strangest systems I've sent email from

[Raymond Wiker]

> On 29 Apr 2016, at 16:05 , Swift Griggs <swiftgriggs at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> While I know exactly what folks mean, I will attempt a weak defense. Perl 
> has extremely strong string manipulation features, including strong (and 
> easy) support for PCRE's. Those regex's are the main reason folks recoil 
> (because of how often they appear inline in Perl code). Also, if you ask 
> me, most folks beginning to code in a scripting language will produce some 
> nasty code. Since Perl attracted a large number of beginners, you'd often 
> run into line noise style code. However, just to play the devils advocate, 
> Perl can often pack a tremendous amount of logic and functionality in 
> those regex strings. It's often stuff that'd take dozens of lines of C for 
> me to reproduce.

The regular expression support in Perl is implemented in C, and are 
supposedly fairly fast. That didn't stop a Lisp programmer from implementing
PCREs in Lisp (that supposedly slow and inefficient language), and getting
better performance than Perl :-)