June 08, 2002
You have to love perl, even if you don't use it

What other language calls design documents apocalypses?

In in what other language would these design documents contain marvelous paragraphs like the following


Let's face it, in the culture of computing, regex languages are mostly considered second-class citizens, or worse. "Real" languages like C and C++ will exploit regexes, but only through a strict policy of apartheid. Regular expressions are our servants or slaves; we tell them what to do, they go and do it, and then they come back to say whether they succeeded or not.

At the other extreme, we have languages like Prolog or Snobol where the pattern matching is built into the very control structure of the language. These languages don't succeed in the long run because thinking about that kind of control structure is rather difficult in actual fact, and one gets tired of doing it constantly. The path to freedom is not to make everyone a slave.

However, I would like to think that there is some happy medium between those two extremes. Coming from a C background, Perl has historically treated regexes as servants. True, Perl has treated them as trusted servants, letting them move about in Perl society better than any other C-like language to date. Nevertheless, if we emancipate regexes to serve as co-equal control structures, and if we can rid ourselves of the regexist attitudes that many of us secretly harbor, we'll have a much more productive society than we currently do. We need to empower regexes with a sense of control (structure). It needs to be just as easy for a regex to call Perl code as it is for Perl code to call a regex.

You've got to love it. Even if you don't want to use it, you've got to love it!

Posted by Claus at June 08, 2002 03:27 PM
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