Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!convex!tchrist@convex.COM From: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) Newsgroups: alt.sources.d Subject: Re: uutraffic report (in perl) Message-ID: <3273@convex.UUCP> Date: 21 Nov 89 04:28:30 GMT References: <4025@mhres.mh.nl> <1194@radius.UUCP> Sender: news@convex.UUCP Reply-To: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) Organization: CONVEX Software Development, Richardson, TX Lines: 42 In article <1194@radius.UUCP> radius!lemke@apple.com (Generic Account) writes: >In article <4025@mhres.mh.nl> jv@mhres.mh.nl (Johan Vromans) writes: >}This is where perl is designed for ... > >OK, but what about those of us who don't have perl? Is there already such >a script or program in plain old "c" that can make the same pretty reports >as shown above? We're running a NeXT with version 1.0 OS... >===== Steve Lemke, Engineering Quality Assurance, Radius Inc., San Jose ===== Please don't take this wrong, but why DON'T you have perl? If you can post this note, you can get perl. It's freely available from FTP and plain old uumail-type archive servers all over the net. Its author, Larry Wall, is the same man who brought you rn, metaconfig, and patch. He privately supports perl better than any industrial software house that I've ever seen. He's extremely helpful in getting perl running on new machines, and I'll bet it's already been tweaked for your architecture. If you've ever run one of Larry's Configure scripts, you know what I mean. Perl is light years ahead of awk, sed, and sh as far as tools go. I very strongly believe that it will be around for many years to come, and that it will be extremely widely used throughout the world. You can see how much source has come across the net just lately that's been written in perl. I have not written any awk or sed scripts since I got perl, and certainly none of those horrendous sh scripts full of multiple calls to sed and awk and tr and sort and cut and paste and expand and grep and all their brethren. I've saved myself quite a bit of development time by writing fewer C programs as well. Furthermore, perl programs are portable without modification or recompilation to a wealth of architectures. I only have around 5 architectures now to send common programs too, but in my last job there were no fewer than a dozen. It's really nice to just close your eyes and rdist your program and know it will run. Do yourself a favor: get perl. --tom Tom Christiansen {uunet,uiucdcs,sun}!convex!tchrist Convex Computer Corporation tchrist@convex.COM "EMACS belongs in : Editor too big!"