Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed • Hacker News Board

Re: Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed

#91

Post by whateveracct » Sun, Jul 09, 2023, 4:33 AM UTC

jph00 wrote: post #8

aportnoy wrote: post #2

The funny thing is Perl is now arguably more obsolete than sed and awk.

That might be true culturally, but it's not true technically. Once you know a bit of Perl (including some command line switches like -e, -n, -a, -l, -p, and -i) you will be able to do just as easily everything you used to do in awk and sed, but with a more powerful foundation so you have the flexibility to go further.

What's a good resource to be proficient in perl for shell scripting?

I write a lot of bash for better or worse. I wonder if perl would be a better choice sometimes.

Re: Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed

#92

Post by jancsika » Sun, Jul 09, 2023, 4:39 AM UTC

stubish wrote: post #55

imiric wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Automation was glued together in one of these with a series of grep, awk, sed, ls, test, commands glued together. Anything more complicated was written in C and called from one of these things. This doesn't sound that horrific to me. It's the classic Unix approach of building small tools that do one thing well, and composing them in novel ways to solve problems. For any problem that can't be solved this way you wri…

At the time, before everything became Linux, all these tools and the shells used to glue them together were an incoherent mess. Was your glue sh, ksh, csh, tcsh, bash or something uncommon like zsh? Did your grep, awk and sed use the same regexp syntax as your text editor? Single letter command line options, all meaning something different to each tool. Dozens of domain specific languages (shells, awk, sed etc.) mean…

Honest question-- why weren't the tools glued together or perhaps replaced entirely with the lisp inside Emacs? What was it missing?

Re: Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed

#93

Post by tannhaeuser » Sun, Jul 09, 2023, 4:43 AM UTC

kristopolous wrote: post #87

imron wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, awk and sed were replaced by Perl, I still use awk and sed semi regularly. I haven’t used Perl in over a decade.

1980s awk and sed aren't the same as the 2020s version. They've become much more useful because of the influence of things like perl. To see what I mean, here's SunOS 4.1.1's man page for awk and sed as grabbed from https://github.com/ambiamber/Run-Sun3-SunOS-4.1.1/blob/main/... and ran through groffer(1) . These are from 1989 and 1987 respectively. The core stuff is there but not much else. https://9ol.es/sed.1v.pdf…

Awk today is very much the same language it was in 1977 when it was introduced. Comparing your links with today's POSIX awk manpage doesn't yield a single thing Perl brought to awk. At best, while JavaScript syntax is even based on awk, you could say JavaScript regexpes are based on PCRE, and it wasn't clear whether use of capture groups/back references makes Perl regexpes accidentally Turing.

Re: Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed

#94

Post by tannhaeuser » Sun, Jul 09, 2023, 4:54 AM UTC

unpythonic wrote: post #11

When perl came out we were living in horrific times. You had the choice of either Bourne, C or Korn shell. Automation was glued together in one of these with a series of grep, awk, sed, ls, test, commands glued together. Anything more complicated was written in C and called from one of these things. Perl in one stroke collapsed the programming of C, text manipulation, the capabilities of all of the Unix utilities, an…

Perl didn't replace anything. It was replaced by PHP for CGI programming (which says a lot!) and botched itself by the second worst version migration of all times.

Re: Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed

#95

Post by asah » Sun, Jul 09, 2023, 5:02 AM UTC

unpythonic wrote: post #11

When perl came out we were living in horrific times. You had the choice of either Bourne, C or Korn shell. Automation was glued together in one of these with a series of grep, awk, sed, ls, test, commands glued together. Anything more complicated was written in C and called from one of these things. Perl in one stroke collapsed the programming of C, text manipulation, the capabilities of all of the Unix utilities, an…

Ignore the haters - they're too young to remember.

I remember different CLI tools working differently on SysV and other variants. I remember AIX and HPUX.

Perl meant one thing that just goddamned worked mostly the same way. That and vi and emacs. :-)

Re: Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed

#96

Post by ChoHag » Sun, Jul 09, 2023, 5:03 AM UTC

jancsika wrote: post #92

stubish wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the time, before everything became Linux, all these tools and the shells used to glue them together were an incoherent mess. Was your glue sh, ksh, csh, tcsh, bash or something uncommon like zsh? Did your grep, awk and sed use the same regexp syntax as your text editor? Single letter command line options, all meaning something different to each tool. Dozens of domain specific languages (shells, awk, sed etc.) mean…

Honest question-- why weren't the tools glued together or perhaps replaced entirely with the lisp inside Emacs? What was it missing?

[dead]

Re: Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed

#97

Post by turndown » Sun, Jul 09, 2023, 5:19 AM UTC

jancsika wrote: post #92

stubish wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the time, before everything became Linux, all these tools and the shells used to glue them together were an incoherent mess. Was your glue sh, ksh, csh, tcsh, bash or something uncommon like zsh? Did your grep, awk and sed use the same regexp syntax as your text editor? Single letter command line options, all meaning something different to each tool. Dozens of domain specific languages (shells, awk, sed etc.) mean…

Honest question-- why weren't the tools glued together or perhaps replaced entirely with the lisp inside Emacs? What was it missing?

While there are many possible answers, it eventually boils down to Unix being a C runtime and thus has a C culture. Lisp is from outside of this section of the world, so it simply had less adoption and support inside Unix land. Other languages, like sed, awk, and shell are not C but share its heritage(essentially, they were made by people close to the making of C.)

Re: Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed

#98

Post by bonzini » Sun, Jul 09, 2023, 5:22 AM UTC

tannhaeuser wrote: post #94

unpythonic wrote: post #11

When perl came out we were living in horrific times. You had the choice of either Bourne, C or Korn shell. Automation was glued together in one of these with a series of grep, awk, sed, ls, test, commands glued together. Anything more complicated was written in C and called from one of these things. Perl in one stroke collapsed the programming of C, text manipulation, the capabilities of all of the Unix utilities, an…

Perl didn't replace anything. It was replaced by PHP for CGI programming (which says a lot!) and botched itself by the second worst version migration of all times.

Perl 4 to 5 was quite successful. Perl 5 to 6 was definitely worse than Python 2 to 3, since the latter actually worked out in the end.

Re: Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed

#99

Post by shrubble » Sun, Jul 09, 2023, 5:30 AM UTC

jancsika wrote: post #92

stubish wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the time, before everything became Linux, all these tools and the shells used to glue them together were an incoherent mess. Was your glue sh, ksh, csh, tcsh, bash or something uncommon like zsh? Did your grep, awk and sed use the same regexp syntax as your text editor? Single letter command line options, all meaning something different to each tool. Dozens of domain specific languages (shells, awk, sed etc.) mean…

Honest question-- why weren't the tools glued together or perhaps replaced entirely with the lisp inside Emacs? What was it missing?

Memory and CPU efficiency, since most systems were memory constrained. My first server had 128MB of RAM...

Re: Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed

#100

Post by speedgoose » Sun, Jul 09, 2023, 5:33 AM UTC

_2z1p wrote: post #16

Unpopular opinion, but I think we'd be so much better off if Netscape had just embedded a Perl interpreter instead of creating JavaScript. Perl CGI was already the dominant server side technology at the time and it has incredible string manipulation capabilities that would be beneficial for browser scripting.

JavaScript being some kind of Lisp dialect with a C syntax is good IMHO. You also get some Perl inspired features in JavaScript, like the regular expression engine, and the not so user friendly array methods like slice and splice.

The DOM API is also a bit more robust than string manipulation.