perl/PERL
Randal L. Schwartz
merlyn at iwarp.intel.com
Fri May 3 03:25:55 AEST 1991
In article <1991May1.161343.21501 at aio.jsc.nasa.gov>, hutch at gothamcity (Mark Hutchison) writes:
| I need a thumbnail sketch of the utility "perl." Understand it is a something
| of a superset of awk and other utilities. Specifically, what does it do that
| the other utilities will not? Where can I get it? How much $? What versions of
| UNIX does it operate with/on?
It's free (more or less). You can get it from all the standard GNU
archives (including the GNU "misc" tape or the osucis anon UUCP
archives) or from its home (via anon FTP) at devvax.jpl.nasa.gov. It
runs with nearly anything that tries to call itself "UNIX", and can be
compiled to run on MS/DOS.
Here's the first paragraph from the 70-page "manpage":
Perl is an interpreted language optimized for scanning arbi-
trary text files, extracting information from those text
files, and printing reports based on that information. It's
also a good language for many system management tasks. The
language is intended to be practical (easy to use, effi-
cient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant,
minimal). It combines (in the author's opinion, anyway)
some of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people
familiar with those languages should have little difficulty
with it. (Language historians will also note some vestiges
of csh, Pascal, and even BASIC-PLUS.) Expression syntax
corresponds quite closely to C expression syntax. Unlike
most Unix utilities, perl does not arbitrarily limit the
size of your data--if you've got the memory, perl can slurp
in your whole file as a single string. Recursion is of
unlimited depth. And the hash tables used by associative
arrays grow as necessary to prevent degraded performance.
Perl uses sophisticated pattern matching techniques to scan
large amounts of data very quickly. Although optimized for
scanning text, perl can also deal with binary data, and can
make dbm files look like associative arrays (where dbm is
available). Setuid perl scripts are safer than C programs
through a dataflow tracing mechanism which prevents many
stupid security holes. If you have a problem that would
ordinarily use sed or awk or sh, but it exceeds their capa-
bilities or must run a little faster, and you don't want to
write the silly thing in C, then perl may be for you. There
are also translators to turn your sed and awk scripts into
perl scripts. OK, enough hype.
There's a (some say 'good', I say 'the only' :-) book on Perl
published by O'Reilly & Associates called "Programming Perl",
available in most better technical bookstores, or directly from the
publisher by mailorder.
Support is provided by the "Joint Association of Perl Hackers" (JAPH)
through the newsgroup comp.lang.perl. Larry Wall, the creator of
Perl, reads and posts to that group frequently.
print "Just another Perl hacker,"
--
/=Randal L. Schwartz, Stonehenge Consulting Services (503)777-0095 ==========\
| on contract to Intel's iWarp project, Beaverton, Oregon, USA, Sol III |
| merlyn at iwarp.intel.com ...!any-MX-mailer-like-uunet!iwarp.intel.com!merlyn |
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