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Comment by bloblaw | Hacker News Reader

This sounds wrong...so I thought I'd see what Notepad++ has built into its syntax highlighting lexer (langs.model.xml):

  * ~ 35, Python
  * ~ 53, Java
  * ~ 59, Ruby
  * ~189, Bash 
  * ~253, Perl   <===== 
  * ~928, PHP

Perl has a higher keyword count than Ruby or Python, but remember Perl's keyword list includes its core socket/network library (which Ruby/Python/Java don't contain in theirs...according to Notepad++).

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Core network as well as many POSIX functions which other languages place in sub-modules (but still use the same names for). eg select() vs IO.select or mkdir() vs FileUtils.mkdir.

OP is clearly thinking of PHP.

It's a language design choice too - Perl very deliberately has different keywords for different data types. So we have "+" for numbers and "." for strings. ">" for numbers, "gt" for strings - and so on. The argument being that what you spend in having to remember multiple keywords you gain back in increased code clarity.

> but remember Perl's keyword list includes its core socket/network library

And it is being mooted that these will be moved out into core modules at some point (ref: http://lwn.net/Articles/458714/).

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