david@indetech.com (David Kuder) (10/05/89)
Larry Wall, whose Wallware (rn, patch, and Config) can be found all
over the net, has announced that Perl 3.0 will soon be available in
comp.sources.unix. Those of us who have been using earlier versions of
Perl feel it is time for a newsgroup devoted to it. The obvious name
is comp.lang.perl.
There is mailing list that is devoted to perl. Since the beta release
of Perl 3.0 there has been a tremendous amount of traffic on list.
Both the members of the list and Larry Wall feel that it is time that
Perl have its own group and the arrival of Perl 3.0 is the perfect
opportunity to start the group.
The following excerpt is from the man page for Perl. It gives a good
capsule description of the language.
Perl is a interpreted language optimized for scanning arbi-
trary text files, extracting information from those text
files, and printing reports based on that information. It's
also a good language for many system management tasks. The
language is intended to be practical (easy to use, effi-
cient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant,
minimal). It combines (in the author's opinion, anyway)
some of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people
familiar with those languages should have little difficulty
with it. (Language historians will also note some vestiges
of csh, Pascal, and even BASIC-PLUS.) Expression syntax
corresponds quite closely to C expression syntax. Unlike
most Unix utilities, perl does not arbitrarily limit the
size of your data--if you've got the memory, perl can slurp
in your whole file as a single string. And the hash tables
used by associative arrays grow as necessary to prevent
degraded performance. Perl uses sophisticated pattern
matching techniques to scan large amounts of data very
quickly. Although optimized for scanning text, perl can
also deal with binary data, and can make dbm files look like
associative arrays (where dbm is available). Setuid perl
scripts are safer than C programs through a dataflow tracing
mechanism which prevents many stupid security holes. If you
have a problem that would ordinarily use sed or awk or sh,
but it exceeds their capabilities or must run a little fas-
ter, and you don't want to write the silly thing in C, then
perl may be for you. There are also translators to turn
your sed and awk scripts into perl scripts. OK, enough
hype.
Well I hate to contradict Larry but that is hardly enough hype. I
suggest that those better at talking it up (those of you on
perl-users@virginia.edu) know who you are) in news.groups. Following
the required time for discussion I will post a call for votes for the
formation of comp.lang.perl.
--
David A. Kuder Comp.lang.perl, the time is now!
415 438-2003 david@indetech.com {uunet,sun,sharkey,pacbell}!indetech!davidcgf@ednor.bbc.com (Chris Faylor) (10/08/89)
I am also in favor of the creation of comp.lang.perl. As the person at our site who receives the mailing list, I've been putting off writing the perl scripts necessary to feed the list into inews. If comp.lang.perl becomes a reality, then I won't have to. Hmm... There may be a Catch-22 in here somewhere. -- Chris Faylor cgf@ednor.bbc.com
piet@cs.ruu.nl (Piet van Oostrum) (10/09/89)
In article <JV.89Oct8132227@mhres.mh.nl>, jv@mh (Johan Vromans) writes:
`
Although I have some critics on the language syntax,
That's one of the reasons to have the newsgroup. I forgot to mention that
one :=)
`it's one of the best tools available in the world. [As far as I know,
`of course.]
--
Piet van Oostrum, Dept of Computer Science, University of Utrecht
Padualaan 14, P.O. Box 80.089, 3508 TB Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Telephone: +31-30-531806 Internet: piet@cs.ruu.nl
Telefax: +31-30-513791 Uucp: uunet!mcsun!hp4nl!ruuinf!pietkent@ssbell.UUCP (Kent Landfield) (10/12/89)
fischer@iesd.auc.dk (Lars P. Fischer) writes in article <FISCHER.89Oct7203613@dirac.iesd.auc.dk> | I agree. Perl is a very good language for prototyping applications and | for creating sys-admin application. Many smaller applications can be | done very easily in Perl, and not having binaries avoids having to | recompile for each kind of CPU. | | A Perl newsgroup would be a good forum for exchange of ideas on how to | use Perl, applications and utilities written in Perl, and also making | more programmers aware of the advantages of using Perl. Ahhhh... I can see it already... Comp.sources.perl -Kent+
denny@mcmi.uucp (Denny Page) (10/13/89)
kent@ssbell.UUCP (Kent Landfield) writes: >Ahhhh... I can see it already... Comp.sources.perl Since the current proposal is for comp.lang.perl, you should restrict your suggestions to that area - comp.lang.perl.sources. (Big :-) -- Good health is merely the slowest rate at which one can die.
fischer@iesd.auc.dk (Lars P. Fischer) (10/14/89)
In article <555@ssbell.UUCP> kent@ssbell.UUCP (Kent Landfield) writes: >Ahhhh... I can see it already... Comp.sources.perl I these times of name confusion, maybe we should go for a perl hierarchy, with perl.src, perl.patches, perl.syntax, perl.philosophy, and so on? :-) :-) :-) /Lars -- Copyright 1989 Lars Fischer; you can redistribute only if your recipients can. Lars Fischer, fischer@iesd.auc.dk, {...}!mcvax!iesd!fischer Department of Computer Science, University of Aalborg, DENMARK. How often have I told you, my dear Watson, that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
david@indetech.com (David Kuder) (11/18/89)
Larry Wall, whose Wallware (rn, patch, and Config) can be found all
over the net, has announced that Perl 3.0 will soon be available in
comp.sources.unix. Those of us who have been using earlier versions of
Perl feel it is time for a newsgroup devoted to it. The obvious name
is comp.lang.perl.
There is mailing list that is devoted to perl. Since the beta release
of Perl 3.0 there has been a tremendous amount of traffic on list.
Both the members of the list and Larry Wall feel that it is time that
Perl have its own group and the arrival of Perl 3.0 is the perfect
opportunity to start the group.
The following excerpt is from the man page for Perl. It gives a good
capsule description of the language.
Perl is a interpreted language optimized for scanning arbi-
trary text files, extracting information from those text
files, and printing reports based on that information. It's
also a good language for many system management tasks. The
language is intended to be practical (easy to use, effi-
cient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant,
minimal). It combines (in the author's opinion, anyway)
some of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people
familiar with those languages should have little difficulty
with it. (Language historians will also note some vestiges
of csh, Pascal, and even BASIC-PLUS.) Expression syntax
corresponds quite closely to C expression syntax. Unlike
most Unix utilities, perl does not arbitrarily limit the
size of your data--if you've got the memory, perl can slurp
in your whole file as a single string. And the hash tables
used by associative arrays grow as necessary to prevent
degraded performance. Perl uses sophisticated pattern
matching techniques to scan large amounts of data very
quickly. Although optimized for scanning text, perl can
also deal with binary data, and can make dbm files look like
associative arrays (where dbm is available). Setuid perl
scripts are safer than C programs through a dataflow tracing
mechanism which prevents many stupid security holes. If you
have a problem that would ordinarily use sed or awk or sh,
but it exceeds their capabilities or must run a little fas-
ter, and you don't want to write the silly thing in C, then
perl may be for you. There are also translators to turn
your sed and awk scripts into perl scripts. OK, enough
hype.
Well I hate to contradict Larry but that is hardly enough hype. I
suggest that those better at talking it up (those of you on
perl-users@virginia.edu) know who you are) in news.groups. Following
the required time for discussion I will post a call for votes for the
formation of comp.lang.perl.
--
David A. Kuder Comp.lang.perl, the time is now!
415 438-2003 david@indetech.com {uunet,sun,sharkey,pacbell}!indetech!david
--
--russ (nelson@clutx [.bitnet | .clarkson.edu])
Live up to the light thou hast, and more will be granted thee.
A recession now appears more than 2 years away -- John D. Mathon, 4 Oct 1989.
I think killing is value-neutral in and of itself. -- Gary Strand, 8 Nov 1989.baur@venice.SEDD.TRW.COM (Steven L. Baur) (11/18/89)
Comp.lang.perl would be great. -- steve baur@venice.SEDD.TRW.COM, baur%venice.SEDD.TRW.COM@uunet.UU.NET
jgreely@oz.cis.ohio-state.edu (J Greely) (11/21/89)
Didn't we do this already? In fact, isn't it about time to post the results of the voting? "It's just a jump to the left..." -=- J Greely (jgreely@cis.ohio-state.edu; osu-cis!jgreely)
kjones@talos.uucp (Kyle Jones) (11/22/89)
? Isn't there a vote being taken on comp.lang.perl already? How many people are on the perl mailing list? I thought if a mailing list had over 100 members, the group was created forthwith without going through the long procedure demanded by the guidelines. I also saw a call for discussion for sci.aquaria. Actually I wouldn't mind going throiugh it all again, just to remove the bad taste it left in some admins mouthes, but I can't believe that's what was intended. So what's up?
davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr) (11/22/89)
In article <1989Nov21.174340.17172@talos.uucp> kjones@talos.uu.net writes: | Isn't there a vote being taken on comp.lang.perl already? How many | people are on the perl mailing list? I thought if a mailing list had | over 100 members, the group was created forthwith without going through | the long procedure demanded by the guidelines. No, sadly that's not true. When I brought that up a few years ago, somebody quoted some obscure bit of purported "guideline" which said that if a person on a mailing list didn't vote yes, the abstension had to be counted as a no vote. If group creation was a simple and reasonable as you suggest I could get rid of two mailing lists! Maybe we could get the fast approval system going, or did that get talked to death, too? -- bill davidsen (davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen) "The world is filled with fools. They blindly follow their so-called 'reason' in the face of the church and common sense. Any fool can see that the world is flat!" - anon