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From: merlyn@iwarp.intel.com (Randal Schwartz)
Newsgroups: alt.sources.d
Subject: Perl (of course!) (was Re: uutraffic report (in perl))
Message-ID: <5262@omepd.UUCP>
Date: 27 Nov 89 01:47:46 GMT
References: <4025@mhres.mh.nl> <1194@radius.UUCP> <3273@convex.UUCP> <RICHARDT.89Nov21141554@anableps.berkeley.edu> <JGREELY.89Nov21175157@oz.cis.ohio-state.edu>
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Reply-To: merlyn@iwarp.intel.com (Randal Schwartz)
Organization: Stonehenge; netaccess via Intel, Hillsboro, Oregon, USA
Lines: 41
In-reply-to: jgreely@oz.cis.ohio-state.edu (J Greely)

In article <JGREELY.89Nov21175157@oz.cis.ohio-state.edu>, jgreely@oz (J Greely) writes:
| I don't think Tom is advocating Perl as a complete replacement for the
| Unix Way(TM), but as a complement to it.  There is a type of
| programming task that's too clumsy or slow (or both) when written the
| "old-fashioned" way, but not easily implemented in C (or just not
| worth the time).  This is what Perl is for.  By some strange
| coincidence, tasks of this type are extremely common in system
| administration.  I suspect a straw poll of Perl users would turn up a
| large number of sysadmins.

This is *exactly* the audience for Perl.  When an "easy" combination
of awk and sed doesn't do it, but writing a C program (under multiple
architectures) is overkill, Perl seems to fit in quite nicely.  It's
also a lot more flexible at launching and managing multiple processes
than the same thing in awk or sh.  It also has this little report
generator built in that I've made minimal use of, but was the original
intent of Perl.

| You *do* know that Perl is a complete programming language, right?
| Powerful enough that Larry Wall is supposedly writing the next version
| of RN in it?  (I've never had the guts to ask him about this one,
| myself; I'd really rather not know)

This is true (Larry said so over dinner last month), and in fact was
the reason that all that socket and termio stuff ended up in Perl 3.0.
Larry hasn't started on the next RN yet (no time! :-), other than some
of the scaffolding to test connecting to an NNTP server with Perl.
The new RN will also be a testbed for a "new way to read news", much
like the current RN gave us all the concepts of "subject threads" and
"kill files".  (Something along the line of "virtual newsgroups", but
I don't want to steal Larry's thunder...)

(Geez.  When the new RN comes out, I'll be torn between using Gnews
inside GNU Emacs, and the new RN.  Gaccckk. :-)

Just another Perl hacker,
-- 
/== Randal L. Schwartz, Stonehenge Consulting Services (503)777-0095 ====\
| on contract to Intel's iWarp project, Hillsboro, Oregon, USA, Sol III  |
| merlyn@iwarp.intel.com ...!uunet!iwarp.intel.com!merlyn	         |
\== Cute Quote: "Welcome to Oregon... Home of the California Raisins!" ==/


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