@Zanna Well, perldoc perldsc covers some kinds of structures.

@Zanna My non-pun response, though, :) is to ask if you actually want to do something with Perl. In particular, if your actual goal is to learn a general-purpose programming language, the one you choose might or might not be Perl. You had mentioned looking at other general-purpose programming languages like Python and Ruby before, right?

Yeah!

I keep starting to learn Python

Anwar encouraged my to try Ruby and I did and it was very nice

So... why Perl?

Finding that a programming language is very nice seems like a good reason to learn it over others.

Perhaps you should do something with Ruby instead! :)

@EliahKagan because you already told me lots of interesting things about it

@EliahKagan that's a good idea

the thing is that I am only slightly motivated to learn things as a matter of interest. I need interesting tasks or compelling reasons to make me study properly

You challenged me to write some Project Euler stuff and I haven't done it yet. I should most definitely do that since I have time at the moment

Yes. More specifically, I dared you do it. In Bash.

Since that is very silly and extremely cumbersome, however, you might want to do it in a some other language that, unlike Bash, is reasonable for the task.

well it doesn't matter if it's silly when it's only for fun :)

:)

Are you looking for practical problems, or just for specific small challenges (i.e., exercises)?

but I like trying to do the same thing in different ways because insights about how all three things work (both methods and the thing to be done) fall out automatically

I mean, more generally. Regarding what constitutes an interesting task or compelling reason.

It really doesn't matter. I just need structure

Competitive programming websites generally have practice problems (sometimes called practice challenges) that are not part of any contest but where the problem is described, and the site runs your code on its servers and tests it against several unit tests, reporting if there were any failures and allowing you to fix bugs and try again.

Does that interest you?

yes, that would be nice

I should do that

Different sites support different languages. I don't know about all of them and I'm only mentioning ones I know about and feel good about recommending. HackerRank lets you use a lot of different languages. GeeksforGeeks has a huge number of problems with more problems added regularly and at a high rate. LeetCode problems and unit tests, in my experience, are extremely well proofread and polished.

awesome :D thanks a lot!

No problem. HackerRank also has a running (non-rated, i.e., doesn't affect your standings, which you might or might not care about anyway depending on whether or not the competitive aspect of competitive programming interests you) contest with all the Project Euler problems.

In some cases it is actually more challenging than if you do them in the usual way, because it has more unit tests, such that some slow naive solution might not be adequate for some of them, and because its time limits are shorter than what you'd probably be willing to wait yourself (they're a few seconds, varying depending on what language you use).

I have some thoughts about languages that might interest you (though if you know Ruby is a language you want to learn, then you should totally just go for that!) but I've gotta run. I'll be back in a bit.

It's bed time for me, so I will read much later :D

K, good night!

:)

Well, plenty of people solve problems in the Project Euler contest in a totally noncompetitive fashion, so it may still interest you.

Are the programming languages you currently know bash, sed, and bc?

(If you happen to see these messages before tomorrow morning, please do not feel obligated to reply.)