Hi, I tried to stay out of this obscure discussion but I recently had the luck to talk to Larry Wall and he had some nice relevant comments that I would like to share with all of you ... Oliver Smith writes:
And the thing to remember is that Perl is a language of optimisations; it's a scripting language not a system programming language. When you can use a perl optimisation without entering an obfuscation contest, it is always worth using them.
But Larry assurred me that writing a registry database in perl is a good thing to do, however, we should not have made this fact public for the people that are not 'enlightened' yet ... (Editorial comment: I don't know if the following is blasphemy but: I am not sure if I can fully agree since many people that know me, know that I actually already think for many years that a more solid foundation for such a piece of important software is a good thing (TM))
That said, I personally find it's just easier not to argue with the nano-second saving perlmeisers :-); perlers are a very religious bunch, with a tendency to opt out of the laziness principle when it comes to discussing SEC (someone elses code).
To add some more religion to the discussion: Do not forget Larry's philosophy which applies her quite well: There's More Than One Way To Do It! David K. ---