(sent to the perl-thanks address) ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon Jul 10 11:05:51 2000 (EDT) From: Karl Dahlke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: I Think I'm In Love With perl, that is. Some 20 years ago I began my career at AT&T (this was pre-divestiture). For some perverse reason I read the complete documentation on sed, awk, and sh, and quickly became a regional expert in these programs. Everybody came to me when they wanted simple text-processing scripts, and they couldn't believe how quickly I whipped them off, or modified them later as necessary. Then I went off and studied math at Berkeley (don't ask me why), and when I returned to programming it was pretty much C, C++, and eventually Java. I really like Java -- much better than C++ -- but there are little tasks that are nearly impossible to do without writing a C native method, so that's kinda frustrating. My last project, for Premiere Technologies, included extensive text processing, which I wrote in C, because (1) that's what my boss expected, (2) that's what I was comfortable with, (3) the program had to run fast, and (4) it was embeded in a larger C program. Yet these reasons don't really stand up to scrutiny, once you know perl. I recently replaced 3 pages of awkward, unreadable, unmaintainable, error-prone C with one regexp substitution. It's a complicated one, spread across several lines (via the /x feature), but it's still one perl statement, and it's pretty obvious what it's doing, and how to maintain it if our situation changes. Also, the silly application won't core dump on us, just because some pointer ran over bounds. It might crash, but at least we get a useful diagnostic message, instead of a register dump. I believe this is the selling point I need to convince my boss that perl is the way to go. Certainly the speed and the interoperability with C are non-issues, so I just have to get him comfortable with the idea. When you promote this language, you should say that it includes the best of: C, shell, sed, awk, and Java. This last point is important, because many people are looking for OO. C++ was first, but Java got it right, and perl offers the same OO features as Java, plus a few more, without the many pitfalls of C++, which are forced upon us by being backward compatible with C. I'm looking forward to playing with perl threads someday too. Keep up the good work. Karl Dahlke [EMAIL PROTECTED]
