From owner-freebsd-chat Sat May 25 01:21:35 1996 Return-Path: owner-chat Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id BAA17156 for chat-outgoing; Sat, 25 May 1996 01:21:35 -0700 (PDT) Received: from irz301.inf.tu-dresden.de (irz301.inf.tu-dresden.de [141.76.1.11]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id BAA17146 for ; Sat, 25 May 1996 01:21:29 -0700 (PDT) Received: from sax.sax.de by irz301.inf.tu-dresden.de (8.6.12/8.6.12-s1) with ESMTP id KAA03309; Sat, 25 May 1996 10:21:26 +0200 Received: by sax.sax.de (8.6.12/8.6.12-s1) with UUCP id KAA02963; Sat, 25 May 1996 10:21:26 +0200 Received: (from j@localhost) by uriah.heep.sax.de (8.7.5/8.6.9) id KAA25950; Sat, 25 May 1996 10:09:54 +0200 (MET DST) From: J Wunsch Message-Id: <199605250809.KAA25950@uriah.heep.sax.de> Subject: Re: Adduser program in C To: jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) Date: Sat, 25 May 1996 10:09:53 +0200 (MET DST) Cc: michaelv@HeadCandy.com, lithium@cia-g.com, joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) In-Reply-To: <2112.833007599@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at "May 24, 96 11:59:59 pm" X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL17 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-chat@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk 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. ;-)