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From: Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell,comp.unix.programmer,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Command Languages Versus Programming Languages
Date: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 10:23:38 +0100
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On 11.11.2024 22:24, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> On Mon, 11 Nov 2024 07:31:13 -0000 (UTC), Sebastian wrote:
> 
>> In comp.unix.programmer Muttley@dastartdlyhq.org wrote:
>>
>>> [Perl’s] syntax is also a horrific mess. Larry took the worst parts of
>>> C and shell syntax and mashed them together.
>>
>> I think you've identified the one language that Python is better than.
> 
> In terms of the modern era of high-level programming, Perl was the 
> breakthrough language. Before Perl, BASIC was considered to be an example 
> of a language with “good” string handling. After Perl, BASIC looked old 
> and clunky indeed.

I'm not, erm.., a fan of Perl or anything, but comparing it to BASIC
is way off; Perl is not *that* bad. - N.B.: Of course no one can say
what "BASIC" actually is given the many variants and dialects. - I'm
sure you must have some modern variant in mind that might have little
to do with the various former BASIC dialects (that I happened to use
in the 1970's; e.g., Wang, Olivetti, Commodore, and a mainframe that
I don't recall).

It's more interesting what Perl added compared to BRE/ERE, what Unix
provided since its beginning (and long before Perl).

> 
> Perl was the language that made regular expressions sexy. Because it made 
> them easy to use.

For those of us who used regexps in Unix from the beginning it's not
that shiny as you want us to buy it; Unix was supporting Chomsky-3
Regular Expressions with a syntax that is still used in contemporary
languages. Perl supports some nice syntactic shortcuts, but also
patterns that exceed Chomsky-3's; too bad if one doesn't know these
differences and any complexity degradation that may be bought with it.

More interesting to me is the fascinating fact that on some non-Unix
platforms it took decades before regexps got (slooooowly) introduced
(even in its simplest form).

Janis