uutraffic report (in perl)

[Tom Christiansen]

In article <1194 at radius.UUCP> radius!lemke at apple.com (Generic Account) writes:
>In article <4025 at mhres.mh.nl> jv at mhres.mh.nl (Johan Vromans) writes:
>}This is where perl is designed for ...
>
>OK, but what about those of us who don't have perl?  Is there already such
>a script or program in plain old "c" that can make the same pretty reports
>as shown above?  We're running a NeXT with version 1.0 OS...
>===== Steve Lemke, Engineering Quality Assurance, Radius Inc., San Jose =====

Please don't take this wrong, but why DON'T you have perl?  If you can
post this note, you can get perl.  It's freely available from FTP and
plain old uumail-type archive servers all over the net.  Its author,
Larry Wall, is the same man who brought you rn, metaconfig, and patch.
He privately supports perl better than any industrial software house
that I've ever seen.  He's extremely helpful in getting perl running on
new machines, and I'll bet it's already been tweaked for your
architecture.  If you've ever run one of Larry's Configure scripts, you
know what I mean.

Perl is light years ahead of awk, sed, and sh as far as tools go.  I
very strongly believe that it will be around for many years to come,
and that it will be extremely widely used throughout the world.  You
can see how much source has come across the net just lately that's been
written in perl.  I have not written any awk or sed scripts since I got
perl, and certainly none of those horrendous sh scripts full of
multiple calls to sed and awk and tr and sort and cut and paste and
expand and grep and all their brethren.  I've saved myself quite a
bit of development time by writing fewer C programs as well.

Furthermore, perl programs are portable without modification or
recompilation to a wealth of architectures.  I only have around 5
architectures now to send common programs too, but in my last job there
were no fewer than a dozen.  It's really nice to just close your eyes
and rdist your program and know it will run.

Do yourself a favor: get perl.

--tom

    Tom Christiansen                       {uunet,uiucdcs,sun}!convex!tchrist 
    Convex Computer Corporation                            tchrist at convex.COM
		 "EMACS belongs in <sys/errno.h>: Editor too big!"