Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!newstop!sun!zweig!stef From: stef@zweig.sun.com (Stephane Payrard) Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl Subject: Re: what is perl? Message-ID: Date: 17 Dec 89 18:14:38 GMT References: <13316@fluke.COM> Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM Distribution: comp Organization: /home/zotz/stef/.organization Lines: 84 In-reply-to: inc@tc.fluke.COM's message of 16 Dec 89 00:07:57 GMT In article xmjschm@mbcrrb.harvard.edu (Mike Schmelzer) writes: It would be nice if someone would explain briefly Perl's history, utility, capabilities and availablity. -- === Mike Schmelzer === xmjschm@mbcrr.harvard.edu ====== 617-732-3746 ======= "A matter of opinion derives weight from the name which is attached to it; but a chain of reasoning is equally conclusive, whoever may be the author." ================================================== - Charles Babbage ======= Originally, Perl was a report generator langage, something comparable to nawk. I have seen it for the first time one or two year ago; but as promising it sounded, it was too buggy and I decided not to use it. A few weeks ago, I have given it a second chance and now I am very enthousiastic about the language and its implementation. Perl is now a full fledged language which provides in one Unix Process the functionalities which are usually provided by complex (and slow) combinations (via multiple process and pipes) of sh, awk (ou nawk) and sed, or by a C program. Perl is now hooked to the OS: the language provide access to system calls as built-in feature; if you use system-calls for which Perl provide no wrapper, you can use as well syscall() combined with pack. There is also a Perl debugger (written in Perl). Perl has both the advantage of an interpreted language (flexibility, extensibility, source code always available) and of a compiled one (speed) because it compiles code in an internal format before executing it. It runs on many hardware platform. I think it is somewhat a heavy investment to learn Perl. But, once you have done it, you can do so many things with it so that you have no more to cope with many of the hundreds of weird Unix utilities. I think that the time usually spent to learn all the UNIX text/file manipulation micro-tools (paste, cut, xargs, head, wc, test, basename, split, uniq...) and the glue to combine them (various shells) is more efficiently used learning Perl. Nevertheless, a previous knowledge of the usual Unix stuff (c, awk, sh and pattern matching) gives you a faster handle on the language. One reason is that tutorial material is not yet released and that the reference manual assumes from the reader a good knowledge of Unix environement. I think Perl is great for almost every system-administration task, for very small programs or rapid-prototyping. But it is not excluded that Perl is useful to write medium-size programs (I am in fact heading in that way!!!) Some bunch of good administrative utilities is part of the toolkit. They provide a good way to learn by examples the language. I think (I am not sure) that Perl is not part of the gnu distribution. But it is distributed under the conditions of the gnu distribution. If I understand well, it means you cannot include Perl or use source of Perl interpreter as part of a commercial release. This is quite limitative for much of us programmers working for private/greedy ;-) companies (For that particular subject, please direct followup to gnu.mic.discuss or dev/null) Whatever, Perl is representative of the quality of all this gnu copyleft stuff. with the following restrictions : the language is not yet very stable and there is still some nasty bugs (not blocking ones in general). I think Larry Wall (the creator and implementor of Perl) is stabilizing the language and is active fixing the remaining bugs. you can find the last version of Perl by anonymous ftp to jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov (128.149.8.43) and get patches regularly from the same server. If you want to keep you up to date, or are blocked by a problem, you will also need to get the prgram 'patch' to apply this patches. Larry Wall seems very receptive to any feedback and seems to correct the reported problems very quickly. There is also a mail list and posted digests for which you will find information in previous posting to this news-group. I hope that my laius has answered your questions ... and wonders of people who are discovering this new and promising news-group. Sorry for my lousy english (yet another not so natural language I try to master).