Perl is driving me crazy...

Recently I'm setting up Blosxom (pronounced "blossom", or "blogsome") as the blog platform for our department. It is an extremely simple Perl script that scans a directory (recursively) for .txt files and displays them accordingly as blog posts.

If you has been visiting here regularly, you should have known that I've learnt a little bit about PHP in the previous month. So now I finally know about one should declare a variable in PHP like $var1: that's how Perl does it.

However, Perl has so much difference from what I've learnt before. Now I'm almost a newbie (again). For example, one write else if (...) in C/C++/JavaScript and elseif (...) in PHP. But in Perl, you'll see something new: elsif (...)! Guess that the Perl inverter is too lazy to type an extra "e" and space... -__-|||

There are many more weird operators and syntax that I've never seen. But I won't list them here or the page would be toooooo long...

One thing that I don't like about Perl is the lack of pointers. Say I need to make changes to a variable with a very long reference chain (e.g. $hash->{'a'}->{'very'}->{'long'}->{'reference'}) many times in a sub (subroutine/function). What I want is to save this reference to a temporarily pointer, and then dereference it to assign new value to it. In JavaScript, reducing object chains can help improve performance. For example, instead of:

for ( var i = 0; i < window.document.forms[0].length; i++ )
{
    window.alert( window.document.forms[0].elements[i].value );
}

one should save the references with variables:

var myForm = window.document.forms[0];
for ( var i = 0, len = myForm.length; i < len; i++ )
{
    window.alert( myForm.elements[i].value );
}

or use for-in (not support in IE though):

var myForm = window.document.forms[0];
for ( var i in myForm )
{
    window.alert( myForm.elements[i].value );
}

I know there are something known as soft/hard references but I can't get it works. Maybe I typed it wrongly. By the way, tell me if you know how to do it.

Anyway, I'm ok with it. Just give me some time... I think I will soon write some very l33t Perl programs/modules (that no one will understand)!