bevan@cs.man.ac.uk (Stephen J Bevan) (03/05/91)
In the past I've written various programs to extract information from
files. To do this I've used :- Common Lisp, Emacs Lisp, awk, sh, ksh
and csh. As this is a bit of nightmare as regards maintenance, I'd
like to move to a single language for doing these sort of tasks. The
likely contenders for this seem to be Perl, Python and Icon.
Rather than FTP all of them and wade through the documentation, I was
wondering if anybody has experiences with them that they'd like to
share?
I'm particularly interested in comments from people who have used (or
at least looked at) more than one of them.
As a guide to the sort of things I'm interested in :-
+ Does the language have any arbitrary limits? e.g. the length of a
line ... etc.
+ How fast is it? This can be compared to whatever you like, but each
other preferably. I'm not really interested if XXX is only, X%
quicker than YYY on average (whatever that maybe).
+ Does it give `reasonable' error messages? i.e. something better
than the equivalent of `awk bailing out on line X'.
+ Does it have a debugger? If not, are there any extra facilities
for debuggging above and beyond simply inserting `printf' (change
as appropriate) statements.
+ Does it allow conditional interpretation/compilation? i.e.
anything like +FEATURE in Lisp or #ifdef FEATURE/#endif in C.
Some other points to note :-
+ The scripts won't be distributed, so arguments about XXX is
installed on more machines than YYY aren't relevant.
+ The fact that Perl has a C like syntax is NOT an advantage in my
book. (I'm not saying its a disadvantage either, I just don't
think it's important either way).
email/post as you think is appropriate (note the followup to
comp.lang.misc). I will summarize email replies after a suitable period.
Thanks in advance,
Stephen J. Bevan bevan@cs.man.ac.uk