| Path: cwi.nl!sun4nl!mcsun!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!convex!usenet |
| From: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) |
| Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl |
| Subject: Re: The problems of Perl (Re: Question (silly?)) |
| Message-ID: <1992Jan17.053115.4220@convex.com> |
| Date: 17 Jan 92 05:31:15 GMT |
| References: <17458@ector.cs.purdue.edu> <1992Jan16.165347.25583@cherokee.uswest.com> <=#Hues+4@cs.psu.edu> |
| Sender: usenet@convex.com (news access account) |
| Reply-To: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) |
| Organization: CONVEX Realtime Development, Colorado Springs, CO |
| Lines: 83 |
| Nntp-Posting-Host: pixel.convex.com |
| |
| From the keyboard of flee@cs.psu.edu (Felix Lee): |
| :And Perl is definitely awkward with data types. I haven't yet found a |
| :pleasant way of shoving non-trivial data types into Perl's grammar. |
| |
| Yes, it's pretty aweful at that, alright. Sometimes I write perl programs |
| that need them, and sometimes it just takes a little creativity. But |
| sometimes it's not worth it. I actually wrote a C program the other day |
| (gasp) because I didn't want to deal with a game matrix with six links per node. |
| |
| :Here's a very simple problem that's tricky to express in Perl: process |
| :the output of "du" to produce output that's indented to reflect the |
| :tree structure, and with each subtree sorted by size. Something like: |
| : 434 /etc |
| : | 344 . |
| : | 50 install |
| : | 35 uucp |
| : | 3 nserve |
| : | | 2 . |
| : | | 1 auth.info |
| : | 1 sm |
| : | 1 sm.bak |
| |
| At first I thought I could just keep one local list around |
| at once, but this seems inherently recursive. Which means |
| I need an real recursive data structure. Maybe you could |
| do it with one of the %assoc arrays Larry uses in the begat |
| programs, but I broke down and got dirty. I think the hardest |
| part was matching Felix's desired output exactly. It's not |
| blazingly fast: I should probably inline the &childof routine, |
| but it *was* faster to write than I could have written the |
| equivalent C program. |
| |
| |
| --tom |
| |
| -- |
| "GUIs normally make it simple to accomplish simple actions and impossible |
| to accomplish complex actions." --Doug Gwyn (22/Jun/91 in comp.unix.wizards) |
| |
| Tom Christiansen tchrist@convex.com convex!tchrist |
| |