[COFF] Perl (was Re: forth on early unix)

[Larry McVoy via COFF]

On Mon, Sep 22, 2025 at 06:23:06PM +0300, Ori Kuttner via COFF wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 22, 2025 at 5:54???PM Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, Sep 22, 2025 at 10:19???AM Ori Kuttner via COFF <coff at tuhs.org>
> > wrote:
> > > FORTH is a Write Only Language, you write it and can't even read it
> > > yourself :-)
> > > I used to like FORTH, did some PostScript and now I just hate it.
> >
> > I thought that was Perl? (*jumps for the exit*)
> >
> Perl is the only language that looks the same before and after
> encryption... :-)

I wrote a source management system mostly in perl.  I rewrote it twice
and by the last time I adopted a very stylized way of doing things.  I
was pretty happy with the last version, I could pop in there and fix
bugs easily.  This was all perl4, I'm not a fan of 99% of perl5 but
you can write perl4 code in perl5 just fine.

I liked perl so much that I proposed rewriting much of /usr/bin in perl.
I wised up when I started benchmarking, perl is pretty fast but it is 
no match for C.  I wrote the next source management system in C.
-- 
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Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat