| Guido van Rossum | 2ba9f30 | 1992-03-02 16:20:32 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1 | Path: cwi.nl!sun4nl!mcsun!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!convex!usenet |
| 2 | From: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) |
| 3 | Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl |
| 4 | Subject: Re: The problems of Perl (Re: Question (silly?)) |
| 5 | Message-ID: <1992Jan17.053115.4220@convex.com> |
| 6 | Date: 17 Jan 92 05:31:15 GMT |
| 7 | References: <17458@ector.cs.purdue.edu> <1992Jan16.165347.25583@cherokee.uswest.com> <=#Hues+4@cs.psu.edu> |
| 8 | Sender: usenet@convex.com (news access account) |
| 9 | Reply-To: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) |
| 10 | Organization: CONVEX Realtime Development, Colorado Springs, CO |
| 11 | Lines: 83 |
| 12 | Nntp-Posting-Host: pixel.convex.com |
| 13 | |
| 14 | From the keyboard of flee@cs.psu.edu (Felix Lee): |
| 15 | :And Perl is definitely awkward with data types. I haven't yet found a |
| 16 | :pleasant way of shoving non-trivial data types into Perl's grammar. |
| 17 | |
| 18 | Yes, it's pretty aweful at that, alright. Sometimes I write perl programs |
| 19 | that need them, and sometimes it just takes a little creativity. But |
| 20 | sometimes it's not worth it. I actually wrote a C program the other day |
| 21 | (gasp) because I didn't want to deal with a game matrix with six links per node. |
| 22 | |
| 23 | :Here's a very simple problem that's tricky to express in Perl: process |
| 24 | :the output of "du" to produce output that's indented to reflect the |
| 25 | :tree structure, and with each subtree sorted by size. Something like: |
| 26 | : 434 /etc |
| 27 | : | 344 . |
| 28 | : | 50 install |
| 29 | : | 35 uucp |
| 30 | : | 3 nserve |
| 31 | : | | 2 . |
| 32 | : | | 1 auth.info |
| 33 | : | 1 sm |
| 34 | : | 1 sm.bak |
| 35 | |
| 36 | At first I thought I could just keep one local list around |
| Serhiy Storchaka | 45ec328 | 2015-04-03 19:42:32 +0300 | [diff] [blame] | 37 | at once, but this seems inherently recursive. Which means |
| Guido van Rossum | 2ba9f30 | 1992-03-02 16:20:32 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 38 | I need an real recursive data structure. Maybe you could |
| 39 | do it with one of the %assoc arrays Larry uses in the begat |
| 40 | programs, but I broke down and got dirty. I think the hardest |
| Serhiy Storchaka | 45ec328 | 2015-04-03 19:42:32 +0300 | [diff] [blame] | 41 | part was matching Felix's desired output exactly. It's not |
| Guido van Rossum | 2ba9f30 | 1992-03-02 16:20:32 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 42 | blazingly fast: I should probably inline the &childof routine, |
| Serhiy Storchaka | 45ec328 | 2015-04-03 19:42:32 +0300 | [diff] [blame] | 43 | but it *was* faster to write than I could have written the |
| Guido van Rossum | 2ba9f30 | 1992-03-02 16:20:32 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 44 | equivalent C program. |
| 45 | |
| 46 | |
| 47 | --tom |
| 48 | |
| 49 | -- |
| 50 | "GUIs normally make it simple to accomplish simple actions and impossible |
| 51 | to accomplish complex actions." --Doug Gwyn (22/Jun/91 in comp.unix.wizards) |
| 52 | |
| 53 | Tom Christiansen tchrist@convex.com convex!tchrist |
| 54 | |