Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!att!linac!midway!gargoyle!chinet!les
From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: perl compared to other Unix tools (was: a pointer for a perl compare script)
Message-ID: <1990Dec09.052353.18018@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 9 Dec 90 05:23:53 GMT
References: <275E7B47.2EB9@tct.uucp> <STEF.90Dec7130410@zweig.exodus> <1990Dec8.020706.28417@midway.uchicago.edu>
Organization: Chinet - Public Access UNIX
Lines: 34

In article <1990Dec8.020706.28417@midway.uchicago.edu> goer@ellis.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz) writes:
>The point was not that there were other tools out there which could
>replace perl, but rather that certain features found in perl (e.g. good
>string handling facilities, associative arrays, and what not) were by no
>means unique, and that for problems which required such facilities, perl
>was by no means a unique tool.

Ok, sticking to the text handling features relating to the original question,
there may be other languages that would easily sort text by keys.  But there
was also a mention of needing to manipulate it when a match occured.
Does anything else let you do those wonderful combination test, assign
and regexp extract like perl's:

if (($got1,$got2,$got3) =($var =~ /(pattern1) (pattern2) (pattern3))) {
  ... do whatever you want with $got1 etc.
}

Or handle multi-line regexps like this piece from the example I posted
where it takes everything between a SUMMARY: line and STATUS: line
in one item and inserts it before the STATUS: in an update which lacks
the SUMMARY information?

local ($*) = 1 ;  # multi-line match needed
[...]
# snarf summary from old - note multi-line 
if (($status) = $oitems{$oldid} =~ /(^SUMMARY:\n[^\0]*)^STATUS:/) {
# and insert into new
substr($nitems{$newid},index($nitems{$newid},"STATUS:\n"),0) = $status ;
}

Yes, you could loop over the lines (or characters) explicitly, but why?

Les Mikesell
  les@chinet.chi.il.us