Xref: utzoo news.announce.newgroups:129 news.groups:14672 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!samsung!uunet!image.soe.clarkson.edu!nelson From: david@indetech.com (David Kuder) Newsgroups: news.announce.newgroups,news.groups Subject: Call for Discussion: comp.lang.perl Message-ID: <1989Oct4.210623.25802@indetech.com> Date: 18 Nov 89 05:36:36 GMT Sender: woods@ncar.ucar.edu Reply-To: david@indetech.com (David Kuder) Followup-To: news.groups Organization: Independence Technologies, Inc. Fremont, CA Lines: 53 Approved: woods@ncar.ucar.edu (Greg Woods) Disclaimer: Author bears full responsibility for contents of this article Larry Wall, whose Wallware (rn, patch, and Config) can be found all over the net, has announced that Perl 3.0 will soon be available in comp.sources.unix. Those of us who have been using earlier versions of Perl feel it is time for a newsgroup devoted to it. The obvious name is comp.lang.perl. There is mailing list that is devoted to perl. Since the beta release of Perl 3.0 there has been a tremendous amount of traffic on list. Both the members of the list and Larry Wall feel that it is time that Perl have its own group and the arrival of Perl 3.0 is the perfect opportunity to start the group. The following excerpt is from the man page for Perl. It gives a good capsule description of the language. Perl is a interpreted language optimized for scanning arbi- trary text files, extracting information from those text files, and printing reports based on that information. It's also a good language for many system management tasks. The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, effi- cient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal). It combines (in the author's opinion, anyway) some of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people familiar with those languages should have little difficulty with it. (Language historians will also note some vestiges of csh, Pascal, and even BASIC-PLUS.) Expression syntax corresponds quite closely to C expression syntax. Unlike most Unix utilities, perl does not arbitrarily limit the size of your data--if you've got the memory, perl can slurp in your whole file as a single string. And the hash tables used by associative arrays grow as necessary to prevent degraded performance. Perl uses sophisticated pattern matching techniques to scan large amounts of data very quickly. Although optimized for scanning text, perl can also deal with binary data, and can make dbm files look like associative arrays (where dbm is available). Setuid perl scripts are safer than C programs through a dataflow tracing mechanism which prevents many stupid security holes. If you have a problem that would ordinarily use sed or awk or sh, but it exceeds their capabilities or must run a little fas- ter, and you don't want to write the silly thing in C, then perl may be for you. There are also translators to turn your sed and awk scripts into perl scripts. OK, enough hype. Well I hate to contradict Larry but that is hardly enough hype. I suggest that those better at talking it up (those of you on perl-users@virginia.edu) know who you are) in news.groups. Following the required time for discussion I will post a call for votes for the formation of comp.lang.perl. -- David A. Kuder Comp.lang.perl, the time is now! 415 438-2003 david@indetech.com {uunet,sun,sharkey,pacbell}!indetech!david -- --russ (nelson@clutx [.bitnet | .clarkson.edu]) Live up to the light thou hast, and more will be granted thee. A recession now appears more than 2 years away -- John D. Mathon, 4 Oct 1989. I think killing is value-neutral in and of itself. -- Gary Strand, 8 Nov 1989.