't have to put BEGIN {} at the beginning, nor END {} at the end. Interesting, no? I wonder if Henry would like it. :-)

309. I knew I'd hate COBOL the moment I saw they'd used 'perform' instead of 'do'.