Date: Sat, 25 May 1996 10:09:53 +0200 (MET DST) From: J Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de> To: jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) Cc: michaelv@HeadCandy.com, lithium@cia-g.com, joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Adduser program in C Message-ID: <199605250809.KAA25950@uriah.heep.sax.de> In-Reply-To: <2112.833007599@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at "May 24, 96 11:59:59 pm"
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Better move this to -chat...
As Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
> I was with you right up through the awk, sed, sh, grep, cut.. You
> lost me at PERL. :-)
Perl (not PERL -- no, that's not UNIX :) is the logical consequence of
awk, sed, sh, and grep...
> P.S. I'm already well on record as saying that PERL is the anti-christ
> of computer languages, so I won't belabor that point here.. :-)
> Suffice it to say that I find PERL's syntax and structure highly
> objectionable. Give me a more structured language like TCL or LISP
> any day..
The old argumentation war. Nope. I know a fair amount of Perl (and
would have had a hard time implementing some of my recent paywork in
something else than Perl). I'm in the process of learning Tcl (and
Tk), for various reasons, finally.
Both bear two entirely different concepts in mind. Perl is a
programming language (not even an interpreter -- it's a compiled
scripting language), with a fairly complex grammar that always makes
me wonder how Larry Wall did ever manage to write a parser for it.
The language is rather well-thought however (you can express anything
in _your_ way, as opposed to have the language dictating you its way
-- see the ``if (cond) {statement}'' vs. ``statement if cond'' vs.
``cond && statement''), and it's damn fast.
Tcl, on the other hand, is a fairly minimalistic approach, something
like FORTH. It's not even a programming language, but rather an
interpreter only (according to Ousterhout), and you can have it
interpret almost everything you want. You can even replace the
builtin control words (`while' etc.) by your own definitions if you
want, since it doesn't have a grammar. This gives a great deal on
flexibility. It's slow due to being interpreted, but with the speeds
of modern CPUs, this ain't a big problem for many tasks, and for those
where it matters, you benefit from another feature: you can write
parts in C, or embed it into a C program.
So finally, as Michael wrote in another followup: there's no such
thing like The Ultimate Tool For Everything. Learn how to use the
tools, and decide yourself which one to use on occasion. But:
_ignoring_ the modern tools is certainly a fatal decision. It's like
ignoring C since you happen to know assembler that good...
--
cheers, J"org
joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199605250809.KAA25950>