Paul,
No, I wouldn't say that Python quite fills the same nitch. It
does have serious text processing capability, but you will type a fair
amount more to do those kinds of jobs in Pyhton. Also, www.python.org
has (or had, I haven't looked lately) some performance comparisons
with other means of doing stuff, and IIRC Perl also usually came out a
tad faster (but that may have been version dependent).
But any performance difference isn't due to the extra verbiage,
since both internalize things before execution (unlike tcl).
On the other hand, I've found that if I don't use Perl much,
(I have tried to "learn" to use it effectively), the syntax and
feature set seems to drift away from me. Python is easier for me to
go back to, even if I've been spending my time in PIC or Scenix
assembler, or running the NC drill machine. Years of programming
with C, starting with Fortran over 30 years ago, etc., may make Python
more comfortable to me, but I think that it's more than that. I think
that it really is easier to get you mind around.
Python also serves me well as a rapid development language for
things that may become C or C++ projects. Since I have been able to
do my text processing conveniently with it, it makes sense for me to
choose not to bother getting good at another quite different language
like Perl.
I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with Perl, just
that it's not the only choice. Mike O'Donnell apparently also doesn't
fine Perl syntax agreeable, so it seems to me that I was correct to
suggest the alternative.
Since I don't know Perl well, I can't offer a reliable feature
comparison. I believe that there is such on the web site. I suspect
that pretty much all the features you need are in Python, although
some of them will be implemented as functions or classes from a
library, and even if they're built into the C source for the
interpreter, they may syntacticly look like library functions (such as
the basename function from the os package that Erik used). And, as
with Perl, there are usually several ways to skin a cat. Erik used a
dictionary (equivelent of the awk/perl associative array) to map back
from his sort keys to the original lines, since it was the list (more
like a regular array) of keys that got sorted. I'd been thinking more
of using the string and perhaps regular expression stuff to convert
the lines so that the basename part became "high order", sort, and
convert back.
I hope that I haven't rambled too much.
Bill
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