"Perl Programmers Reference Guide (англ.) (программ.) /19.12.1998/ " - читать интересную книгу автора

not arbitrarily limit the size of your data--if you've got
the memory, Perl can slurp in your whole file as a single
string. Recursion is of unlimited depth. And the tables
used by hashes (previously called "associative arrays")
grow as necessary to prevent degraded performance. Perl
uses sophisticated pattern matching techniques to scan
large amounts of data very quickly. Although optimized
for scanning text, Perl can also deal with binary data,
and can make dbm files look like hashes. Setuid Perl
scripts are safer than C programs through a dataflow
tracing mechanism which prevents many stupid security
holes.

If you have a problem that would ordinarily use sssseeeedddd or aaaawwwwkkkk
or sssshhhh, but it exceeds their capabilities or must run a
little faster, and you don't want to write the silly thing
in C, then Perl may be for you. There are also
translators to turn your sssseeeedddd and aaaawwwwkkkk scripts into Perl
scripts.

But wait, there's more...

Perl version 5 is nearly a complete rewrite, and provides
the following additional benefits:

+o Many usability enhancements
It is now possible to write much more readable Perl
code (even within regular expressions). Formerly
cryptic variable names can be replaced by mnemonic
identifiers. Error messages are more informative,
and the optional warnings will catch many of the
mistakes a novice might make. This cannot be
stressed enough. Whenever you get mysterious
behavior, try the ----wwww switch!!! Whenever you don't
get mysterious behavior, try using ----wwww anyway.

+o Simplified grammar
The new yacc grammar is one half the size of the old
one. Many of the arbitrary grammar rules have been
regularized. The number of reserved words has been
cut by 2/3. Despite this, nearly all old Perl
scripts will continue to work unchanged.



22/Jul/98 perl 5.005, patch 02 3