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From: goer@ellis.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: perl compared to other Unix tools
Message-ID: <1990Dec9.193205.5794@midway.uchicago.edu>
Date: 9 Dec 90 19:32:05 GMT
References: <STEF.90Dec7130410@zweig.exodus> <1990Dec8.020706.28417@midway.uchicago.edu> <1990Dec09.052353.18018@chinet.chi.il.us>
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In article <1990Dec09.052353.18018@chinet.chi.il.us>
les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) writes:
>
>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 ;
>}

Again, it's not the string processing tools that make perl unique.
It's the combination of tools and their particularly facile integration
with the operating system that make perl unique.

The regexp stuff you mention above is peanuts in languages like Snobol
and Icon.  In fact, regular expressions are felt, by Snobol and Icon
programmers, to be insufficiently powerful for the sorts of things they
do.  Multi-line matches, non-regular languages, and other bits of
trickery are the bread and butter of languages like Snobol and Icon.
Note, though, that to do the things you mention above takes more space
in at least Icon than perl - that is, if you restrict yourself to pat-
terns that can be recognized using a deterministic finite state auto-
maton.  And for this restricted pattern-type, perl will probably run
faster than Icon and Snobol (but what about Spitbol?).  There are ups
and downs to everything.

I guess what I'm saying is that statements like the one I'm responding
to above indicate that people really don't know about the grand old
tradition of nonnumeric processing we see in systems like COMIT (ee
gads), SNOBOL4, Spitbol, Icon, and offshoots like awk, nawk, and now
languages which incorporate elements from these, like perl.  I really
never wanted to get into any argument here.  I've never taken a
course from a computer science departement in my life (I'm currently
finishing up a PhD in Near Eastern Languages), and I feel out of my
element.  When people started taking me to task for saying that perl
wasn't uniquely suited to sorting, hashing, and matching tasks, I guess
I felt I had to say something.

As I've said before, perl is neat tool, and if it had no usefulness,
I would not be here.

Keep on perling!

-Richard (goer@sophist.uchicago.edu)