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From: Rainer Weikusat <rweikusat@talktalk.net>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell,comp.unix.programmer,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Command Languages Versus Programming Languages
Date: Wed, 09 Oct 2024 22:25:05 +0100
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Bozo User <anthk@disroot.org> writes:
> On 2024-04-07, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>> On Sun, 07 Apr 2024 00:01:43 +0000, Javier wrote:
>>
>>> The downside is the loss of performance because of disk access for
>>> trivial things like 'nfiles=$(ls | wc -l)'.
>>
>> Well, you could save one process creation by writing
>> “nfiles=$(echo * | wc -l)” instead. But that would still not be strictly 
>> correct.
>>
>>> I suspect disk access times where
>>> one of the reasons for the development of perl in the early 90s.
>>
>> Shells were somewhat less powerful in those days. I would describe the 
>> genesis of Perl as “awk on steroids”. Its big party trick was regular 
>> expressions. And I guess combining that with more sophisticated data-
>> structuring capabilities.
>
> Perl is more awk+sed+sh in a single language. Basically the killer
> of the Unix philophy in late 90's/early 00's, and for the good.

Perl is a high-level programming language with a rich syntax¹, with
support for deterministic automatic memory management, functions as
first-class objects and message-based OO. It's also a virtual machine
for executing threaded code and a(n optimizing) compiler for translating
Perl code into the corresponding threaded code.

¹ Has recently gained try/catch for exception handling which is IMNSHO a
great improvement over eval + $@.