4 ms·
Absolutely. It is comparable to python in some ways, but makes it much easier to write quick one-liners using regexes and data manipulation, and to scale those
by gpvos 3y ago
Absolutely. It is comparable to python in some ways, but makes it much easier to write quick one-liners using regexes and data manipulation, and to scale those up to real programs. It fills the gap between bash scripts using awk, grep and sed, and C/java/C#. Compared to bash scripting, perl is a real programming language. The documentation and library ecosystem are excellent, backwards compatibility is legendary, yet it supports modern Unicode. The syntax is weird, but try it for a bit, read the man pages, it's not that hard. The OO system is weirder, and I wouldn't make complex class hierarchies in it, but it is usable.
- marttt 3y agoI like how Awk is just a single executable. A single-executable Perl that includes only the core library would be great. There is Microperl [0, 1], but no idea how well it compiles with more up-to-date Perl versions. 0: https://github.com/bentxt/microperl-standalone https://github.com/bentxt/microperl-standalone 1: Original article from 2000 by the author Simon Cozens: https://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/issues/vol5_3/tpj0503-0003.html https://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/issues/vol5_3/tpj0503-0003.html