From: "Elaine -HFB- Ashton" <ela...@chaos.wustl.edu>

One point I haven't seen mentioned yet.... "Perl is a mess and that's good because the problem space is also a mess." - Larry Wall

Perl deals with hard problems. Non-complex problems are easy to understand and maintain.

print join ",", map { &{$field_info{$_}{format}}($deal) } @fields;

Obfusticated? Yep. But when I separated content and formatting in C I used horrors like **pointer_to_function_arrays inside structs. Very efficient. Very hard to maintain. And no neat little one-liners to dig what I wanted out of it.

In perl I code crappy looking workable solutions to a hard problems (anybody got A* search code, BTW). For easy stuff I can use Basic :-)))