Lars Eighner wrote:
On Fri, 9 Oct 2009, Warren Block wrote:
That's twice now people have suggested sed instead of perl. Why? For many uses, perl is a better sed than sed. The regex engine is far more powerful and escapes are much simpler.
Because sed is stable and perl is getting all OO and flaky. Sed will work like sed for so long as there are unix-like systems. It is not clear that perl is going to continue to work.
What utter tosh. Perl's Object Oriented features have been in place for years and, believe it or not, perl programs written for Perl 4 still continue to work with little or no modification under the very latest perl release, right alongside the stuff written yesterday that uses all the very latest features. That's a damnsight better track record than almost any other actively developed language you could mention.
There's nothing that forces you to program Perl in an OO style -- procedural
style works just fine. You could probably make a fair stab at writing in a
purely functional style (like Ocaml) if you felt that way inclined.
I get very irritated with the current vogue in certain quarters for doing down
Perl. So what if you personally don't like coding in Perl? No one is holding a
gun to your head and making you do it. Write in what ever language suits you,
but don't try and force me to conform to your prejudices.
Matthew
--
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 7 Priory Courtyard
Flat 3
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