in reply to what caused Perl to be created?

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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Re: Re: what caused Perl to be created?
by merlyn (Sage) on Jul 04, 2001 at 12:59 UTC
    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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