2009/3/21 Raul Miller <[email protected]>: > On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 6:06 PM, Boyko Bantchev <[email protected]> wrote: >> The point is that sh is a commmand-line interpreter (a job >> control language), but not an extension language. It doesn't >> do scripting in the sense of extending a compiled program. >> REXX is both a c.l. interpreter and a scripting language in >> this sense. And as sh was designed as (only) a c.l. interpreter, >> it lacks features that would have made it a programming language >> per se; so in this respect, too, it is inferior to REXX. > > I have spawned shell scripts from inside perl programs to > do complex tasks for the perl program. > .................... > ...... I often write shell scripts which call perl > (sometimes multiple times within the same script), > and vice versa (as I mentioned, above).
Surely such calls can be done. Still, data exchange between the two parts can only take crude forms: files and pipes. Quite not the same as using APIs. And it remains true that sh's own data processing capabilities are rather weak. In both respects sh is inferior to REXX. Sh was simply not designed to have the scope of capabilities REXX has. >> Spawning a process to compute a single value just because it >> happens to be non-integer, and then communicating this value >> through a pipe or a file to another process is a replacement >> to true scripting only in the sense in which all computers >> are Turing machines and all programming languages are the same. > > But this characterization seems rather microscopic, and thus > not particularly relevant. I don't see what you mean here, and how it relates to my words. >> Were it not so, there would be no point in creating and using >> Tcl, Perl etc., and game programmers would have used sh and >> piping where they really use, e.g., Lua. > > I do not think games are good examples of > system integration tasks. And I didn't say or mean ‘system integration’ here. I said and meant ‘scripting’; and games, as complex program systems, are a well known domain of applying scripting (in the sense of ‘system extension’). > That said, I have seen various people comment that > perl does too much and that tcl was not needed. One can find supporters for any opinion. I mean any. But opinions alone are not a criterion for anything. In any case, both Perl and Tcl are thriving, along with many others of the kind. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
