On Mon, Jan 05, 2009, Les Mikesell wrote:
>Bill Campbell wrote:
>>
>> I used to some pretty complex shell and awk scripts before learning perl
>> about 20 years ago. Perl allowed me to do most things in a single language
>> including fairly low-level system calls that I previously had to do with
>> compiled ``C'' programs.
>
>And you can probably still run all of your perl scripts unchanged, with
>the possible exception of "@array" being interpolated in double-quoted
>strings which I think started in perl4.
I think that was perl-5, but I may well be mistaken. I have found some
changes in perl along the way that have required fixing scripts since I
started in perl-3.something, but not many.
>> I have switched all of my new development primarily to python which I find
>> far cleaner than perl, and easier to use for large projects. Python uses
>> perl regular expression syntax so the transition was pretty painless.
>
>Don't count on the same stability with python. It has an annoying habit
>of changing syntax in non-backwards compatible ways with no provision
>for running old scripts. If you run your programs on more than one
>machine you'll end up having to maintain different versions to match the
>installed interpreters.
I have not run into many (any) compatibility issues with python, but then I
have only been doing python for a bit over 4 years now. As I remember,
there were some issues with the early versions of python-2.4, but those
were in the python builds, not in the syntax of python itself.
I tend to stay away of the more esoteric features of languages that are
likely to change so don't generally have problems of this type.
We don't have problems with multiple versions of packages as we use the
ones from the OpenPKG portable packaging system which includes its own
versions of python, perl, gcc, berkeley db, etc. avoiding most problems
with the underlying distribution/vendor's packages. There were some issues
when we moved to CentOS from SuSE in that SuSE ran ran python-2.3.x while
CentOS has python-2.4.x which caused some interesting shared library issues
with the OpenPKG python-2.4.x (which we are running for Zope compatibility
as the version of Zope we're running doesn't work with python-2.5.x.
Python-3 definately has backwards compatibility issues, and there are
lengthy explanations as to why this is so.
Bill
--
INTERNET: bill@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/ PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
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