Re: Command Languages Versus Programming Languages

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.