On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 11:00 AM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote: >>>> Reminds me of the *only* O'Reilly book I didn't like: I think it was >>>> Larry's original book on Perl - the index was *dreadful*, couldn't find >>>> anything. >>> >>> On the other hand, if you wrote a perl program following those >>> examples, it would almost certainly still run today, with the only >>> change it might need being to escape @ symbols that you had in >>> double-quoted strings. That's pretty rare. >> >> Well, yes. And I can do the same with my favorite language of all, ANSI C. > > Umm, yeah - now. In 1987 when perl was released you'd have been using > K&R C which needed some changes when compilers started demanding the > syntax from the ANSI changes. Or worse, some compiler with it's own > unique syntax. And I forgot my favorite issue with 'C': a failing 'include' is fatal. So, even though the language is mostly portable you can't, within the language, write code that will compile across systems that provide different include files. So you have to use some other less portable preprocessing toolset to get your code to a point where the compiler has a chance of accepting it - something that has turned into one of the most arcane arts you are likely to ever see. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com