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Message: [QUOTE="ccc31807, post: 4872051"] Ben, I like Perl a lot, and I've developed enough proficiency in Perl to do useful work and earn a living with it. I said this with my tongue partly in my cheek, and without meaning to give reasons for avoiding it. People can consider Perl ugly with all the punctuation characters, just as Larry Wall can consider Lisp ugly with all the parens (his remark about Lisp looking like oatmeal with finger nail clippings.) The OO and reference hacks are also convoluted, with arrays and hashes only holding scalar values. This caused the convoluted assignment statements which you objected to, i.e., $hash{$anotherhash{$k}{'key}} ('realkey'}. If you keep your data structures in mind, it's easy to write these references without thinking, but hard to read them when the data structures are out of mind. In the thread on c.l.l. ("another frustrating learner question, CLOS") I wrote a fairly extended defense of REs, which was the original point of RG's complaint about Perl. REs are also ugly, convoluted, and write once read never bits of code, but they can also be beautiful, elegant, and perfectly lucid bits of code as well, and at the same time, too. This is one of the mysteries of life which we might as well accept, as we can do nothing to change it. CC. [/QUOTE]