Some depressing programming

Everything wrong with the programming language C, and all the ilk inspired by its incomprehensible syntax, can be illustrated by the following line, which someone used as an example of "good" Perl code:

<eqn>($a==0)?"1":(($a==1)?"<i>x</i>":"<i>x</i>^<eqn>")</eqn>

Don't feel bad if that orgy of operators makes no sense to you. It makes sense to me, but I desperately wish it didn't. The sad thing is that the same thing can be done quite legibly, even in Perl. People simply choose not to.

Enough griping. Back to work...