[10421] in Perl-Users-Digest
Perl-Users Digest, Issue: 4015 Volume: 8
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Perl-Users Digest)
Tue Oct 20 00:03:37 1998
Date: Mon, 19 Oct 98 21:01:51 -0700
From: Perl-Users Digest <Perl-Users-Request@ruby.OCE.ORST.EDU>
To: Perl-Users@ruby.OCE.ORST.EDU (Perl-Users Digest)
Perl-Users Digest Mon, 19 Oct 1998 Volume: 8 Number: 4015
Today's topics:
Re: Raleigh.pm (Raleigh, NC, USA perl mongers) has regi (Adam Turoff)
Re: Raleigh.pm (Raleigh, NC, USA perl mongers) has regi (Adam Turoff)
Re: Raleigh.pm (Raleigh, NC, USA perl mongers) has regi (Adam Turoff)
Re: Raleigh.pm (Raleigh, NC, USA perl mongers) has regi (Adam Turoff)
Re: Raleigh.pm (Raleigh, NC, USA perl mongers) has regi <eashton@bbnplanet.com>
Re: Raleigh.pm (Raleigh, NC, USA perl mongers) has regi <eashton@bbnplanet.com>
Re: Raleigh.pm (Raleigh, NC, USA perl mongers) has regi (Adam Turoff)
Re: Raleigh.pm (Raleigh, NC, USA perl mongers) has regi (Adam Turoff)
Re: Raleigh.pm (Raleigh, NC, USA perl mongers) has regi (Adam Turoff)
Re: Replacing multiply ":" with a string. ceevee@my-dejanews.com
Re: sorting (Larry Wall)
Subroutines in Substitutions: Possible? dmulholl@cs.indiana.edu
What isn't Perl good for? <m.v.wilson@erols.com>
Re: What isn't Perl good for? (Martien Verbruggen)
Re: What isn't Perl good for? (Ilya Zakharevich)
Re: What isn't Perl good for? <eashton@bbnplanet.com>
Re: What isn't Perl good for? <tchrist@mox.perl.com>
Re: What isn't Perl good for? <clinton@dt.wdc.REMOVETHIS.com>
Special: Digest Administrivia (Last modified: 12 Mar 98 (Perl-Users-Digest Admin)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 19 Oct 1998 23:13:31 -0400
From: ziggy@panix.com (Adam Turoff)
Subject: Re: Raleigh.pm (Raleigh, NC, USA perl mongers) has registered
Message-Id: <70gv4r$6na@panix.com>
Daniel E. Macks <dmacks@sas.upenn.edu> wrote:
>Elaine -HappyFunBall- Ashton (eashton@bbnplanet.com) said:
>: Adam Turoff wrote:
>:
>: > Let's not forget the Pe[a]rl Sake, the oyster bar, roasted gecko,
>: > good beer, or the mother-of-perl inlay at the bar.
>:
>: That Pearl Sake you and Dave bought is disturbing. The mother-of-perl
>: inlay would have to be of Larry, of course. :)
>
>That'd be *father*-of-perl, no? Unless there's something Larry hasn't
>told us...
Well, perl gestated inside of larry for a while...does that count?
Besides, there's no such thingy as 'father-of-perl' unless you translate
it into a language that has one ambiguous word for 'parent'. :-)
Z.
------------------------------
Date: 19 Oct 1998 23:16:54 -0400
From: ziggy@panix.com (Adam Turoff)
Subject: Re: Raleigh.pm (Raleigh, NC, USA perl mongers) has registered
Message-Id: <70gvb6$6tu@panix.com>
Joergen W. Lang <jwl@_munged_worldmusic.de> wrote:
>Daniel Grisinger <dgris@perrin.dimensional.com> wrote:
>> Elaine -HappyFunBall- Ashton <eashton@bbnplanet.com> writes:
>> > Joergen W. Lang wrote:
>> >
>> > > And the menu is written in Perl, of course.
>> >
>> > Of course, with a translated version for the non-geeks. :)
>>
>> No, non-geeks are expected to RTFM if they are
>> hungry :-).
>
>Which means you are expected to know how to use a fork().
Wrong kind of restaurant. It's serving geeks, so there's a chopstick
on your left and on your right.
Now, everybody pick up your left chopstick...er, ah, right chopstick..er, um,
check CPAN for a solution to this problem while you think about perl. Yeah,
that's the ticket!
>(RTFM = "read the forking manual" ?)
read the friendly menu.
Z.
------------------------------
Date: 19 Oct 1998 23:19:45 -0400
From: ziggy@panix.com (Adam Turoff)
Subject: Re: Raleigh.pm (Raleigh, NC, USA perl mongers) has registered
Message-Id: <70gvgh$725@panix.com>
Elaine -HappyFunBall- Ashton <eashton@bbnplanet.com> wrote:
>Brad Murray wrote:
>> So you're recommending we just let everyone in to a room full of wild
>> animals with an axe, a lighter, and a bag of briquettes? You're going
>> to need to supply a lot of cheap beer for that to fly. Actually, maybe
>> not.
>
>I was thinking about something a bit less Robert Bly :) Fine rare
>scotches and around 100 taps, of course, I could stash some Bud for the
>heathens.
100 scotches on tap?
You're weird. Next you're going to be serving weissscotch with yeastybits
floating in it or even something icky like Belgian Trappist Scotch!
Don't mess with a good thing here. No beer in the pub unless it's free.
Z.
------------------------------
Date: 19 Oct 1998 23:22:29 -0400
From: ziggy@panix.com (Adam Turoff)
Subject: Re: Raleigh.pm (Raleigh, NC, USA perl mongers) has registered
Message-Id: <70gvll$7jp@panix.com>
Elaine -HappyFunBall- Ashton <eashton@bbnplanet.com> wrote:
>Joergen W. Lang wrote:
>
>> And the menu is written in Perl, of course.
>
>Of course, with a translated version for the non-geeks. :)
You mean the babelfish perl<->english translator I presume...
Z.
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 1998 03:23:17 GMT
From: Elaine -HappyFunBall- Ashton <eashton@bbnplanet.com>
Subject: Re: Raleigh.pm (Raleigh, NC, USA perl mongers) has registered
Message-Id: <362BFF9D.E9787B55@bbnplanet.com>
Adam Turoff wrote:
> 100 scotches on tap?
er, beers are on tap, scotches aren't :)
> You're weird. Next you're going to be serving weissscotch with yeastybits
> floating in it or even something icky like Belgian Trappist Scotch!
I may be weird, but I know what I like. No Trappist beverages allowed.
> Don't mess with a good thing here. No beer in the pub unless it's free.
Free? I may be enough of a philanthropist to give Sparcs away to a good
cause, but the beer, you buy. :) and buy me one as well.
e.
After all, the cultivated person's first duty is to
always be prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia. - U. Eco -
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 1998 03:19:00 GMT
From: Elaine -HappyFunBall- Ashton <eashton@bbnplanet.com>
Subject: Re: Raleigh.pm (Raleigh, NC, USA perl mongers) has registered
Message-Id: <362BFE9C.45CCD9D4@bbnplanet.com>
Adam Turoff wrote:
> Well, perl gestated inside of larry for a while...does that count?
Oh, gack, a boy mentioned the word gestated. Ick! What do mere men know
about that? Listen to a room full of cranky women all wanting
pickles/mexican food and expecting that the world should thank them and
you'll know what gestation means. feh. I don't suppose that Larry is
like that. :)
> Besides, there's no such thingy as 'father-of-perl' unless you translate
> it into a language that has one ambiguous word for 'parent'. :-)
There are a few such languages, but even the most ancient of
languages/cultures have certain value placed upon the woman as 'life
giver'. The eskimos have 15 words for snow, the Germans have 6 words for
love. English, as a language, is not terribly emotive nor descriptive.
In our vernacular, Larry is 'the mother of Perl'.
e.
After all, the cultivated person's first duty is to
always be prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia. - U. Eco -
------------------------------
Date: 19 Oct 1998 23:21:03 -0400
From: ziggy@panix.com (Adam Turoff)
Subject: Re: Raleigh.pm (Raleigh, NC, USA perl mongers) has registered
Message-Id: <70gviv$75d@panix.com>
Uri Guttman <uri@camel.fastserv.com> wrote:
>what about briquettes and LOX?.
Lox taste better when they've been smoked and cured slowly, not barbequeued.
Barbequeue salmon OTOH...
Z.
------------------------------
Date: 19 Oct 1998 23:47:26 -0400
From: ziggy@panix.com (Adam Turoff)
Subject: Re: Raleigh.pm (Raleigh, NC, USA perl mongers) has registered
Message-Id: <70h14e$8pr@panix.com>
John Porter <jdporter@min.net> wrote:
>Joergen W. Lang wrote:
>>
>> And the menu is written in Perl, of course.
>
>I was thinking that it ought to be written in PDL (or perhaps
>Data::Dumper)... but it occured to me that Many are welcome at the
>O'Reilly critter feast; so the menu should be written in XML.
No, the menu should be written in ASCII on those nostalgic nights,
UTF-8 all other nights. :-)
How 'bout a burger-and-fries menu in the local ambient language,
and an exotic menu in perl poetry? The descriptions would be POD formatted:
=head1 NAME
Specials
=item * Chef's Surprise
Succlent desert reptile served with teriyaki sauce on a bed of greens
=cut
@meatybits = split('|', 'python');
$sauce = 'teriyaki';
foreach(@meatybits) {
$entree .= substr($sauce, 0, 1) . $_;
$sauce = substr($sauce, 1);
}
print STDERR "$sauce\n"; # Throw out the leftover sauce
$dish = <<EODISH;
$entree
frisee endive spinach
EODISH
print $dish;
(I'm not much of a cook - excuse the piss poor perl poetry)
It's starting to sound like this pub should be in London. That way
you won't get the prices confused with the variable names...
Z.
------------------------------
Date: 19 Oct 1998 23:58:44 -0400
From: ziggy@panix.com (Adam Turoff)
Subject: Re: Raleigh.pm (Raleigh, NC, USA perl mongers) has registered
Message-Id: <70h1pk$9jm@panix.com>
Elaine -HappyFunBall- Ashton <eashton@bbnplanet.com> wrote:
>Adam Turoff wrote:
>
>> 100 scotches on tap?
>
>er, beers are on tap, scotches aren't :)
Good. I was getting a little worried there.
>> You're weird. Next you're going to be serving weissscotch with yeastybits
>> floating in it or even something icky like Belgian Trappist Scotch!
>
>I may be weird, but I know what I like. No Trappist beverages allowed.
No Chimay at this pub? What kind of place is this?
(And, last time I checked, Belgian Scotch was mostly illegal, except
for the technicalities, like that Scotch made in the south of France...)
>> Don't mess with a good thing here. No beer in the pub unless it's free.
>
>Free? I may be enough of a philanthropist to give Sparcs away to a good
>cause, but the beer, you buy. :) and buy me one as well.
OK. How about open source beer? :-)
Z.
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 19 Oct 1998 23:42:54 GMT
From: ceevee@my-dejanews.com
Subject: Re: Replacing multiply ":" with a string.
Message-Id: <70gipu$j3v$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>
Use $blah =~s/:/$expr/g , the end /g global matching operator and it
will replace every instance.
In article <362AFE15.897DC164@softclub.net>,
"Alexei V. Alexandrov" <ava@softclub.net> wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> i`ve ran into a problem.
> suppose there is a string 1:2:3:4:5
> and there is an expression $expr = " or id = ";
> i have to replace every instance of symbol ":" with $expr;
> standard perl substitute replaces onle the first instance,
> what should i do with other?
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> --
> Best regards,
> Alexei V. Alexandrov
> Mail: ava@softclub.net
> WWW: www.softclub.net
>
-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==----------
http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own
------------------------------
Date: 19 Oct 1998 19:11:20 -0700
From: larry@kiev.wall.org (Larry Wall)
Subject: Re: sorting
Message-Id: <70grg8$qs8@kiev.wall.org>
In article <x77lxytu64.fsf@sysarch.com>, Uri Guttman <uri@sysarch.com> wrote:
>>>>>> "MD" == Mark-Jason Dominus <mjd@op.net> writes:
>
> MD> In article <sar7ly0p7z9.fsf@camel.fastserv.com>,
> MD> Uri Guttman <uri@camel.fastserv.com> wrote:
> >> i think you should just be able to use the sub ref directly.
>
> MD> I asked Chip about this a couple of days ago, and he agreed.
>
>this is powerful backing. but does larry like it?
I'm kinda surprised it doesn't do that already. It's certainly
possible: the CV knows which package it was compiled in, so $a and $b
are accessible. I'd say that anything people expect to work in a
particular reasonable way ought to be made to work in that particular
reasonable way, as long as it doesn't slow everything down too much,
and as long as it's not already subject to some other interpretation,
which this isn't. I doubt anyone relies on the fact that
$subref = \&sortsub;
sort $subref 5,4,3,2,1;
throws a "Not a GLOB reference" error.
Larry
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 1998 03:40:48 GMT
From: dmulholl@cs.indiana.edu
Subject: Subroutines in Substitutions: Possible?
Message-Id: <70h0o0$6l0$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>
Greetings All,
I just hit a problem that I can solve readily in lex but not nicely
in perl. I would like to write a filter that detected numbers after
words, then converted the number (which I know won't exceed 3 digits)
to an ascii character. Here is a simplified version of what seemed
like the nice way to go about it:
s/(\w) ([0-9]+)/\1 chr(\2)/g;
Where "chr" is Perl's built in function. This isn't working (nor did
&chr or \&chr my next guesses), is there a way to escape subroutines
in substitutions to do this. If not, tragic :( , what is the most
elegant way out of the problem?
thanks!
/Daniel
-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==----------
http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 1998 01:23:00 +0000
From: WMWilson <m.v.wilson@erols.com>
Subject: What isn't Perl good for?
Message-Id: <362BE5F4.BB56E2AF@erols.com>
I'm pretty new to this whole perl/programming thing and I'm curious as
to what Perl is really horrible with (besides the obvious device driver,
etc.) and when it becomes time to fumble through C or another lower
level language.
--
\||/
(..)
+---oOOo-----(_)-----oOOo-----+
| mailto:m.v.wilson@erols.com |
| WMWilson |
|__USCS Data Center Sysadmin__|
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 1998 02:30:52 GMT
From: mgjv@comdyn.com.au (Martien Verbruggen)
Subject: Re: What isn't Perl good for?
Message-Id: <wBSW1.38$6a4.217717@nsw.nnrp.telstra.net>
In article <362BE5F4.BB56E2AF@erols.com>,
WMWilson <m.v.wilson@erols.com> writes:
> I'm pretty new to this whole perl/programming thing and I'm curious as
> to what Perl is really horrible with (besides the obvious device driver,
> etc.) and when it becomes time to fumble through C or another lower
> level language.
trolling?
Perl isn't horrible at anything. And it is always time to use C.
Martien
--
Martien Verbruggen |
Webmaster www.tradingpost.com.au | I think there is a world market for
Commercial Dynamics Pty. Ltd. | maybe five computers. --Thomas Watson,
NSW, Australia | chairman IBM, 1943
------------------------------
Date: 20 Oct 1998 02:38:37 GMT
From: ilya@math.ohio-state.edu (Ilya Zakharevich)
Subject: Re: What isn't Perl good for?
Message-Id: <70gt3d$sf2$1@mathserv.mps.ohio-state.edu>
[A complimentary Cc of this posting was sent to Martien Verbruggen
<mgjv@comdyn.com.au>],
who wrote in article <wBSW1.38$6a4.217717@nsw.nnrp.telstra.net>:
> Perl isn't horrible at anything.
Get real! Perl is horrible for most things. The only reason which
keeps people with Perl is those random glances at the alternatives.
> And it is always time to use C.
The only thing I use C for is fixing Perl. Well, almost.
Ilya
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 1998 03:11:02 GMT
From: Elaine -HappyFunBall- Ashton <eashton@bbnplanet.com>
Subject: Re: What isn't Perl good for?
Message-Id: <362BFCBE.8889B8E5@bbnplanet.com>
Martien Verbruggen wrote:
> Perl isn't horrible at anything. And it is always time to use C.
Perl never cooked for me. Anything else, it rocks. C is painful by
comparison, from an SA POV anyway. The day Perl makes coffee and muffins
for me in the morning, I'll never have eyes for another language. :)
e.
After all, the cultivated person's first duty is to
always be prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia. - U. Eco -
------------------------------
Date: 20 Oct 1998 03:15:08 GMT
From: Tom Christiansen <tchrist@mox.perl.com>
Subject: Re: What isn't Perl good for?
Message-Id: <70gv7s$7h4$1@csnews.cs.colorado.edu>
[courtesy cc of this posting sent to cited author via email]
In comp.lang.perl.misc, WMWilson <m.v.wilson@erols.com> writes:
:I'm pretty new to this whole perl/programming thing and I'm curious as
:to what Perl is really horrible with (besides the obvious device driver,
:etc.) and when it becomes time to fumble through C or another lower
:level language.
Although you might take some flames, this is actually an interesting
question.
There was a time several decades back when ``real programmers'' used
nothing but pure, bare-bones assembly language. This attitude of ``only
asm is good enough'' stuck around for a long time. It was a slow, uphill
battle, but eventually a higher-level language, C, came to take over
asm's privileged place as the preferred language for systems programming.
Sure, C was a portable assembler, but it couldn't quite do everything --
at least, not fast enough for tastes. So we would resort to asm("")
statements in our C code now and then, plus the stray asm module--like
say locore.s, just to name one. If you haven't taken a gander at an
old Vax locore.s, it's a good read.
Of course, the scientific computing crowd who were doing massive
number-crunching on their supercomputers still all hand-rolled their
most important core routines in asm instead of the prevailing Fortran.
We less numerically fanatic types would look at the old RSTS/E systems
running everything under BASIC-PLUS, or later on, the Symbolic Machines
running Lisp, and a bit of convenience-envy would arise now and then.
But most of us used C for all our real work. It was fast enough, or at
least, eventually became such. Of course, C was designed to be that way,
and a large proportion of its compromises were to make its compilation
sufficiently fast, and implementable on strange new operating systems.
Reading the crazy things that Ken and Dennis and Brian did back in those
days is remarkably educational.
As Moore's Law on transistor density continued to prove itself in terms of
CPU speeds, a funny thing happened. Human time became more valuable than
machine time as machines kept getting faster and faster. You used to have
many programmers for one might machine. Then you had one programmer,
one computer. Now you often have multiple computers per programmer.
The ratios have, for cost reasons, inverted. No longer when you buy a
new computer do you get a pair of gnomes gratis from Cray to come live
with you on-site and tinker with their Great Machine. No, now you get
a cheap desktop machine, and that machine is considerably faster than
even a whole machine-room full of washing machine Vax 750s was.
Over the last decade, largely as a result of these performance advances,
for certain kinds of programming and certain kinds of programmers,
Perl has been supplanting C as the language of choice for writing
portable programs. The convenience of a high-level langauge that takes
care of useless details for you is too seductive to resist. At the
History/Nostalgia BOF at the last USENIX, Steve Johnson (yacc, pcc,
etc.) pointed out that Perl has finally become what C was always meant
to be -- a reasonable way to write portable programs using a high-level
language.
And Dennis didn't even sneer at Steve's remark. :-)
Mind you: this doesn't mean that one *should* code *everything* in Perl.
One will note that /usr/bin/perl is not written in Perl. Nor, should I
imagine, is your X server -- although the clients might well be. Just as
the crunchers of yesteryear ripped out core routines and hand-crafted
these with tedious care in asm, so too do we use XS today to turbo-charge
time-critical functions. Check out the chimeric composition of the
compiler's various backend code generators for another approach to this
kind of thing. I believe that we'll see plenty of that in the future.
Heck, we see a lot of it now.
Now that you've read the somewhat long story, the short story is that
using Perl is a good first stab at just about everything, and more often
than you would imagine, a perfectly adequate last stab, too.
I hope that that usefully addresses your question.
--tom
--
*** The previous line contains the naughty word "$&".\n
if /(ibm|apple|awk)/; # :-)
--Larry Wall in the perl man page
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 1998 03:29:22 GMT
From: "John Clinton" <clinton@dt.wdc.REMOVETHIS.com>
Subject: Re: What isn't Perl good for?
Message-Id: <msTW1.1325$OA2.4016440@news.rdc2.occa.home.com>
For me, the only things Perl isn't good for is handling applications
that either handle very large amounts of data or do LOTS of processing.
Perl data structures waste a lot of space compared to a efficiently
constructed
equivalent in C/C++.
Fortunately I now get to have my cake and eat it too. My typical strategy
now
is to create C/C++ modules for Perl using Perls XS interface whenever I have
code best not written in Perl. I started doing this for small libraries,
but later
decided that if I had a moderately large applications for which C/C++ might
be the best language, I would write all but the user interface and related
code
in C++, then make that possibly large application into a Perl module using
XS.
Perl is great for the top layer of an application because that's the part
that changes
the most as new user requests come in. It's quicker to make these high
level code
changes in Perl than in C++.
By the way, my application area is UNIX programs for doing analysis of
designs
for VLSI chip designers (inhouse software, not for resale). This type of
program
sometimes needs to quickly process 100s MBs of data so I need C for parts.
--John
WMWilson wrote in message <362BE5F4.BB56E2AF@erols.com>...
>I'm pretty new to this whole perl/programming thing and I'm curious as
>to what Perl is really horrible with (besides the obvious device driver,
>etc.) and when it becomes time to fumble through C or another lower
>level language.
>
>--
> \||/
> (..)
> +---oOOo-----(_)-----oOOo-----+
> | mailto:m.v.wilson@erols.com |
> | WMWilson |
> |__USCS Data Center Sysadmin__|
------------------------------
Date: 12 Jul 98 21:33:47 GMT (Last modified)
From: Perl-Request@ruby.oce.orst.edu (Perl-Users-Digest Admin)
Subject: Special: Digest Administrivia (Last modified: 12 Mar 98)
Message-Id: <null>
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------------------------------
End of Perl-Users Digest V8 Issue 4015
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