[Melbourne-pm] thanks and thoughts on Perl

John Thornton jdthornton at ozemail.com.au
Mon Dec 29 21:49:11 PST 2008


                 Thanks to all who responded. Now I have so much to think
about. This will probably be my last post on this list; I am not a Perl
programmer and will be looking into Python, Ruby etc lists that I do program
in. 

 

               My thoughts on how I like to learn to program:

 

             [1] Playing with the program after skimming through a tutorial.
For instance in python 3.0 it is interesting that 

 

                  4*'cat'

                  catcatcatcat 

 

                But I found this:

 

                0*'cat'

                ' '

 

                -5*'cat'

                ' ' 

 

               In other words any number<0 0r =0 multiplied by a string gets
the single quotes with nothing between. Can't work out why that is. 

 

            [2] Modifying a program that already works. For instance I took
a Ruby calculator program and added the ** exponentiation function to it. 

            [3] comparing the same idea in different languages such as a
loop.

 

              Perl and Java are very hard to do [1] and [2] with. [3] might
be possible in them. Ruby and Python are easy for doing all 3. Perl might be
a great language. But I have not found it to be beginner friendly for tyros
like me.    

 

          John 

 

                 

 

 

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