Re: [tlug] Alternatives to sed + awk

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Raymond Wan writes:

 > I know little about Python, but I usually hear that Python 
 > is good for rapid prototyping while Perl is good for text 
 > processing.

I don't think I'd pigeon-hole either language that way.  Although I
enjoy Perl bashing as much as the next guy, really both are
high-level, general-purpose languages, and it's mostly a matter of
style which you use.  I *personally* find Python much cleaner, even
cleaner than Ruby for that matter, but all of these languages (maybe
including PHP, but that one is very biased toward being run within a
webserver) are general purpose.

As Josh says, the one thing that makes Perl stand out is that its
concise (ahem!) syntax, many operators, usually accurate implicit type
coercion, and implicit loop command line options make it very useful
for one liners that otherwise would require several tools hooked
together by pipes.