Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!bfmny0!tneff From: tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET (Tom Neff) Newsgroups: alt.sources.d Subject: Re: uutraffic report (in perl) Message-ID: <14947@bfmny0.UU.NET> Date: 22 Nov 89 04:24:11 GMT References: <4025@mhres.mh.nl> <1194@radius.UUCP> <3273@convex.UUCP> <14946@bfmny0.UU.NET> Reply-To: tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET (Tom Neff) Lines: 46 In article J Greely writes: >> It's too early for [perl] to become a religious issue. > >(Two years after its first net release is too early?) Oh yes absolutely. Two years is nothing, or why are we at 3.0. > ... And yes, it *is* a religious issue. It cuts to the heart of the >Unix philosophy, performs a triple bypass, and gets some useful work >done while sh is still in the first set of backquotes. Ever seen a >disk usage accounting system written in sh? It's not a pretty sight. More to the point, ever seen one in awk? Probably not, because although people may write 'em they don't get around. Swiss Army Interpreters occupy a peculiar middle zone between the pure shell -- dumb and function-poor but, in Madge's immortal words, "you're soaking in it" -- and compiled C, which takes work up front but which can do anything conceivable and will run maximally fast. Depending on your "religion," awk/perl either combine the best of these worlds or the worst. Perl attempts to win converts like Crocodile Dundee (naaooww, THAT's not a Swiss Army knife, THIS is a Swiss Army knife...) at the expense of compactness. It's a worthy idea, but there are drawbacks. On System V/386, for instance, with all debugging #undef'd and with -O turned on, the latest perl executable *after* both 'strip' and 'mcs -d' subtends 229K, and takes ~5 seconds to load, compile and interpret an in-line script consisting of 'exit 0;'. For overnight batch reports this is irrelevant, but there's little hope of using perl as a quickie tool to get something fun done in, say, a hacked Pnews as one might with sed. The perl answer, unfortunately, is "so what, just rewrite Pnews in perl" but this illustrates the "hump" of acceptance. "Switch over completely or suffer inconvenience" does *not* cut to the heart of the UNIX philosophy. It is closer to the religious passions that retard UNIX than it is to UNIX strengths. So while I like and admire Perl and feel it's the best batched report writer invented, I think its limitations preclude basic tool status. Perhaps one solution would be to stop writing '?2p' translators for a bit and write 'p2c' so that cherished perl tools can be C-compiled for lasting freshness. Then perl becomes a superb prototyper capable of dashing off a fast tool for intensive use in other environments. -- To have a horror of the bourgeois (\( Tom Neff is bourgeois. -- Jules Renard )\) tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET