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From: goer@quads.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Needed: a pointer for a perl compare script (long, sorry..)
Message-ID: <1990Dec5.060300.21410@midway.uchicago.edu>
Date: 5 Dec 90 06:03:00 GMT
References: <12020@milton.u.washington.edu> <1990Dec04.230436.8432@chinet.chi.il.us>
Sender: news@midway.uchicago.edu (News Administrator)
Organization: University of Chicago
Lines: 23

In article <1990Dec04.230436.8432@chinet.chi.il.us>
les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) writes:
>
>>My program reads two files of differing format which are sorted by a unique
>>5-character label.  When two labels match, a new record is written, with
>>info from file A (moved around a bit) written to the "left" and info from
>>file B (again, reformatted a little) written to the "right".  Where a 
>>given record from file A or B has no counterpart, the same new record is
>>written, with blanks on the "side" without counterpart information.
>
>Perl is the language of choice for this kind of thing but it may still
>turn out to be non-trivial....

I like reading this newsgroup, but this sort of statement comes up all too
often.  Perl is not the only language around that is optimized for file,
string, and symbol processing, which has associative arrays, and handles
sorting and printing elegantly.  If you can't think of any examples off-
hand then mail me, and I'll be glad to provide you with a few.  This is not
to say that we should not use perl.  It is to say simply that it's a bit
outlandish to call it "*the* language of choice" for tasks like the one
described above.

-Richard (goer@sophist.uchicago.edu)


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