Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Regularly expressing

So I haven't been posting very much recently ... here's what I've been doing:

http://www.burlingtoncommunityschools.org

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Perl, which stands for "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language" (or "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister," depending on who you're talking to), is one of the more popular languages for writing web applications. It is particularly well-adapted for web applications because it has very powerful tools for dealing with text(s), which is, after all, what the internet is made up of.

Perl scripts include a lot of slashes (and hash-marks, and other punctuation used in strange ways). Most often, these are to denote "regular expressions."

While regular expressions are indeed a thing of sublime beauty, I have to say I find the punctuational thrift of Perl terribly confusing.

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