On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 01:42:05PM +0200, Almir Karic wrote: > On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 9:37 AM, Marc Espie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > As far as perl goes, it's about the only language that fit the bill. > > The older pkg_* were totally impossible to maintain and extend, and > > I needed a sensible script language that was in base. > > at the risk of starting a flame war, considered python? beside not > being in the base, any other downsides for this particular task?
There's no real fundamental difference between python and perl, especially for this kind of job. Some people prefer python, say it's cleaner. Frankly, I don't care. I haven't yet met a task that python could tackle and python could not. Perl is in base, and I'm used to working with it. Those are pretty big advantages. The only potential drawback to perl was speed... since the rewritten pkg_* turned out to be *faster* than their older C counterpart, that was not a viable argument. The only other viable choice would have been C++. But needing to compile that stuff, having a somewhat less stable toolchain, plus the frank dislike of some OpenBSD people wrt C++ made that a non-issue. I've spent quite some time thinking about the language before I embarked on the perl pkg_* adventures. I've never regretted that choice, the tools turned out to do even more than I hoped for, and I've never run into any perl-related issue.
