From owner-freebsd-current Sun Jun 23 20:14:48 1996 Return-Path: owner-current Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id UAA16883 for current-outgoing; Sun, 23 Jun 1996 20:14:48 -0700 (PDT) Received: from magigimmix.xs4all.nl (magigimmix.xs4all.nl [194.109.6.25]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id UAA16878 for ; Sun, 23 Jun 1996 20:14:42 -0700 (PDT) Received: from asterix.xs4all.nl (asterix.xs4all.nl [194.109.6.11]) by magigimmix.xs4all.nl (8.7.5/XS4ALL) with ESMTP id FAA29450 for ; Mon, 24 Jun 1996 05:14:40 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from plm.xs4all.nl (uucp@localhost) by asterix (8.7.5/8.7.2) with UUCP id FAA11760 for freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG; Mon, 24 Jun 1996 05:04:30 +0200 (MET DST) Received: (from plm@localhost) by plm.xs4all.nl (8.7.5/8.7.3) id SAA02945; Sun, 23 Jun 1996 18:55:12 +0200 (MET DST) To: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: tcl -- what's going on here. References: <87ohmasctn.fsf@totally-fudged-out-message-id> From: Peter Mutsaers Date: 23 Jun 1996 18:55:10 +0200 In-Reply-To: J Wunsch's message of Sun, 23 Jun 1996 12:52:48 +0200 (MET DST) Message-ID: <87enn6sbo1.fsf@plm.xs4all.nl> Lines: 47 X-Mailer: Gnus v5.2.22/Emacs 19.31 Sender: owner-current@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk >> On Sun, 23 Jun 1996 12:52:48 +0200 (MET DST), J Wunsch >> said: JW> As Tony Kimball wrote: >> up-to-date version, and is just plain evil. I suggested that I >> would be willing to rewrite those few perl kludges which are >> current. I was rebuffed. JW> They are not ``kludges''. The authors of those tools JW> deliberately choose Perl for them, not since they didn't knew JW> C, but since they felt that Perl was simply more adequate. JW> Something like text processing (or pattern matching etc.) in C JW> is simply a kludge, where Perl allows for elegant (and easier JW> to maintain) solutions. One could also create such tools in sh/awk/sed etc. Awk and sed are also very good for text processing (though perl is slightly better). I scanned which files in current use perl: catman makewhatis h2ph etc :) /usr/src/sys/pci/locate.pl (is this one used?) keyinfo killall sgmlfmt whereis which adduser kbdmap spkrtest I do think that Perl is a good choice for many of these, but on the other hand, the shell or C or Awk is also possible without much effort, since the number of perl scripts is very small. Do these really warrant that perl4 (in the future perl5, which is much bigger?) is part of the base OS? -- ______________________________________________________________________ Peter Mutsaers | Abcoude (Utrecht), | "Quod licet bovis, plm@xs4all.nl | the Netherlands | non licet Jovi."