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Date: Sat, 22 Jun 1996 16:13:04 -0500 (CDT)
From: Tony Kimball <alk@Think.COM>
Message-Id: <199606222113.QAA02156@compound.Think.COM>
To: wosch@cs.tu-berlin.de
Cc: current@freefall.freebsd.org
Subject: Re: tcl -- what's going on here.
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  From: Wolfram Schneider <wosch@cs.tu-berlin.de>
  Date: Sat, 22 Jun 1996 16:59:16 +0200

  You can't remove perl from the main tree ;-))) Many sytem tools are
  written in perl. Don't waste your time to rewrite them in C because
  you don't like perl! 

This misses the point.  The point is not that perl is unliked.  Perl
is almost universally acknowledged as the right tool for its job.  The
point is that it does not belong in the base system.  I will
invariably install perl on every system I install, with the exception
of those which essentially serve as embedded controllers or routers or
the like.  But including perl in the base OS inflates the base OS by
several megabytes (which one cannot afford in important special cases)
locks it into obsolete software, annoys and confuses users of the
up-to-date version, and is just plain evil.  I suggested that I would
be willing to rewrite those few perl kludges which are current.  I was
rebuffed.