On Sun, 22 Mar 1998, Scott McDermott wrote:
> I haven't heard of any RAD tools for Linux, this doesn't strike me as
> the Unix way. If you want to use other people's functions, you know how
> to do that, or your own. RAD tools are for people that want to program
> without programming.
Aha, it is the "it's hard for me, should be hard for you" mentality. :)
The best system for such a thing is TCL/TK. It provides a full featured
scripting language, and good access to the X window system. It comes with
Red Hat 5. TCL/TK is designed as a "glue" language for hanging a good
interface on top of a program whose "guts" are written mostly in C or C++,
and for providing basically a "better shell script" system for gluing
programs and their components together. TCL/TK's biggest weakness is its
lack of data typing; everything is considered to be a string (this was
intended to make parsing input and output of C programs easier). Despite
this, some people have written some pretty complicated applications
entirely in TCL. The complete language specification and a couple of
tutorials are available on-line, though I don't remember where.
If you're mostly interested in parsing text and/or databases, you will
want to look at perl. Perl is an interpreted functional language
optimized for text and regular expression processing. It is also the most
common language for writing CGI scripts in for the web. It also comes
with Red Hat 5, and modules are available for simplifying and automating a
large number of tasks. Look at www.perl.org.
You might also look into the scripting abilities of bash (or tcsh), the
shells available on Unix based systems. If you can learn out of a man
page, the bash man page describes all the neat things you can do with it.
Imagine DOS batch files crossed with Visual Basic, except that when you
add all the processing tools you get free in the box with your breakfast
cereal, it becomes considerably more powerful than both of them put
together.
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