From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.2 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID, REPLYTO_WITHOUT_TO_CC autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,dd4586b9dd51c602 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Stephen Leake Subject: Re: general-purpose vs. domain-specific programming languages Date: 1998/01/15 Message-ID: <34BE4F53.4B56@gsfc.nasa.gov>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 316262199 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <98011217550672@psavax.pwfl.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Reply-To: Stephen.Leake@gsfc.nasa.gov Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Organization: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center -- Greenbelt, Maryland USA Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1998-01-15T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Brian Rogoff wrote: > > Part of the attraction of Perl is that its pattern matching functionality > is derived from the Unix utilities (grep, awk, sed, tr, ....) so Unix > programmers feel somewhat comfortable (i.e., they don't have to learn > anything new) using it. I've never met anyone who could write regular expressions from memory; I know I always have to look in the manual. I much prefer reading an Ada spec! In addition, the Gnat.Snobol syntax is reminiscent of DEC's TPU pattern matching, which I learned before I learned Unix/emacs regexp. > Another part, separate from the pattern matching > functionality, is that there is a pretty convenient socket programming > interface, also familiar to Unix people. No reason we can't have an Ada Berkely sockets binding (although I never did like the Berkely abstraction). > And a third is that since Perl > has an interactive mode, you can learn by typing in examples rather than > reading the Perl manual. (OK, I'm ducking and running for cover ;-) Yep, that's a biggie. I think that's the main reason people like (used to like?) Forth, Lisp, and all the other interpreted/user interactive languages. > -- Brian -- - Stephe