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!daviddavid@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.