[vox-tech] perl never ceases to amaze me

[Peter Jay Salzman]

perl is such a cool language.  i never knew you can represent numbers
this way:

   my $number = 3_151_592_653;
   print ++$number, "\n";

i can easily see that $number represents "three billion one hundred
fifty one million five hundred ninety two thousand six hundred fifty
three".  if, instead, i saw:

   my $number = 3151592653;
   print ++$number, "\n";

i'd be sitting there all day trying to figure out what this number is.
perl will balk if you use an underscore in anything other than groups of
three, as in:

   my $number = 3_151_592_53;

jeez, for all the numerical stuff i do for research, i wish C had
something like this built in!

pete