I would tend not to use Perl for anything too large as it's function setup is strange. I don't like how there are no variables, as you mention, everything is passed in some sort of an array, and you have to 'shift' off what you need. -Rob PS: What's the 'K' in K<bob>? > On 20010508.1523, Bob Miller said ... > > On Tue, May 08, 2001 at 01:57:25PM -0700, Cory Petkovsek wrote: > > > I think this has already been mentioned before, but I'm finding the > > need to learn a scripting language. Something more powerful than > > bash, but not as indepth(?) as C. > > > > I currently know C, C++ and Java. Can anyone tell me in about a > > paragraph why I should learn perl or python or > > $your_favorite_scripting_language? I don't need to be sold hard, I > > just want a few highlights of each language, especially how it is > > related to bash and C or C++ (not java ;( > > I know Perl pretty thoroughly. I have written a few dozen lines of > Python. If I needed to learn a scripting language today, I would pick > Python, but I have too much invested in Perl to make the switch. > > Perl is very powerful and very ugly. Its power comes from having nearly > all of libc built in, and from the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network > (CPAN), a truly huge library. I always start a nontrivial Perl project > by searching CPAN for keywords. Perl also has strong regular expression > support fairly well integrated into the language. Not all problems > need regexps in their solution, but when they do, you can't beat Perl. > > Perl is also ugly. Its semantics are just weird because perl 3 and > perl 4 had no datastructures except lists (one-dimensional vectors) > and hashes, and it only had dynamic scoping. References (pointers), > objects, and lexical scoping were added in perl 5, and Perl suffers > from its legacy. Perl also uses lots of punctuation, and the > punctuation makes programs hard to read. > > Python does not yet have anything equivalent to CPAN, but it's > a much cleaner design, since it was object oriented and lexically > scoped from the beginning. > > K<bob> >
