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From: barry@abel.math.ucla.edu (Barry Merriman)
Subject: Re: Why you should not use Tcl
Message-ID: <1994Sep26.004707.24772@math.ucla.edu>
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References: <9409232314.AA29957@mole.gnu.ai.mit.edu> <3635a6$ang@apollo.west.oic.com>
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 94 00:47:07 GMT
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In article <3635a6$ang@apollo.west.oic.com> dillon@apollo.west.oic.com (Matthew Dillon) writes:
>    Perl comes closest to what I believe GNU wants
>    but so far nothing fits the bill exactly, and I do not particularly
>    like Perl's variable syntax either (though it's better then TCL's).
>

The problems I see with perl are that: (1) it has an unnecessarily complicated/ugly
syntax and name space conventions, that tends to lead to obfuscated
code (though not as obscure as sed,awk,sh code) and (2)  It also seems to be a 
rather derivative language---it essentially just collects together 
all the useful features found in 

-shell languages, 
-standard unix commands, 
-unix C system routines, 
-standard C libraries 

and rolls them into one big interpreted, system independent  language.  
That may be nearly ideal if your goal is to write unix system administration routines 
and portable across unices scripts. But that is probably a poor basis 
for a general purpose programming language; such a language should have 
a general basis and a library devoted to the points above, not
the other way around.

Matt: are you familiar with Python? (as in comp.lang.python). Given your
considerable experience, I'd like to know what you think of it.


--
Barry Merriman
UCLA Dept. of Math
UCLA Inst. for Fusion and Plasma Research
barry@math.ucla.edu (Internet)   barry@arnold.math.ucla.edu (NeXTMail)
