[vox-tech] hold on to your hats - perl vs python

[Doug Huckaba]

Today, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:

[snip]
> > And lets not forget awk - a pleasant, well behaved,
> > easily learned language. It's yet one more great Unix
> > tool for manipulating text and the odd system-admin
> > chore. It's been around alot longer than Ruby or Python
> > (maybe even longer than Perl), which is a plus. I'm
> > an OOP advocate, but most simple text-processing and
> > sys- admin doesn't lend itself neatly to OOP style
> > so those benefits of OOperl, Ruby & Python seem
> > dubious. 
>  
> not to start a thread or anything, but i used to use awk and sed for all

too late...

> my text processing needs, before i ever knew what perl or linux was.
> i'd call awk alot of things: powerful, stable, old.   i'd never call it
> "pleasant".  for one, its error messages are very close to useless[1].
> 
> i'm not sure i'd call it easy to learn[2], either.  i've written some
> pretty hairy awk scripts.
> 
> i'd certainly call it older than perl.
> 
> pete
> 
> [1]: i used awk/sed exclusively on a sunos machine, before i ever knew
> about linux.  i've never used gawk.  maybe gawk is easier to use and has
> better error reporting.  but sun's awk on sunos was ridiculous.  the
> time differential between using awk/sed and using perl for advanced text
> processing is absurd.

Sun's awk is actually mawk, I found this because I had created a fairly 
complex ksh/awk script on linux systems at home only to get to the office 
and find that mawk behaves differantly to the switches and my *awk scripts 
wouldn't work. Back to the drawing board...


-doug

> 
> [2]: a common joke is to say that the complexity of a topic is
> proportional to the number of pages of an o'reilly book.  you can't take
> this too seriously (advanced perl is a very thin book), but fwiw,
> awk/sed is larger than the perl/tk and apache books.
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