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000002_icon-group-sender _Thu Jan 4 18:47:02 1996.msg
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Received: by cheltenham.cs.arizona.edu; Thu, 4 Jan 1996 12:27:17 MST
Date: Thu, 4 Jan 1996 18:47:02 +0100
From: karczma@calvin.info.unicaen.fr (Jerzy Karczmarczuk)
Message-Id: <9601041747.AA12350@obelix.unicaen.fr>
To: icon-group@cs.arizona.edu
Subject: Re: How does Icon compare to Perl?
X-Sun-Charset: US-ASCII
Errors-To: icon-group-errors@cs.arizona.edu
Status: O
Gordon Peterson (obviously, who else...) answered the following query:
* > Hi,I was wondering if anyone could tell me (that is, if anyone posts to
* > this group) how Icon compares to Perl (on the Mac, that is) in terms of
* > text handling capabilities and speed.
in the following way:
> I can't speculate on speed (and least of all for the Mac platform), but
> certainly in text handling capabilities Perl is a pathetic substitute for either
> SNOBOL4 or Icon.
>
> Gordon Peterson
This is the 165423109 posting of Gordon Peterson on this issue. WE KNOW ALL
that Gordon hates Perl and loves Icon. That is perfectly alright! But it starts
to be really boring. Could Gordon add at least once a serious argument in favour
of his standpoint??!
I tried to exchange some private letters with Gordon, but I still don't know
the reason of his personal, partisan attitude.
I know why I like Icon. I enjoy the functional 'visage' of the language and
I appreciate in general the generators and co-expressions, as the non-determinism
is a sine-qua-non methodology for the artificial intelligence.
I like Perl because I learned it before I knew Python and I had to write some
really lousy CGI scripts. In my opinion the languages ARE comparable. Icon is
a well structured procedural language, Perl is $horrible, but it has been built
to deal in a simple manner with regexps. This is rather a question of style
than of the brute power. All this was discussed here several times. Perhaps we
could write one day a decent comparison-FAQ instead of posting slogans.
We have to gather some serious questions first, for example:
How important for you are modern control structures? (If not at all, use
Snobol4...)
Yours
Jerzy Karczmarczuk
Dept. of Comp. Sci., University of Caen, France