[82] in Back_Bay_LISA
Perl before swine
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert D Webber)
Thu Nov 19 22:10:46 1992
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 1992 20:44:17 -0500
From: webber@world.std.com (Robert D Webber)
To: bblisa@inset.com
I have never written a program in Perl, but I looked over someone's
shoulder recently while she did. At one point she just had to keep
piling on backslashes to match (as I recall) a trailing $ on a line.
From what little else I saw, the language seemed inconsistent. For
what was being done, the "full" version of awk (e.g. nawk and gawk)
would have worked well without "\\\\\$".
Has anybody done the equivalent of writing "hoc" in Perl? Is it true,
as I've heard, that Larry Wall admits that Perl has a lot of problems
but says he doesn't have time to fix them and still have a life? If
so, I think that's a good argument for not using it.
Maybe some of the people involved in this discussion can come up
with some examples of problems where Perl is required, where a
combination of "the usual" can't be used to get results. I'll give
you that dbm and sockets are going to require me to write some C
code if I stick to the programs that come with, e.g., SunOS, but
I don't see why I'd want to use them in what amounts to a shell script.
I recently wrote a script which uses multiple concurrent background
processes to speed up an operation across 160 Unix systems. It's
written in Bourne shell, grep, and sed. How hard is it to do
something like that in Perl? Does Perl give a fork()?
Bob
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