Kwan Lowe wrote:
On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 4:20 PM, Natxo Asenjo natxo.asenjo@gmail.com wrote:
It kind of gets boring to see Perl attacked for no reason. The problem
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As to Perl.. though it still is my preferred language for getting things done (mainly because I understand it that I first think out problems in Perl then convert to other languages), I have seen some bad, really bad Perl code..
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Some years ago I saw a piece of code that generated code... The generated code would individually load every element of an array with a zipcode for lookups. Yes... Rather than load the array directly, the code generated a perl script that, on each line, loaded a number into a new element of the array. The generated code was thousands of lines long, took an hour to start up, and needed a E250 to run. At the time my first thought was that the developer got paid based on the number of lines of code... Still can't imagine why he would take such an approach.
Um, that COBOL code I fixed? The program did nothing other than print labels, about 6 or 8 chars high, of six digits. Y'know, 44 44 44 44 4444444 44 44 ? So the previous programmer had written ->36<- (or was it 54?!) seperate data structures, *each* of which had 0-9. She didn't understand arrays at all.... I made one set up numbers, of course, and moved each structure in, which was how I cut about 1500 lines from the program....
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