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- Path: sparky!uunet!crdgw1!rdsunx.crd.ge.com!ariel!davidsen
- From: davidsen@ariel.crd.GE.COM (william E Davidsen)
- Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell
- Subject: Re: ksh 1, perl 2 - ksh or perl for scripting?
- Message-ID: <1992Dec23.160443.13103@crd.ge.com>
- Date: 23 Dec 92 16:04:43 GMT
- References: <ASH.92Dec21095237@ulysses.mr.ams.com>
- Sender: usenet@crd.ge.com (Required for NNTP)
- Reply-To: davidsen@crd.ge.com (bill davidsen)
- Organization: GE Corporate R&D Center, Schenectady NY
- Lines: 32
- Nntp-Posting-Host: ariel.crd.ge.com
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- In article <ASH.92Dec21095237@ulysses.mr.ams.com>, ash@ulysses.mr.ams.com (Alan Harder) writes:
- |
- | Hi, all. We are currently trying to decide if we should move from
- | /bin/sh as our language for production scripting to ksh, or if we
- | should move to perl instead. Is anyone out there using perl as their
- | production scripting language of choice?
-
- You should definitely move!
-
- Now, as to where, I prefer ksh for most problems, although there are a
- number of things which work more easily in perl. I find that ksh does
- redirection and argument truncation in a way which is easier to enter
- and read (for me) than perl. Things like ${name%.*} are trivial to write
- in ksh, but somewhat more verbose in perl. For these reasons I find I
- use perl very sparingly, possibly only a few times a month.
-
- Certainly the retraining will be faster if you go to ksh, since you
- can use 100% of the things you already know, and can use the same shell
- for programming and interractive use, which speeds learning.
-
- Perl is more powerful, but seems to provide too many solutions for my
- taste, certainly for simple problems. I like a language where there is
- one clear way to solve a problem rather than one which has many ways,
- since I find that programmers tend to waste a lot of time looking for
- the single elegant way to solve the problem, rather than finding one way
- which is clearly best and then useing it. This is particularly true of
- really clever perl programmers I have known, who seem to feel the need
- to write "impressive" code instead of code which just works.
-
- --
- bill davidsen, GE Corp. R&D Center; Box 8; Schenectady NY 12345
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