Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!mucs!m1!bevan From: bevan@cs.man.ac.uk (Stephen J Bevan) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: Which to use :- Perl, Python, Icon, ... ? Message-ID: Date: 8 Mar 91 10:56:25 GMT References: <1073@caslon.cs.arizona.edu> Sender: news@cs.man.ac.uk Distribution: comp Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester Lines: 42 In-reply-to: cjeffery@cs.arizona.edu's message of 7 Mar 91 19:59:48 GMT > Would someone please post or e-mail me a reference for Python? Seeing as I started this with mentioning Python, here's what I know about it. It was advertised in a few news groups (it definitely appeared in comp.archives) and the source was posted to alt.sources. Anyway here's part of the post. From Guido van Rossum (the author of Python) > I have placed tarred, compressed versions of Python and STDWIN on the > anonymous ftp archive server "wuarchive.wustl.edu", in pub, under the names > python0.9.1.tar.Z and stdwin0.9.4.tar.Z. This includes official patch#1 > for Python. I will also place the Postscript of the manuals there under > the names pythondoc1.ps.Z and pythondoc2.ps.Z. I now have the python documentation and have just finished reading it (about ten minutes ago). As I haven't read much about Perl and Icon, I'm not in a position to comment on how it compares yet. > Generally, my guess is that you would find Icon better for complex > string analysis tasks that don't fit into neat regular expressions, > or for programs that use extracted information in complex ways. > Perl looks better for the jobs that it was designed to handle. I'm specifically after a language which allow flexible extraction of information from multiple files and the creation of subsequent files. I currently use awk for most of these tasks, but the built in line length limits, not being able to define my own functions and terrible error messages are a pain%. > Well if I can show my bias here, I'd forget all about Perl, AWK, Python, Icon ... etc. if Scheme had things like regexps. Granted I could implement them myself (e.g. an extension to ELK), but I'm trying not to invent yet another language but use one that is already defined. Stephen J. Bevan bevan@cs.man.ac.uk % Some, if not all, of these may be solved by using gawk fron GNU rather than the awk that comes with SunOS