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From: Peter da Silva <peter@bonkers.taronga.com>
Message-Id: <199503290236.UAA05204@bonkers.taronga.com>
Subject: Re: MBONE interfaces and snazzy install tools.
To: nate@trout.sri.MT.net (Nate Williams)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 1995 20:36:20 -0600 (CST)
Cc: hasty@star-gate.com, hackers@freefall.cdrom.com
In-Reply-To: <199503290127.SAA12442@trout.sri.MT.net> from "Nate Williams" at Mar 28, 95 06:27:40 pm
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Gee, I guess we won't be needing that bmaked tcl/tk after all.

> > Again, something like an installation tool will be trivial to implement in
> > tcl/tk which will work for X and curses.

> Or TkPerl. :-)

Is TkPerl honestly ready for prime time? Most of these "foo + Tk" things
I've tried have been flakey. If you want that, I'd rather go with Tk4 and
CTK, since that'll give us both X and curses interfaces.

I'm beginning to get used to Perl 5. Perl 4 and earlier have a lot more
random adhocery than I care for: Tcl is a cleaner design (and like lisp
it takes a little getting used to). If we were talking Perl 5 versus Tcl
7.4 I'd grant you the point on the language.  But then we'd have the "same
script for X and curses" point to consider.

> We need to standardize on *one* scripting language, and jumping from one
> ship to the next as it becomes popular does not help us.

The standard scripting language is sh, with csh and perl virtually tied
for second.

On freefall:
% cd /usr/bin
% file * | awk '/script/ {$1=""; t[$0]++}; END {for(i in t) print i, t[i]}'
 a /usr/bin/perl script text 4
 Bourne Shell script text 28
 FreeBSD/i386 demand paged dynamically linked executable 1
 C Shell script text 1
% cd /usr/local/bin
% !fi
file * | awk '/script/ {$1=""; t[$0]++}; END {for(i in t) print i, t[i]}'
 a /usr/bin/perl script text 14
 Bourne Shell script text 16
 a /usr/local/bin/dpwish -f script text 1
 a /usr/local/bin/wishx -f script text 1
 a /usr/local/bin/wish -f script text 1
 C Shell script text 18
% 

> However, I'm pretty sure Peter Da Silva will disagree with me on the
> ease of use comparing Perl & Tcl.

Gee, what a surprise. <grin>