18 Nov
2021
18 Nov
'21
6:47 p.m.
Here’s another angle on Perl, perhaps more on topic for TUHS. Let’s accept for a minute
that Perl filled the void between C and shell scripts, and that there was a latent need
for a scripting language like this on Unix.
The shell, awk, sed, etc. had arrived at more or less fully formed versions by 1980. Perl
(and TCL) did not appear until the very end of the 1980’s. What filled the gap in that
decade, if anything?
Ancient Unix has ‘bs’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bs_(programming_language) but this
seems to have had very little use.
Paul
18 Nov
18 Nov
7:03 p.m.
New subject: Book Recommendation [ reallly inscrutable languages ]
Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org> wrote:
Here’s another angle on Perl, perhaps more on topic
for TUHS. Let’s
accept for a minute that Perl filled the void between C and shell scripts,
and that there was a latent need for a scripting language like this
on Unix.
The shell, awk, sed, etc. had arrived at more or less fully formed
versions by 1980. Perl (and TCL) did not appear until the very end of
the 1980’s. What filled the gap in that decade, if anything?
Nothing. It was the need for filling the gap that engendered Perl.
Remember that Perl 1 through Perl 3 were around durinig the 80s; Perl 4
sort of settled in for a longer time.
"New" awk didn't get out of the labs until 1987/1988, and that was only
via SVR3.2 and/or the AT&T Toolchest; it wasn't open source, nor
did it provide access to many of the needed system calls in the way
that Perl did.
Also remember that there were plenty of people who were happy working
with the shell and the Unix toolkit as-is.
Arnold
7:16 p.m.
New subject: Book Recommendation [ reallly inscrutable languages ]
On 11/18/21 2:03 PM, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
Also remember that there were plenty of people who
were happy working
with the shell and the Unix toolkit as-is.
I would argue that this functionality gap is what inspired David Korn to
put as much into ksh as he did. The first `public' version of ksh was
released in 1983.
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU chet(a)case.edu http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/
7:20 p.m.
New subject: Book Recommendation [ reallly inscrutable languages ]
Chet Ramey <chet.ramey(a)case.edu> wrote:
On 11/18/21 2:03 PM, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
This is a good point. Those of us with access to ksh made use of
its features when scripting. (Speaking for myself.)
Arnold
Also remember that there were plenty of people
who were happy working
with the shell and the Unix toolkit as-is.
I would argue that this functionality gap is what inspired David Korn to
put as much into ksh as he did. The first `public' version of ksh was
released in 1983. 
9:03 p.m.
New subject: Book Recommendation [ reallly inscrutable languages ]
On Thu, Nov 18, 2021 at 2:06 PM <arnold(a)skeeve.com> wrote:
ISTR that lwall said his specific problem with using awk was its inability
to read from files other than those mentioned on the command line (and them
only sequentially). Old awk did not have getline. There were probably
other itches he wanted to scratch, but that one was a deal-breaker (or
-maker).
Remember that Perl 1 through Perl 3 were around durinig the 80s; Perl 4
The shell,
awk, sed, etc. had arrived at more or less fully formed
versions by 1980. Perl (and TCL) did not appear until the very end of
the 1980’s. What filled the gap in that decade, if anything?
Nothing. It was the need for filling the gap that engendered Perl.
sort of settled in for a longer time.
Perl 2 was the faster (though still very slow) regex engine; Perl 3 was
binary I/O; Perl 4 was the Camel Book, which is why the version number
stayed at 4.xxx until something in the Camel Book broke.
"New" awk didn't get out of the labs until 1987/1988, and that was only
via SVR3.2 and/or the AT&T Toolchest; it
wasn't open source, nor
did it provide access to many of the needed system calls in the way
that Perl did.
The project I worked on in 1999-2005 was about half Perl and half
shell+sed+awk+etc.... I was able to do that because I had worked on an
earlier project that was by fiat all Perl 4. I don't use Perl any more,
but I still use the shell toolkit constantly.
I have a back burner project to allow convenient manual data file
transformation. It grew out of my dissatisfaction with using the m,n!
command in various editors: you can undo, but it's slow, and you have no
access to the full undo tree except in vim. My proposed 'mung' command
doesn't actually edit at the micro level, but it lets you use | to create a
new state of the tree, and each state is stored in a file (disk is cheap).
The tree is persistent. When you have the file the way you want it, you
write it out and, if you want, generate a shell script that replicates what
you just did so it's repeatable.
I'll probably implement it in Python. The commands and other external
information are at <
https://github.com/johnwcowan/exx/blob/master/mung/mung.txt>gt;.
9:42 p.m.
New subject: Book Recommendation [ reallly inscrutable languages ]
Not that anyone asked, but...
My introduction to Perl was motivated by a performance issue. I had been using a set of
sh/awk/... scripts to generate the source files (troff and file trees) for my Prime Time
Freeware book/CD-ROM collections. One of the cooler aspects of this approach was that I
could use sh as a macro processor, substituting assorted values into the awk (etc) code.
However, running the scripts was taking about three hours (!), so I tended to start them
up just before going to bed. This worked, for some value of "work", but it was
kind of a nuisance...
So, upon the recommendation of Erik Fair, I transliterated my scripts into Perl. The
similarity of Perl syntax to my previous combination of languages was so strong that the
effort was almost mindless. And, even though I made no attempt to use any Perlish
features, the new scripts ran about five (!) times faster. My assumption is that this was
mostly due to getting rid of the process startup times.
My move to Ruby was motivated by the Perl 6 clusterfudge. After watching Perl 5 sit at a
siding for a few years, with no relief in sight, I took another friend's advice and
tried out Ruby. Aside from a few odd differences, it was quite familiar and a very easy
transition. However, the syntax seemed much "cleaner" than Perl's (Matz
has very good taste, IMHO). So, it's still my choice for small, single-threaded
scripts.
That said, if I want to write larger and/or concurrent apps, I turn to Elixir. It gives
me Ruby-like syntax (with nifty extensions such as pipes), strong support for concurrency
and distribution, macros, etc.
-r
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5 comments
5 participants
participants (5)
-
arnold＠skeeve.com -
Chet Ramey -
John Cowan -
Paul Ruizendaal -
Rich Morin