New Zealand (South Island)
Seth Kenlon is a UNIX geek, free culture advocate, independent multimedia artist, and D&D nerd. He has worked in the film and computing industry, often at the same time. He is one of the maintainers of the Slackware-based multimedia production project Slackermedia.
Authored Comments
Thanks for the tips. I think you and I differ in our approach to education, but ultimately that's to the benefit of readers.
I'd love to get more Perl content on Opensource.com, so if you're looking for another outlet please do get in touch.
Thank you for your helpful comments, Mr. Cross!
I'm glad you're enjoying the say() function. Unlike print(), it adds a newline automatically, so it's a great thing to know. However, I think reinforcing awareness of newlines in programming is helpful for new programmers, because when you have a function that doesn't automatically include them, you understand why you need to insert \n or endl or whatever.
Explicit ampersands are a matter of preference. We stand by this.
We use UTF8 for the same reason we use print(). To many people, UTF8 isn't something they think about, so we use it as a way to reinforce its importance. It will be the default in Perl soon anyway, but for now it's something we use explicitly.
Thanks for reading our article!
In the words of Larry Wall: TMTOWTDI ("There's more than one way to do it".)