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Subject: Re: Adduser program in C
To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de
Date: Sat, 25 May 1996 16:04:59 -0700 (PDT)
Cc: dima@FreeBSD.org, michaelv@HeadCandy.com, lithium@cia-g.com,
        freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.org
In-Reply-To: <199605250829.KAA26162@uriah.heep.sax.de> from "J Wunsch" at May 25, 96 10:29:30 am
From: dima@FreeBSD.org (Dima Ruban)
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J Wunsch writes:
> 
> (Also moved to -chat)
> 
> > First: this is not small tool.
> > Second: this is slow tool.
> > Third: this is not standard unix tool.
> 
> Fourth: `Second' and `Third' are wrong. :)

Don't think so.

> Perl is certainly one of the fastest scripting languages.

fastest scripting language != fastest programming language.
I don't think perl script is going to be faster when the same C program.

About scripting language ... One of my clients had chat script for his
WWW server written on perl. Standard load average on this machine was
40-70!!!!!
And now it keeps under 10 only becasue I wrote this script on C.

> Perl is getting more and more standard, it's not only FreeBSD that
> ships with it installed by default, or at least readily available on
> the intallation medium.

getting standard != standard (again)
Maybe some day, when computer will have lotsa memory and at least 10 times
faster CPUs, maybe then perl will become standard or something.

> (Of course, the last is also true for Tcl.)
> 
> > Perl is one of those tools.
> > 
> > I can't agree.
> 
> But you fail to explain your reasons for disagreeing. ;)

well, from you side - maybe yes, but not from mine.
I don't realy want to argue. I don't make any sence.
Because I don't realy think, my explanations to you or your
explanations to me will change something. For you pelr is cool,
because you can write program w/o any problems in notime.
For me it's bad, because I DO care about how fast it is going to work
and how many system resources it will requre. That's the point.

> 
> 
> I've seen more than one person finally pick my advise, and use Perl
> instead of sh/awk/grep/... for more complex projects.  Mind you, these
> are people who know their tools well, my colleague is in Unix since
> the 2BSD era.  However, shell is a rather poor programming language in
> several respects (have you ever seen a shell quotation orgy?), so for
> more complex tasks, learning something else pays off quickly.
> 
> -- 
> 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. ;-)
> 

-- dima