htmlize {Edrx's Perl page} {
[P Perl goes on step beyond [L http://www.ccil.org/~esr/intercal/
Intercal] in that the intrincacies of Perl's syntax and semantics are
\"global\", in the sense that they require you to understand most of
the inner workings of the Perl interpreter to fix even the simplest
misbehaviour on your programs. Besides that Perl, being 20 years
younger than Intercal, and being so popular and overbloated, is *MUCH*
bigger than Intercal, and even the process that generates its binary
from a set of C files and some libraries written in a restricted Perl
is almost impossible to understand in full.]
[P Anyway, here are some tricks that helped me learn enough Perl to
write Perl scripts a few lines long, even calling the yucky, hackish,
pathologically-object-oriented standard libraries.]
[P eep
interactive
perldb
dump
w
context vars
vocabs
ioctl]
[P If you want a pretty language instead, one that is good for solving
\"real-life\", complex problems (in opposition to \"purely
administrative\" problems), take a look at Icon\; it only lacks a bit
more of interaction with the underlying Unix (sprintf, regexps,
bidirectional pipes), but that's being worked on.]
}