On Mon, 28 Jan 2002, Sam Ewalt wrote: > I had no idea that perl and > python were so important and used that frequently by so > many different things. > > I was thinking that they wouldn't be needed by a guy like > myself because there's no way I'm ever going to write anything > in perl or python.
You might be surprised. If you ever need to go beyond the constraints of a bash script, one of those might well fit your purpose. They're at more or less opposite ends of the spectrum, so you might choose strictly on "personality." ;-) Perl is really good for text/file manipulation, has rather loose grammatical rules (was written by a linguist rather than a programmer) and is quite commonly used for cgi programs. The philosophy is tmtowtdi (pronounced tim-towdy) which stands for, There's More Than One Way To Do It. Prides itself on being able to do a given job in the least number of lines of code. No interactive prompt. /usr/bin/perl is ~528K. Python is not only strict in grammatical construction, but also in indentation (rather than brackets) to set off subroutines. Is just as easy to use for cgi, but not as commonly used for that purpose. It seems to be capable of more direct hardware access, its philosophy is that "There's only one 'best' way to do it." Prides itself on being able to do a job fast (not as fast as C, but faster than perl or basic or other interpreted languages). Has an interactive prompt, so you can run single commands to see what they do. /usr/bin/python is ~347K - Steve
