Perl may be great, but... (was Re: uutraffic report (in perl))

[Tom Christiansen]

>Just as net policy should not be made on the assumption that everyone
>has rn (because it's not standard), programming should not be done on
>the assumption that everyone has perl.

There is no "standard" newsreader, is there?  I'm not sure: I was
so delighted with rn after gagging on readnews and vnews years ago
when it came out that I've not forgotten whether "readnews" is actually
standard.

And "cut" and "paste" aren't standard, and "sh" or "awk" with functions
aren't standard.  Few C library functions are standard.  Until POSIX boxes
us all into a tight, conformant little cubicle, there'll be no true
universal standard.  I maintain that you can do nearly nothing at all if
you want to be utterly standard, whatever that really means.  It's a great
tribute to perl that it runs on as many machines as it does.

Guys, it's getting awfully close to time to move this discussion off to 
alt.religion.computers, don't you think?

--tom

    Tom Christiansen                       {uunet,uiucdcs,sun}!convex!tchrist 
    Convex Computer Corporation                            tchrist at convex.COM
		 "EMACS belongs in <sys/errno.h>: Editor too big!"