Re: Dear Programmrers, PERL seems the Language to go for. (I have used, BASIC, C, C++, TCL/TK, PASCAL).

[lwall@netlabs.com (Larry Wall)]

In article <D30J7o.G8K@ss3.magec.com> mjmeie@ss5.magec.com (Mike Meier) writes:
: Jong Park (jong@mrc-cpe.cam.ac.uk) wrote:
: : Dear Programmers,
: : If you still wonder which language you want to specialize for
: : long, try PERL. 
: 
: Well, I have found perl to be a wonderful alternative to C, awk and shell
: programming for a wide variety of small- to moderate-size tools (i.e., less
: than 5K LOC).  But, I truly balk at the idea of using it as a substitute for
: Ada (or even C) for larger efforts (where heavy-duty design is needed).  It's
: especially useful where powerful, predictable text processing is needed (its
: pattern matching is unbeatable).  But, it fails to scale up in many of the same
: ways that C is known to not scale up well.
: 
: Take this from someone who has used C, awk, shell, and Ada for many years now
: (and even used C on some decent-sized projects).  Use perl for anything less
: than 5K, C or Ada for anything less than 100K, and Ada only for anything bigger.

We are pushing Perl upscale a little bit by adding various (optional)
declarative features, but by and large I'd agree with you.  I'd much
rather the flight control software on the airplane I'm riding in be
written in Ada than in Perl.  Perl will always be primarily about text
processing, simply because I feel that much of our everyday lives is
about text processing.

Larry Wall
lwall@netlabs.com

P.S. I do apologize for the exuberance of some of my recent converts.   :-)