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Comment by pwr22 | Hacker News Reader

Perl as a language has "unless" as a keyword and a lot of people, who are not inexperienced with programming, have trouble using it at first. Some even rebel against its use and claim they hate it

So it is interesting that even similar seeming things can still require some time to internalise and comprehend

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Am I missing something about this `unless` keyword? From what it looks like, it's just syntactic sugar for `if not`, and it makes much more sense…

    (unless (string= a b)
      (fail))
    ;; much more readable than
    (when (string/= a b)
      (fail))

I notice the same thing with Ruby's 'unless'. I think it has to do with the mapping of English to programming. Sort of like the fact that 'or' can be inclusive or exclusive.

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