Re: Announcing new scripting/prototyping language

["Frank J. Lhota" <NOSPAM.lhota.adarose@verizon.net>]

"Dan Pop" <Dan.Pop@cern.ch> wrote in message
news:c00men$rdu$8@sunnews.cern.ch...
> It is perfectly possible to write Perl code that is as readable as
> well written C code.  And it is perfectly possible to write C code that
> is as unreadable as badly written Perl code.
>
> It's not the tool, it's the way it's used.  Unfortunately, many Perl
> tutorials encourage conciseness at the expense of readability.  I started
> to like Perl only when I realised that I don't have to follow the
> tutorial's examples in my own coding.

Good point. Even APL can be written in a readable fashion. (After all, APL
started as a documentation language!) A lot of the readability problems are
due more to the culture around programming languages, rather than the
limitations of the languages itself. One wonders how much obfuscated C might
have been avoided if introductory C texts did not present the following as
an acceptable way to copy a null-terminated string:

    while( *s++ = *t++ )
        ;