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From: merlyn@iwarp.intel.com (Randal Schwartz)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Icon or Perl?
Message-ID: <1990Jul16.224846.18330@iwarp.intel.com>
Date: 16 Jul 90 22:48:46 GMT
References: <263@sun13.scri.fsu.edu>
Sender: news@iwarp.intel.com
Reply-To: merlyn@iwarp.intel.com (Randal Schwartz)
Organization: Stonehenge; netaccess via Intel, Beaverton, Oregon, USA
Lines: 49
In-Reply-To: nall@sun8.scri.fsu.edu (John Nall)

In article <263@sun13.scri.fsu.edu>, nall@sun8 (John Nall) writes:
| A friend of mine looked at some of the stuff which I was
| attempting to do with Perl (involving primarily the manip-
| ulation of words) and opined that I could do it with Icon
| much easier.

I was an Icon expert, although I'm a bit rusty at it now.  (One of my
contributions made it into the standard library, for example.)

Icon excels at what it was written for... munging strings, lists,
structured data types, and so on.  The I/O was pretty limited to
Pascal-like I/O (we're talking early Pascal here... basically fetch
sequential and store sequential).  It doesn't have regexps, but you
can build them *very* easily.

Perl excels at what it was written for... except we are still trying
to figure out what that is. :-) But seriously, Perl has some of the
hackery of attacking and munging strings and simple lists down pretty
well.  Structured data (as someone pointed out a few weeks ago) has to
be handled by forcing the data to be viewed a string or a list.  Perl
has about a third of Icon's string-handling capability, about the same
control structures (OK, so there's no equivalent to generators or
failing expressions), and about three times the amount of I/O and
process management.

IMHO, of course. :-)

They're both good at separate tasks.  I haven't had time or motivation
to fire up Icon on my current "day job", but have occasionaly noted
that "this part would be better in Icon".  I have never said that
about an entire task... just some crafty (crufty? :-) text
manipulation or structured data mangling.  Overall, for hacking away
at data inside a UNIX environment, if I was stuck with one tool, I'd
pick Perl over Icon.  (And not because I am now Perl adept... I've
really had time to play with both on a fair basis.)

A true toolsmith can use a both a Swiss Army Chainsaw and a
Sledge-o-matic, however, so I'd recommend learning both.  I find
myself sometimes thinking Icon-like while writing Perl, and I come up
with some new idiom to express some particular trick in a
straightforward way.  You can never learn too many computer languages.
(I list over 50 on my resume now.)

Just another Swiss Army Chainsaw Wielder,
-- 
/=Randal L. Schwartz, Stonehenge Consulting Services (503)777-0095 ==========\
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