On Tue, Aug 28, 2007 at 05:04:33PM -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> It's easy to hate perl that other people have written, but you can write
> your own in whatever style you like.
6 years ago I wrote a perl regexp that did some magic. The comment before
it...
# It's lines like this that make people hate perl
The 10 line afterwards explained the magic. After all, I would need to
read it again a few years later, so I needed to give myself all the help
I could :-)
(My best ever comment was "this came to me in a dream"; it was literally
correct - the answer _did_ come to me in a dream - and it took me 3 days
to work out _why_ that stuff worked! I finally replaced the comment
with something more useful when I worked out what it did. After all,
it was 10 times faster than my previous code).
The problem with perl isn't that you can write crap code in it; the
problem is that people take the "hammer" approach ("If I have a hammer
then everything looks like a nail"). The responses to the original
question are a perfect example; people wrote multi-line perl scripts to
do something that was possible in 1 line of sed (the people writing perl
didn't even write _efficient_ perl; dammit, -p flag people!)
I'm probably fighting a losing battle; I was shell scripting 17 years
ago when every fork/exec was expensive. I cry when I see people writing
grep | awk
type combinations (and don't start me on cat | grep).
Old geek statement: If you think perl is the answer to a simple filter
question then think twice. You might be right, but it's likely smaller
faster tools already exist. And I say this as someone who has written
1000 line shell scripts and even bigger perl scripts; perl is good for
complicated tasks, but rarely required for simple stuff. Don't wield
your hammer because that's all you know.
In this case, everyone who responded with a perl solution needs their
hammer taken away.
--
rgds
Stephen
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