In comp.lang.scheme today someone said: 
And we all know that Perl only existed
because Larry Wall was tired of getting his
awk and sed scripts to work portably across 
all the diferent vendor versions of awk.

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Is this true? I thought Perl was intentionally designed to fill the space between shell and C... at least that what Larry said at his Atlanta talk.

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Re: what caused Perl to be created?
by MeowChow (Vicar) on Jul 03, 2001 at 23:44 UTC 
    <meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="pithy/quoteable;author=voltai
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    Perl exists because if she didn't, it would have been necessary to invent her. 
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       MeowChow                                   
               s aamecha.s a..a\u$&owag.print
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Re: what caused Perl to be created?
by frag (Hermit) on Jul 03, 2001 at 23:59 UTC
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Re: what caused Perl to be created?
by mikeB (Friar) on Jul 03, 2001 at 23:55 UTC
    And unix exists because a couple of guys needed an OS to play their Star Trek game on.
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Re: what caused Perl to be created?
by runrig (Abbot) on Jul 04, 2001 at 00:43 UTC
    It's a cute thing to say, chuckle at, then get on with life. But hardly true, I think. Perl does so much more than awk, though its impossible for me to compare perl 1.0 with whatever awk or gawk was around at the time :)
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      gawk wasn't around (nor was most of the GNU project). Awk was V7 Awk, fairly limited compared to a lot of what's in SysV Awk these days.

      I've occasionally pondered whether Larry would have created Perl if gawk was around. I usually conclude (although I hadn't asked him) that Perl might not have been created; Larry would have taken the "lazy" approach, since gawk could accomplish what Larry initially needed Perl to do. Here's to timing!

      -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

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Re: what caused Perl to be created?
by Maestro_007 (Hermit) on Jul 04, 2001 at 00:19 UTC
    And Scheme exists because... uh... I never found that one out...

    MM ;-)

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Re: what caused Perl to be created?
by BrentDax (Hermit) on Jul 06, 2001 at 09:28 UTC
    IIRC, Perl was created because awk just couldn't do what Larry wanted it to, and he didn't want to write something in C because he knew, sooner or later, he'd run into another problem awk couldn't handle.

    "Larry's first thought was, 'Let's use awk.' Unfortunately, the awk of that day couldn't handle opening and closing of multiple files based on information in the files. Larry didn't want to have to code a special-purpose tool. As a result, a new language was born."
    --"Perl Culture", Camel III, p646

    =cut
    --Brent Dax

    @HPAJ=split("", "rekcaH lreP rentonA tsuJ");
print reverse @HPAJ;  #sucky but who cares?

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