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Re: Scheme disutility

To: scsh-news@martigny.ai.mit.edu
Subject: Re: Scheme disutility
From: cobbe@rice.edu (Richard Cobbe)
Date: 29 Apr 1997 18:24:32 GMT
Organization: Rice University
Reply-to: cobbe@rice.edu
giacomo boffi (boffi@rachele.stru.polimi.it) wrote:
> Richard Coleman <coleman@math.gatech.edu> writes:
> > What's make tcl/tk and perl good languages is that they are general
> > purpose hammers.

>   may i add that their developers apparently love to write good
>   documentation?

I disagree.  I own copies of both the Camel and Llama books.  The
first one, "Learning Perl", does a decent job as a language
introduction.  The second book, I think, tries to be both a tutorial
and a reference manual.  This has the result that it does neither
well.  There's too much information, and it's too dense, so it's not a
good tutorial/intro.  Plus, the material isn't organized in a very
useful or findable fashion, so it's not particularly useful as a
reference.  (Yes, I know about the chapter containing function
definitions; I'm referring mostly to syntactic rules, regexps, file
operators, and so forth.)

I haven't read the tcl/tk docs, so I can't comment on those, but I
would have constructed the Perl docs very differently.

Richard

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