Re: FAQ and string functions

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

Robert A Duff wrote:
> I'm talking about things like, "zip up a bunch of files for a release,
> put it in the version 1.234 release directory, run some regression
> tests, and then send some mail to somebody-or-other notifying them of
> something-or-other."
> 
> I wish they were all written in a language that had Perl's features for
> doing stuff, and Ada's features for making it work reliably.


Generally, I've found it best to rewrite any shell scripts that get 
beyond a screen or two in Ada, using the "System" call (or its 
equivalent on that OS) to execute commands. Maintaing large TCL or sh 
scripts just isn't worth the hassle (a little lesson from the school of 
hard knocks here).

It would be nice to have a strongly-typed "make" language though. I 
can't really figure out a good way to do rule-based systems like 
rebuilding tools in Ada. So I have to learn all the gnarly dark corners 
in Make. Yech.