[PLUG] Is PHP a good intro programming language?

Felix Lee felix.1 at canids.net
Tue Feb 4 15:10:02 UTC 2003


merlyn at stonehenge.com (Randal L. Schwartz):
> You're being pedantic.  The only difference between the two
> is that the second one will stop one line early if the last
> line is "0" without a newline.
> 
> That's such a rare case that Perl programmers didn't worry about it
> for 11 years of Perl's existence.

yes, that's not the point.  the point is the difference
between undef and '' and '0' and 0 is important.  if someone
doesn't know why the two loops are not identical, then I'd
be wary of their understanding of Perl booleans in general.
there are way too many cargo-cult programmers out there.

yes, I'm being pedantic.  there's a normal tension between
programming as mathematics and programming as engineering.
this is not going to go away anytime soon.
--




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