A snippet from the latest freshmeat.net announcement of Perl 5.10 that landed in my email inbox:
This version includes a new smart match operator, a switch statement,
the // defined-or operator, regular expression improvements, and
other language changes…
Funny, I was just thinking that what Perl needs most is more operators… 🙂
Hey, defined-or is awesome. Don’t go knocking it!
I have to admit that I find most of my Perl code is littered with defined-or type syntax, and it is nice to have an operator for it.
That said, it strikes me that C++ and Perl are locked in mortal combat, trying to prove whether statically typed or dynamically typed languages can be more complex and idiosyncratic. It is unclear who is going to win, or if anyone cares.