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=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID 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: Brian Rogoff Subject: Re: general-purpose vs. domain-specific programming languages Date: 1998/01/13 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 315652252 References: <98011217550672@psavax.pwfl.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Trace: 884713645 18040 bpr 206.184.139.132 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1998-01-13T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: On 13 Jan 1998, Robert Dewar wrote: > But it is reasonable to have the primitives from which this is easily > constructed, and certainly using the pattern matching support in GNAT, > you can easily program this function (and indeed tuck it in a library > if you really think it is something you will often want to do). 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. Another part, separate from the pattern matching functionality, is that there is a pretty convenient socket programming interface, also familiar to Unix people. 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 ;-) > A useful thing would be for someone to propose a spec for a Perl interface Probably just an Ada-fied version of POSIX regex matching would suffice to emulate a suitable subset of Perl pattern matching. -- Brian