Why are they used to ksh? :)

Why are they used to ksh? :)

Because at some point in time, it seemed to be the only usable tool?

Quoting the sig of roboticus: When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.

I vaguely remember one of my profs claiming that ksh was the only portable shell, because it was standardised. Well, we continued to write bash and perl scripts.

Alexander

--
Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-)

You already use ksh or bash interactively before you write your first script.

That's why people try to reuse their convoluted one liners as scripts.

Perl started as sh on steroids but failed to enter in the interactive shell niche.

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice}

AIX background. KSH is the de-facto shell. You have to install ksh93 or bash to get something more modern (to use arrays and such).

This was more a rhetorical question.

My point is:

Perl's character is to try to comply to the needs of many target groups at the same time.

But this attracts criticism for mangling syntax from different domains.

There is

• Perl the scripting language, with special variables, one-liners, golfing, $_ ,
• Perl the modular language packages, CPAN,
• Perl the OO language, with Moose, M* ...
• Perl the functional language with anonymous subs, map/grep and closures
• ...
At the moment we get beaten at most battle fields by more specialized languages, because their users get confused by all the other features.

Our marketing strategy should be to fill these gaps ...

Perl could be a great interactive shell language (something Python could never do) with the possibility to expand short scripts to full scale applications (something where Bash sucks).

... to be continued.

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice}