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Re: Scheme disutility

To: scsh-news@martigny.ai.mit.edu
Subject: Re: Scheme disutility
From: tadmc@flash.net (Tad McClellan)
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 1997 18:43:35 -0500
Organization: Flashnet Communications, http://www.flash.net
Richard Cobbe (cobbe@rice.edu) wrote:
: 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
                                        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I expect that giacomo was referring to the free documentation
that is included with the perl distribution.

wc -l *.pod

Tells me there are 27164 lines of it.

At 66 lines a page, that is over 400 pages. And it's free!

grepping in there answers about 90% of the questions I get...


: 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.)


--
    Tad McClellan                          SGML Consulting
    Tag And Document Consulting            Perl programming
    tadmc@flash.net

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