[84] in Back_Bay_LISA
Perl before swine
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (niemira.jim)
Fri Nov 20 11:16:13 1992
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 92 10:34:23 -0500
From: niemira@rooney.fstrf.org (niemira.jim)
To: webber@world.std.com
Cc: bblisa@inset.com
In-Reply-To: Robert D Webber's message of Thu, 19 Nov 1992 20:44:17 -0500 <199211200144.AA10900@world.std.com>
Reply-To: niemira@fstrf.org (Jim Niemira)
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?
The next major revision is due out January-ish (or so goes the net.gossip), and
by all accounts Larry is working very hard on it. In addition, he devotes
considerable time to comp.lang.perl, far more than one would expect of someone
who has a Real World job.
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.
Perl is not _required_ anywhere, but neither are any of "the usual", and there
is no situation where you can't get results without "the usual", as evidenced
by the fact that Un*x got along just fine without it ;-) The usefullness of
perl comes from the "gap" (for lack of a better word) between the shell and
C (I think someone already mentioned that...) - if all you want to do is run
/bin/commandx and capture the output the shell is the obvious choice. But if
you want to whip up a script that will connect to madlab.sprl.umich.edu#3000
and get you your local weather report (so you can watch <local weatherman>
repeat it verbatim 8*) ), doing so in perl would be several orders of
magnitude faster than coding the same in C/C++ (especially since it's already
done ;-))
I'm not sure what you mean by the dbm/socket sentence - perl has both.
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()?
Yes, perl has fork - I don't know what your script does, but it sound like
something perl could do very easily: grep, sed, and most shell functionality
is part of perl.
Don't get me wrong - as I said before, there are places where it's the most
efficient tool to use, and many others where it is not.
| It breathes fire. -more- | Jim Niemira |
| It breathes fire. -more- | Senior SysOp, Frontier Sci | "So?"
| You are not happy. -more- | niemira@fstrf.org | -Worf
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