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Re: parsing markup with Perl

• From: "Tony Graham" <tgraham@mentea.net>
• To: "xml-dev@lists.xml.org OASIS" <xml-dev@lists.xml.org>
• Date: Sat, 8 Feb 2014 16:47:11 -0000 (GMT)

On Sat, February 8, 2014 2:20 pm, Michael Kay wrote:
>> They had unreadable code and it was driving them into the ground. My
>> takeaway was that Perl as it stood then required infeasibly much
>> commenting to be maintainable

That Perl, no doubt, but not all Perl.  If you were looking for a general
purpose scripting language in the early 90s, you would have picked Perl; a
few years later, and if you weren't already invested in Perl, you probably
would have picked Python; and now, you'd probably find some reason to use
JavaScript [1].

...
> Regular expressions seem to have two problems. The first is that they are

Which puts me in mind of the famous Jamie Zawinski line [2]:

  Jamie> Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know,
  Jamie> I'll use regular expressions."  Now they have two problems.

where the regular expression is the second problem.

But conflating regular expressions and Perl, as others have said, ignores
both the good things you can do with Perl and the bad things you can do
with regular expressions in any language.

Regards,


Tony Graham                                         tgraham@mentea.net
Consultant                                       http://www.mentea.net
Chair, Print and Page Layout Community Group @ W3C    XML Guild member
  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --
Mentea       XML, XSL-FO and XSLT consulting, training and programming

[1] E.g., https://npmjs.org/package/xsl-transform: Node.js package for a
command-line XSLT processor that requires a second node.js package that
requires libxslt, which, once installed, gives you a command-line XSLT
processor anyway.
[2]
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.emacs.xemacs/CyHb8HW-hKs/n1WCMEw5iCkJ

• Follow-Ups:
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    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>

• References:
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    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>
  • Re: parsing markup with Perl
    • From: Ihe Onwuka <ihe.onwuka@gmail.com>
  • Re: parsing markup with Perl
    • From: Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe@allette.com.au>
  • Re: parsing markup with Perl
    • From: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>