Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1999 22:58:06 +0200 (CEST) From: Oliver Fromme <olli@dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de> To: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FICL breakage... Message-ID: <199909302058.WAA27547@dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de>
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Jordan K. Hubbard wrote in list.freebsd-current:
> > Anyway, all good to know. There are almost certainly more perl
> > speakers than awk speakers these days, so it probably makes sense
> > to do these things in perl rather than awk.
>
> I think that's sort of in the grey area. There are also many Hardened
> Traditionalists(tm) like myself who don't know perl and have no
> interest in learning it because everything they ever need to do can be
> handled by sh, awk and sed and they spent many years gaining that
> level of proficiency with them. We could color our ls and replace sh
> with bash too, but sometimes there's value in retaining the simpler
> traditions as you also go forward with the newer tools. :-)
Not that anybody actually listens to me, but I have to say that
I completely agree with Jordan. Knowing both perl and awk, I
like awk a _lot_ better. It is definitely much easier to learn
and to use. (You _have_ to learn it first, of course, but if
you already know C, you know 90% of awk.) A lot of my scripts
begin with #!/usr/bin/awk -f ;)
In fact, I learned perl first and did quite a lot of things
with it. However, when I became more familiar with awk, the
deficiencies of perl became more and more obvious to me. So I
started porting my old perl stuff: to sh, to awk, to C, or
whatever seemed most appropriate. (I still have some perl
scripts left, just because they work, and lack of time to
convert, or because someone else wrote them without too much
care, rendering them unreadable and unmaintainable -- a common
problem with perl.)
Just my 0.02 Euro...
Regards
Oliver
PS: If you need something ported to awk or written in awk,
just let me know. :)
--
Oliver Fromme, Leibnizstr. 18/61, 38678 Clausthal, Germany
(Info: finger userinfo:olli@dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de)
"In jedem Stück Kohle wartet ein Diamant auf seine Geburt"
(Terry Pratchett)
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