[SunRescue] Anyone else here hate Perl?

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Wednesday, April 4, 2001 at 22:15:36 (-0400), David Rouse wrote: ]
> Subject: RE: [SunRescue] Anyone else here hate Perl?
>
> But, but ... cross platform text manipulation!

Phooey.  If awk and sed can't do it (and they're about as cross-platform
as you could possibly get!) then it's not worth doing at a scripted level.

> I can write a script that
> munges html and have the flexibility of running that script on a Unix server
> or on a Mac desktop.

There must be several awk and sed implementations for MacOS by now.

I'm told there is a MacPython implementation too.  From the look of the
"Macintosh Library Modules" index it's pretty well integrated too.

There really should be Ruby and even REXX implementations for the Mac
too, though I don't know of any yet.....

Of course if you want the ultimate prototyping language on MacOS, which
can do excellent amounts of text manipulation, as well as anything else
right up to full multi-media programming, then the Squeak implementation
of Smalltalk-80 is what you really need.  It's downright incredible
anywhere it runs (including on Unix/X11), and on a G4 it should fly
along with incredible speed.

> Okay, I'm not really trying to argue the point -- I'm just saying that you
> can come up with an edge case that contradicts *any* "not one tiny thing
> good" statement. Hey, there is a reason they call stuff like this 'religious
> wars.'

Wherever perl is being used there's usually something "better"(*)
available!  :-)

(*) In this case "better" means something that won't rot a programmer's
brains quite so quickly.....   :-)


Don't you like applescript better anyway?  :-)

(Or Dylan?  Oh, never mind, if you knew Dylan you'd probably already be
using Squeak anyway....   :-)

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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