Re: Command Languages Versus Programming Languages

Bozo User <anthk@disroot.org> writes:

On 2024-04-07, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Sun, 07 Apr 2024 00:01:43 +0000, Javier wrote:
>

The downside is the loss of performance because of disk access for
trivial things like 'nfiles=$(ls | wc -l)'.

>
Well, you could save one process creation by writing
“nfiles=$(echo * | wc -l)” instead. But that would still not be strictly
correct.
>

I suspect disk access times where
one of the reasons for the development of perl in the early 90s.

>
Shells were somewhat less powerful in those days. I would describe the
genesis of Perl as “awk on steroids”. Its big party trick was regular
expressions. And I guess combining that with more sophisticated data-
structuring capabilities.

>
Perl is more awk+sed+sh in a single language. Basically the killer
of the Unix philophy in late 90's/early 00's, and for the good.

Perl is a high-level programming language with a rich syntax¹, with
support for deterministic automatic memory management, functions as
first-class objects and message-based OO. It's also a virtual machine
for executing threaded code and a(n optimizing) compiler for translating
Perl code into the corresponding threaded code.

¹ Has recently gained try/catch for exception handling which is IMNSHO a
great improvement over eval + $@.