March 2001
Intermediate to advanced
288 pages
4h 56m
English
Content preview from Perl Debugged
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1.4. Know the Language
Just as every country has its customs, so does every computer language. We use a language best when we adopt its customs rather than pretend we know better and try to force this new language to fit our old prejudices.
 | Years ago, after I had been working on my first mainframe (an ICL 1903T running George III), I was introduced to my second (technically, a minicomputer: a VAX 11/780 running VAX/VMS). I spent some time defining symbols in the new operating system so that I could type the same commands for listing files, etc., I used in the old one. A wiser programmer nearby inquired, “Why would you want to make VMS look like ... |