Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Regular expressions can get out of hand, but that's a developers (bad) choice. Perl lets you use multi-line regular expressions that ignore whitespace and allow end-of-line comments, which lets you properly document longer expressions if you need to use them.

Regular expressions are really powerful, and are so much better than the typical non-regex string operations most languages support. Combine that power with the ~= and qr operators, which make regexes as integral to the language syntax as == and "", and you get why Perl is so good at textual searching, parsing, and manipulation. It's easily what I miss most about Perl development since my career has moved to primarily C# and Javascript.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: