Kwan Lowe wrote: > On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 4:20 PM, Natxo Asenjo <natxo.asenjo at gmail.com> > wrote: >> >> It kind of gets boring to see Perl attacked for no reason. The problem <snip> >>> 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.. <snip> > 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.... mark