uutraffic report (in perl)

[Tom Neff]

I'm going to try and pick out the constructive dialog here, although I
usually prefer to let postings like this one speak for themselves...

In article <JGREELY.89Nov22100225 at oz.cis.ohio-state.edu> J Greely <jgreely at cis.ohio-state.edu> writes:
>[me:]
>>More to the point, ever seen one in awk?  Probably not, because although
>>people may write 'em they don't get around.
>
>Actually, I've seen several, only one of which was written here.  All
>written in that peculiar combination of awk, sed, grep, join, sort,
>and <insert shell here>, 

It's not a peculiar combination, it's using tools under shell, which is
how UNIX works.  That's what they're there for.  Vertical shells like
Perl just internalize more of the functionality.  My point is that
while Perl does this as well as anyone, the resulting behemoth is
less well suited for use AS A TOOL ITSELF than the more familiar
ones.  The same thing goes for comparable projects like Mush.  It's
like Bloomingdale's -- a truly magnificent department store where you
can spend a whole day shopping and find anything imaginable, but just
try and dash in to get a quick pair of socks!! :-)

>                         which is the approach you seem to imply is
                                                ^^^
>better than using Perl.  Whatever for?  You can implement Life in a
>spreadsheet, but do you really want to?

Meta-peeve!: why don't posters address the argument rather than aiming
the second person at some individual arguer?  News is not mail...  sigh

 [me:]
>>Perl attempts to win converts like Crocodile Dundee (naaooww, THAT's not
>>a Swiss Army knife, THIS <swish> is a Swiss Army knife...) at the
>>expense of compactness.
>
>Huh?  I'll overlook the personification of the enemy for the moment,
                                                ^^^^^
>and say that some Perl *users* do that.  

There is no 'enemy' here. (re-sigh!)  Perl's own documentation says it
"is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather
than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal)."  This is a clear cut and well
achieved design goal; it is simply not consequence-free.

>>                                              On System V/386, for
>>instance, with all debugging #undef'd and with -O turned on, the
>>latest perl executable *after* both 'strip' and 'mcs -d' subtends
>>229K, and takes ~5 seconds to load, compile and interpret an in-line
>>script consisting of 'exit 0;'.
>
>...and my "hello world" program in C takes two minutes to compile, and
>takes up 48K.  BFD.

For purposes of comparison, "hello world" on V/386 takes 10 seconds
(once) to make and purge, occupies 13k after stripping, and runs in
1/10th second.  (The above quoted poster either didn't strip his object
or has a more space hungry compiler in general.)  For quick tools
the huge Perl latency (like the huge Mush latency and others') is a
drawback.

>>"Switch over completely or suffer inconvenience" does *not* cut to the
>>heart of the UNIX philosophy.  It is closer to the religious passions
>>that retard UNIX than it is to UNIX strengths.
>
>Am I right in suspecting that you didn't read my sentence the way I
                               ^^^
>wrote it?  I never said it epitomized the Unix philosophy, I said it
>*ignored* it.

Since this is mail :-), no *I* didn't understand the way ***->YOU<-***
phrased +--==<<YOUR>>==--+ sentence, which didn't say 'ignore'.
Fortunately Larry's program does not really ignore the UNIX philosophy
as ///(-y-o-u-)\\\ imply -- it just exploits some UNIX concepts with
specialized rewards and risks.

[ childishness deleted ]

>>Perhaps one solution would be to stop writing '?2p' translators for a
>>bit and write 'p2c' ...
>...let me know when you finish sh2c, too :-)

These are sold commercially I believe.  The basic idea is sound.

>(side note: p2c *is* in Larry's wishlist for future additions)
-- 
"How can a man of integrity get along    ///  Tom Neff
in Washington?" -- Richard Feynman      ///   tneff at bfmny0.UU.NET