Phoenix.pm: Re: Processing Dates

[Victor Odhner]

Scott Walters wrote:
 > I hadn't heard the phrase "table driven" since my
 > COBOL instructor in technical college used it
 > 12 years ago. People say "configurable" a lot
 > these days which isn't as specific ...

Perl makes "table driven" a much more powerful concept,
because setting up a few hashes absolutely kicks butt
compared to what you could do in the Ancient Languages.

I mean, basically to set up a table where you could
do a lookup using a string as a key required a whole
layer of implementation.  You had to write the hash
stuff, or the tree-search stuff, or fer gosh sakes
do a serial search.  COBOL actually came the closest,
because it made Indexed Sequential files so easy to
use, so you could put your tables out there on disk
if you couldn't do them in memory.

The next level is the pipe-delimited config file
that you have your Perl program slurp up.  You write
while + split, and stuff the information into a few
hashes, and with a few lines of code the program
*knows stuff*.  That's just so cool!

Back in the day, I programmed in ALGOL and COBOL and
PL/I and C and a few shells, but the hashes and regular
expressions in Perl have kept me away from most of that
stuff for most of the past eight years.  Perl just works.

But I don't write Perl scripts.  I write programs.
There's a difference in attitude between those two words.

Vic

P.S. -- How the heck did I get "slowass.net" tacked onto
my address for this list?  Egad.
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