T> On Tue, 25 Feb 2014 16:29:00 -0500, Charlton Wilbur
T> I know what assembly language is, so I understand what you
T> mean. But those words may confuse people who only want to learn
T> enough Perl to solve their immediate problem.
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.
T> It's not always wise to say everything you know.
And it is inordinately foolish to ask idiotic questions and expect to
not have the idiocy pointed out.
The question wasn't idiotic. It was somewhat academic (Solve problem A
without using obvious feature X), but that's often a good way to learn,
and especially in an interpreted language it is often worthwhile to use
complex builtins instead of explicitely coding a loop (less interpreter
overhead).
It is - well, I'd like to avoid words like "foolish" or "idiotic" here -
not useful to give an answer which is obviously true at some level, but
doesn't match the level of the question. Yes, using perl to run Perl
programs always involves loops. The compiler will loop over the source
text building the byte code[1], the interpreter will loop over the byte
code. Many primitive operations will also involve loops. @a = @b will
loop over both arrays. m/foo.*bar/ will loop over $_ and the pattern.
But at the level of the Perl language these are primitive operations,
not loops.
hp
[1] Is there a more generic term for this? It's not *byte* code after
all.