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Postings from September 2000
Russ Allbery wrote: > > I've found the use of use English in code I had to maintain to be annoying > and unhelpful, and to actually degrade the maintainability of the code [snip] > I've yet to understand why I'd *want* to use English regularly; so far as > I can tell, it has essentially no benefit in the long term. [snip] > I know it's not the only stance to take, but I prefer to try to make my > Perl code very readable by people who know Perl, and encourage people who > don't know Perl who are trying to read my code to learn Perl first, or at > the same time. [snip] > use English doesn't really address the syntactical points of Perl that > make it hard to read for someone who doesn't know Perl; it strikes me, and > always has struck me, as a bad partial solution to a problem that may not > need to be solved and that only makes things more complicated in the long > run. Y'know, I couldn't have said this better myself. :-) I've always felt that "use English" was a waste of time and effort, a bandaid trying to act as a tourniquet. Using Randal's code: /foo/ && print while <>; Note that "use English" here does nothing to improve the horribly unreadable - yet beautifully succinct and flexible - syntax that is Perl. My personal feeling is that I'd love "use English" to be expunged from the language altogether - it's unnecessary bloat that only increases the number of mistakes that people can make. But I'm not sure if I have the guts to write that RFC just yet. ;-) -NateThread Previous | Thread Next