Re: Perl, the new generation

On Thu 17 May, Michael G Schwern wrote:
> On Wed, May 16, 2001 at 11:58:07AM -0400, Adam Turoff wrote:
> > It's not so much that Perl shouldn't have data structures or modules.
> > I think what Stephen is saying (and he's not the only one) is that
> > the bare minimum amount of Perl you *must* know to be productive
> > is increasing.  Either that, or we're giving the impression that
> > it's increasing.
> 
> We could provide a seperate man page (perlsmall?) which describes this
> mini-language-within-a-language.  It would skip things like OO (or
> only as much as you need to use the occasional CPAN module), Unicode,
> odd syntax details, etc... and focus on things like basic regexes,
> string and file handling, basic data structures, map, grep, etc...
> 

Many years ago I had dealings with a language which was effectivly documented
in a two diminsional manner.  

It had a very brief introduction, then you could read the first section 
of each chapter to get a language over view - enough for simple use,
then if you needed the depth you read the other sections.  The book
even had a two dimensional contents matrix at the front.

This worked (for me).

Richard

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