Re: Command Languages Versus Programming Languages

On 13.10.2024 10:19, Muttley@DastartdlyHQ.org wrote:

On Sat, 12 Oct 2024 16:39:20 +0000
Eric Pozharski <apple.universe@posteo.net> boring babbled:

[...]
>
You're arguing with Unix Haters Handbook.  You've already lost.

 
ITYF the people who dislike Perl are the ones who actually like the unix
way of having simple daisychained tools instead of some lump of a language
that does everything messily.

(I think some topics in this black-or-white mix should be sorted.)

The pipelining mechanisms - if you meant that with "daisychained
tools" - has its limitations. For simple filtering it's okay, but
once you need some information from the front of the processing
chain at the end of the chain solutions can get very clumsy, may
create logical problems, race conditions, etc. Being able to
memorize some information from the pipe-front processes to be used
later is one inherent advantage of using a [scripting-]language
like Perl, Awk, or whatever. (Personally I prefer a language like
Awk because it's simple and has a clear syntax as opposed to Perl,
but I understand that other folks might prefer Perl or Python.)

Janis