🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <D7L95H.Bp6@ul.ie>,
relihanl@ul.ie (Liam Relihan) wrote:

>I think that awk/nawk/gawk's strength is that it is lightweight.
>Perl's strength is that it is very pragmatic --- it can do just about 
>anything you would ever want to do in a script and quite a few more besides.
>
>There is room for both languages I think.

Give the man a cigar.

I am a perl freak, having come to perl by way of awk. Currently we've
got perl 5 at this site -- but it's a bit cumbersome for some of those
small one-liners.

I have occasionally speculated about the usefulness of a small, 
stripped-down perl subset for use as an explicit awk replacement. 
If I was going to say _why_ I want such a toy, I'd haver a bit and
finally come down on the side of fast string mangling. It would need
rapid startup -- faster than the existing Perl -- but could do without
a lot of the more complex features of Perl (system calls, file and
process management, sockets, object orientation and any post-Perl 4
language accretions, source level debugger). The only exceptions would
be the inclusion of the BEGIN and END patterns.

If such a cut-down Perl could be made to function, and _if_ it was
faster and smaller than full Perl, I'd be an enthusiastic user. I'd
still need the full Perl kit from time to time -- but frankly, 90% of
the time I don't need sockets or dbm files or objects or a debugger;
I just want a quick one-liner execution engine.

Would it be feasible to graft a subset of perl's syntax onto gawk (as
syntactic sugar for perl users), or to derive a cut-down perl from the
existing perl distribution?



-- Charlie