in reply to Let's face it, Perl *is* a scripting language

I like Andy Lester's take on this in his lightning talk. He says that the things you write with Perl are "programs" -- they have all the characteristics of a program, and there is essentially nothing that makes them "scripts." If you use it write programs, it must be a programming language.
  • Comment on Re: Let's face it, Perl *is* a scripting language

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Re^2: Let's face it, Perl *is* a scripting language
by Ovid (Cardinal) on Aug 08, 2006 at 15:20 UTC

    #!/bin/bash is not my preferred way to start building large scale tools, but I've heard about people building Web sites that way (well, back in the 90s).

    Cheers,
    Ovid

    New address of my CGI Course.

[reply]

      Thanks, I thought I'd repressed all memory of an ancient version of the Remedy "web interface" but this remark brought it all back. A whole bunch of little CGI shell scripts which all sourced one mongo common file which defined shell functions to implement all the different behaviors (all of which had to be parsed for every single invocation).

      (Rewrote most of it in Perl and it went from 5+ seconds to generate a page to ~2 seconds; moved to Apache::Registry under mod_perl and got that down to actually useable).

      *shudder*

[reply]
      I take it we're all familiar with the dd/sh language, from the same warped genius as perlfs?
[reply]
      having just completed a stint updating a website -- very elaborate -- built in ksh in that time period, I just say "one page at a time..." :D

      Don Wilde
      "There's more than one level to any answer."
[reply]

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