Perl Style: Embrace Pattern Matching

  • Regular Expressions are your friend. More than that, they’re a whole new way of thinking.
  • Just as chess players see patterns in the board positions their pieces control, Perl adepts look at data in terms of patterns.
  • Although most modern programming languages offer primitive pattern matching tools, usually through an extra library, Perl’s patterns are directly integrated into the language core. /.../, $1, etc.
  • Perl’s patterns boast features not found in other languages’ pattern matching, features that encourage a whole different way of looking at data.

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