I am one of the maintainers of a sizeable Perl application -- order of magnitude thirty thousand lines of Perl -- and from my perspective, the greatest advantage of Perl over DCL is that Perl *can* be much better structured, thus easier to debug and to change.
An aside: > * Perl does lists and hashes _much_ better than DCL; I agree, but the advantage isn't quite as enormous as some people think, because they haven't noticed that DCL does have built-in support for hashes. It just calls them logical name tables .... / Tom Edelson -----Original Message----- From: Thomas R Wyant_III [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, September 03, 2002 5:07 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Perl vs. DCL (was RE: Set Default not Working) ... Actually, though, I find myself these days having to make a conscious decision whether to use DCL or Perl. Some of the issues are: * A Perl script is almost always shorter; * A DCL script works on any VMS system; * Perl does lists and hashes _much_ better than DCL; * If you're compute-intensive, Perl is at least an order of magnitude faster; * A Perl script can be made to work under multiple OSes; * DCL requires fewer processes (or at least no more); * Perl is still missing a few things that DCL will do. ...
