🚀 go-pugleaf

Tom Christiansen <tchrist@mox.perl.com> writes:
|In comp.unix.shell, 
|    manson@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Bob Manson) writes:
...
|:Perl!=gawk!=nawk!=awk!=(POSIX awk). If you want to use perl, use
|:perl. If you want to use gawk, use gawk. If you want to use
|:nawk, use nawk...
|
| No, I'm sorry, but that just doesn't make sense.  It's in
| anyone's interest to be diversifying awk dialects.  There should
| be POSIX awk, end of story.  Period.  Full stop.  That's it.
| If you want a new language, fine, but DON'T CALL IT AWK!

OK - how about GAWK?

I found Mr. Manson's case rather well put, plus leavened with a
superior sense of humor.  As I understand it, he doesn't care for perl,
for reasons he has in common with a lot of other people.  It seems
unlikely that you're going to be able to browbeat him or anyone else
into liking it better.  It follows, that for some people perl is not
very relevant to gawk development.

That should equally apply to development of other languages.  It seems
like it would be more productive for the Apostles of Perl to focus their
energies on Perl, rather than attempting to suppress other languages
(scsh, gawk, what next?).

| I'll say it again for the logic impaired: the list of things that are
| intended to be put into gawk are already in perl, and people all excited
| about them should think very very hard on why they wish to devote so very
| much time to reinvent something that was better constructed from the start
| than they have a chance at implementing.  You see, perl began a ground
| zero starting point without a legacy to preserve, so those features got
| added there much more cleanly and coherently that shall ever be even
| POSSIBLE in awk.  It's similar to (part of) why there are disgusting
| abominations in ksh: he decided to be still handle sh scripts, rather than
| throwing the cruddy code out and getting a fresh start as they did in rc.

OK, Tom, you're on record here.  You're saying language design works better
if you can include all the basic features from the start, right?  I assume
this particularly applies to features fundamental to the programming model,
like OOP for example.  A language couldn't possibly add features like that,
after the fact, and do it half as well?  I tend to agree, and there are
some great examples - C++ for example would be better off without its
C compatibility.  I haven't seen the Perl 5 manual, so I can't comment
on that.

	Donn Cave, University Computing Services, University of Washington
	donn@cac.washington.edu