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  • Programming for linguists: Perl for language researchers by Michael Hammond
  • John Goldsmith
Programming for linguists: Perl for language researchers. By Michael Hammond. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Pp. 219. ISBN 0631234349. $39.95.

In case you hadn’t noticed, the world has changed. We now have our own computers, each of us, and we have instant access to the largest collection of documents in the world, documents in more languages than we could have dreamed of. I’m referring to the internet, of course, and [End Page 857] the linguistic resources it makes available to us are staggering. Interested in reduplication in Tagalog? It took me about fifteen minutes of searching to find a couple hundred thousand words in Tagalog so I could set up my own database and scour it for reduplicated forms. Swahili, likewise. It wouldn’t even take that long to find a wordlist in English that matched 50,000 words in orthographic form to a phonemic representation, if you want to study English lexical phonology.

You can do some remarkable things with a good web browser, a word processor like Microsoft Word, and even more if you’re handy with a spreadsheet program (e.g. Excel). Word lets you search for words or patterns, and Excel lets you sort lists easily. But if you want to go past that, and you’re not already a programmer, then you should learn Perl.

Perl is a language that was written by Larry Wall about fifteen years ago. Wall is not only a computer developer but a linguist trained by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL); a blurb on one of his books states that he was a graduate student in linguistics at both UCLA and UC Berkeley. It won’t mean much to neophytes to say that Perl is written much in the spirit of C, a standard programming language, but it is. (The up-side is that someone who knows Perl very well has a leg up on advancing to C or C++.) Perl is a relatively easy programming language to learn. It runs on every platform I’ve heard of (that means there are versions of it for Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and so on), and it’s free—you can download it off the internet.

How, then, are you to make good on your determination to follow my good advice, or to follow your own inclination, and learn Perl? You could take a course somewhere, like a community college, or you could read on-line documentation—or, most likely, you’ll buy a book, one that claims you can learn Perl just by working your way through it.

I have taught programming to linguistics students, and I’ve learned programming languages (like Perl) from books. One generalization that emerges from all of this is that buying just one book on a programming language simply isn’t enough. That may sound a bit spendthrift when we recall that the price of a book is likely to start at $30 (Hammond’s is $40), averages $50, and goes as high as $90, but it’s not. With a few good books that complement each other, you can learn material that is almost priceless: in any event, a basic course at a college level will start at several hundred dollars, so you have no call to be cheap on books. Take my advice—if you want to learn Perl, or any other programming language, it will be worth your money to buy two or three books so you can read several different approaches to the same basic programming tasks.

Michael Hammond, a phonologist at the University of Arizona, has written a book on Perl for linguists who want to learn to program. It’s a fairly compact book, as computer books go, and was published by Blackwell, a publisher better known for its linguistics line than for its computer languages line. He covers the principal aspects of the language that a linguist needs to know, and he touches on a few topics of special interest to linguists in more detail.

H’s book (PL) teaches the basics of using Perl, in addition to one of its major uses, its...

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