* John Richard Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [020711 07:31]: > My family often say I'm too curious. I found the name interesting. > I hadn't thought about man python, as it wasn't a specific programme, I > hadn't thought about looking for perl there( yes I spelt it wrong)
The man program looks for a manual for a given command. Try man man for a manual for man ;-) Not everything has a manual. There is also info which I consider awkward and unfortunately, some programs have an old man file that tells you to consult info for more information. Which often is the same as what you found in man anyway. There is MUCH more information available for GNU/Linux stuff than for Windows stuff (unless you have an unlimited expense account for books), but it IS a bit difficult to locate, since it's scattered about. > these various flavours they are all variations of C, C+, C++ , I > guess. They all do something better in some way and that is why > programmes use them. Perl is not a variation of C, although there is a lot of similarity in their syntaxes, the rules about how you construct statements, variables, etc. Many modern computer languages are very C-like. One difference (warning ... gross oversimplification follows) is that C (and its varieties like C++) are COMPILED. This means that someone writes source code, in plain ASCII text, and then a compiler creates binary code which can be executed. Perl, Python, and many others are INTERPRETED, which means the ASCII source code is read and interpreteted by a program (named perl, in the case of Perl) and executed from that. Thus C can be much faster than Perl, at least for certain things ... you wouldn't want to write a video driver in Perl. The speed differences are much less than they used to be, because interpreted programs like Perl, Python, and PHP actually compile the scripts into tokens before executing, and the tokenized code can do many things almost as fast as compiled code. So why use an interpreted language? Well, most programmers would agree that it's a lot quicker to develop a short program in Perl or Python than in C. It's generally a lot easier to learn (someone will of course disagree with this). I would encourage anyone to at least dabble in programming. Learn at least some BASH ( man bash ) because it will help you harness the power of Linux. Play with Perl, Python (some think it's better for learning ... I haven't really tried it), or even JavaScript if you do any web page designing. -- Jan Wilson, SysAdmin _/*]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corozal Junior College | |:' corozal.com corozal.bz Corozal Town, Belize | /' chetumal.com & linux.bz Reg. Linux user #151611 |_/ Network, SQL, Perl, HTML
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