Compiles to Tcl byte codes
Compiles to Tcl byte codes
Perl has a lot of good ideas and things I find myself missing a lot when I use Python or JS (autovivification being probably #1) but IMO these one or two symbol magic variables would generally be improved if they were more descriptive, with maybe one exception for $_/@_.
Although I must admit reminiscing about this made me realize how much I miss Perl now that I'm forced to use Python for work.
These ultra terse shorthands make some sense in the shell because it's meant for interactive, write-only commands but a scripting language should be a little more verbose and consistent IMO.
while (buf = <>)
did. So I didn't want to invent a new syntax, there is way too much of that going on, I like C, I like perl, pull the useful stuff from each and move on.
I freely admit it's not how everyone would do it.
I think <> as a fancy readline and _ as a default/throwaway variable does really improve readability and lowers the mental load of understanding programs.
If you're already aware that ARGV exists, you'll guess that ARGF might be used in relation to it, and so when writing a CLI program that uses ARGV, you might wonder if ARGF could simplify your code and look up what it is/does.
Yet another horrible hack in Perl that for some reason is advocated for. Optional chaining / null propagation is a much, much better idea and shouldn’t have been any harder to implement.
Null propagation is nice too, but it doesn't address all the uses cases of autovivification when you have, say, a hash table of arrays and you want to insert a new entry in an array, creating it if it doesn't exist. In python you have to use setdefault which I always found clunky.
You can bind to a non-existing hash element (even multiple levels deep) and it won't exist until you actually assign to it:
my %h;
my $c := %h<a><b><c>;
say %h<a>:exists; # False
$c = 42;
say %h<a>:exists; # TrueMy 3rd rewrite was very stylized and, I felt, maintainable. Which proved to be true as I had to fix bugs in it.
I did weird stuff like using $whatever as the index into the @whatever array.
But I digress. On the <>, Little has argv so you can do
int main(string argv[]) { int i; string buf; FILE f;
if (defined(argv[1]) && streq(argv[1], "-") && !defined(argv[2])) {
while (buf = <STDIN>) bputs(buf);
} else {
for (i = 1; defined(argv[i]); i++) {
if (defined(f = fopen(argv[i], "r")) {
while (buf = <f>) puts(buf);
fclose(f);
} else {
fprintf(stderr, "unable to open '%s'\n", argv[i]);
}
}
}
return (0);but why would you want to when all of that is
int main(string argv[]) { string buf;
while (buf = <>) puts(buf);
return (0);I mean, come on, that's cat(1) in 8 lines of code.
edit: I need to learn hacker markup. My code looks like crap.
int main(string argv[]) { string buf;
while (buf = <>) puts(buf);
return (0);
}