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From: richardt@mica.Berkeley.EDU (Richard Threadgill)
Newsgroups: alt.sources.d
Subject: Re: uutraffic report (in perl)
Message-ID: <RICHARDT.89Nov21141554@anableps.berkeley.edu>
Date: 21 Nov 89 22:15:54 GMT
References: <4025@mhres.mh.nl> <1194@radius.UUCP> <3273@convex.UUCP>
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In-reply-to: tchrist@convex.COM's message of 21 Nov 89 04:28:30 GMT

In article <3273@convex.UUCP> tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) writes:

  >>OK, but what about those of us who don't have 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.  

To my mind this is the most powerful argument I heard *against* using
perl.  Perl, like any other monolithic integrated system is wonderful
for performing the tasks it was designed to encompass.  However, that
also ties you to that monolithic system.  The whole point of having
filters is that with a filter you can massage the input in just
about any fashion you like.  Need a different filter? Spend the few
minutes it takes to write one.  Maybe perl has the capabilities for
all the filters you need now - if so, great.  However, the filter
paradigm is still a hell of a lot more useful than the monolithic
pardigm.  Don't forget how to do filter programming - moreover, don't
tie new script authors to your pet monolithic system.

RichardT