"you can't do this utterly simple thing in C"

Perhaps you didn't read the node... you certainly weren't quoting it.

He didn't say you can't do that simple thing in C. He implied that such a simple thing was much simpler to do in Perl than in C.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";

Well he said "How would you do this in C?", which could be interpretted as a rhetorical means of asserting the claim that it couldn't be done (particularly if you take his quote in context). Regardless of whether you think that he was asserting it's impossibility or just claiming that it was ridiculously hard, his statement was clearly rhetoric.

I was just answering rhetoric with rhetoric. Specifically with hyperbole. I know he wasn't claiming that it couldn't be done at all... but his claim was ridiculous none the less. The worst thing is that he picked a particularly silly example, as it could be done in a very small and simple C program.


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:Wq
Not an editor command: Wq

I know he wasn't claiming that it couldn't be done at all... but his claim was ridiculous none the less.

By what measure?

Assuming "his claim" was that writing his silly example would be easier to do in Perl than C, he's correct by any decent metric I can think of.

So, podian, a new monk and perhaps someone relatively new to programming in general finds a neat website dedicated to this great language he recently started learning and voices his wonder at the expressive power of high-level languages, apparently hoping to start a discussion he might learn from — and he gets downvoted to -10 or less because several of you miss the point entirely and mistake it as an opportunity to correct someone rather than teach him.

Shame on you.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";

P.S. The only truly ridiculous things in this thread, IMHO, are the responses that seemingly take up arms to defend C's isomorphism to Perl, which is both obtuse in the context of the original post and redundant because perl is written in C.