From owner-freebsd-chat Thu Dec 20 8:20:53 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from prism.flugsvamp.com (66-188-92-95.mad.wi.charter.com [66.188.92.95]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 427B037B509 for ; Thu, 20 Dec 2001 08:20:46 -0800 (PST) Received: (from jlemon@localhost) by prism.flugsvamp.com (8.11.6/8.11.6) id fBKGKH527435; Thu, 20 Dec 2001 10:20:17 -0600 (CST) (envelope-from jlemon) Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 10:20:16 -0600 From: Jonathan Lemon To: "Brandon D. Valentine" Cc: Jonathan Lemon , mwm-dated-1009255696.e529b9@mired.org, chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: The Dirty Little Open Source Secret Message-ID: <20011220102016.B26326@prism.flugsvamp.com> References: <200112200511.fBK5Bpl05690@prism.flugsvamp.com> <20011220030222.T21508-100000@turtle.looksharp.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0pre2i In-Reply-To: <20011220030222.T21508-100000@turtle.looksharp.net> Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Thu, Dec 20, 2001 at 03:04:37AM -0500, Brandon D. Valentine wrote: > On Wed, 19 Dec 2001, Jonathan Lemon wrote: > > >However, replacing Perl with C will be accepted, (and is being done too). > >So if you produce suitable working code, it will find its way into the tree. > > I would assume that also holds true for replacing Perl will > sh/awk/sed/etc? There are some things obviously implemented in Perl > because C sucks at them. Awk can do a lot of those things quite well. > Awk has just fallen into the shadows behind the sledgehammer of > programming languages, Perl. Ah, now things start to get sticky. One of the reasons why perl was introducuced was to replace some horribly nasty awk scripts that were just getting too unmaintainable. Yes, you _can_ do the same thing in awk, but the resulting mess is so bad that becomes too fragile. (If you want to see what I mean, look at "cvs co -p -r1.19 src/sys/kern/vnode_if.sh" for an example) If you're really interested in this, I can point you to a couple of people who are working on C replacements. The main reason C wasn't used originally was because of the initial effort needed in writing the various parsing code bits. -- Jonathan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message