sorting pathnames by basename

[pll at lanminds.com]

In a message dated: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 19:18:32 EDT
"Derek D. Martin" said:

>1. Perl seems to favor supporting a variety of features with obscure,
>meaningless, two-character variables that might be clearer with flags
>or arguments to functions that make use of it.


Define obscure please.  Everything in the perl language is tediously 
and breathtakingly documented and quickly accessible to any system on 
which perl has been installed using either the 'man' or 'perldoc' 
commands.

>Whereas in many ways, Perl seems to have gone
>out of its way to work like other common Unix tools/languages (shell
>scripting, C, sed/grep), in others it seems to go out of its way to do
>things in such a way as to be as confusing as possible.

Example?

>2.  The people who like to program Perl seem to have a propensity to
>prefer to write code which takes advantage of all the obscure
>features, and generally to write code which is unreadable.

Well, I guess it depends upon how well you know the language.  I can 
say the same for just about any language I've ever looked at.
For example, the C code in libc is about as obscure undecipherable as 
it gets :)

>I reject the notion that it is not possible to write readable code in
>Perl.  I prefer to think that Perlheads just like it that way.  =8^)

I think a lot also has to do with coding style.  People who write 
unreadable code will do so in any language.  I ardently comment my 
code far more than the average programmer, IMO.  Partially because I 
can seldom remember what I did in 6 months, and partially because if 
I were to pass my code around, I want whomever I'm passing it to 
immediately be able to understand what I was thinking.

I think the problem with JAPHs (or "PerlHeads" as you call them) 
forget that there may be others who don't know the language as well 
as they do.  Additionally, they're also quite expert programmers who 
also don't believe in commenting their code, believing the code 
should speak for itself :)

-- 

Seeya,
Paul
--
	It may look like I'm just sitting here doing nothing,
   but I'm really actively waiting for all my problems to go away.

	 If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right!