[Info-vax] BASIC (was Re: 64-bit)

[Dan Cross]

In article <uo1co2$ihn3$1 at dont-email.me>,
Craig A. Berry <craigberry at nospam.mac.com> wrote:
>
>On 1/13/24 7:29 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
>> In article <unv79k$4qr0$1 at dont-email.me>,
>> Craig A. Berry <craigberry at nospam.mac.com> wrote:
>>> On 1/13/24 1:50 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
>>>> In article <ununma$35nkk$1 at i2pn2.org>,
>>>> John Reagan  <johnrreagan at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>>> On 1/12/2024 7:09 AM, Chris Townley wrote:
>>>>>> On 12/01/2024 06:15, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>>>>>>> On Fri, 12 Jan 2024 00:40:47 -0500, Dave Froble wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Basic in my opinion does strings very well.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Only if you measure it by the pre-Perl era.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Perl is the work of the devil!
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> I actually like Perl and did a whole bunch of scripting with it
>>>>> during my time with HP-UX and NonStop compilers.
>>>>
>>>> In it's day, Perl was kind of the only viable solution in the
>>>> space it inhabited (that of a relatively light-weight middle
>>>> ground between C on one hand and the shell+utilites on the
>>>> other).  Raku fixed most of the deficiencies of perl 4 and perl
>>>> 5, but I'd argue there are other, better languages to
>>>> choose from these days.
>>>
>>> Which of the languages that are available as part of the base install of
>>> OpenVMS x86 would you choose instead of Perl?
>> 
>> TPU!
>
>Sure, it's better than DCL for some kinds of text processing, but you
>didn't say why you think it's better than Perl.  Or were you not aware
>that Perl is in the base install of OpenVMS x86?

In fact, I did not know that.  But I fail to see the relavence.

What I wrote, that you quoted and responded to, was that in it's
day Perl filled a certain niche between C and the shell plus
utilities (awk, sed, filters, etc).  This implies a Unix context
not VMS, though I suppose the POSIX environment for OpenVMS
might be applicable.  Regardless I went on to say, "there are
other, better languages to choose from these days."  I never
stipulated or implied that those languages should be part of the
base OpenVMS x86 instalation; that seems to be a requirement
that you imposed after the fact.

As for languages that I think are better than Perl on their
merits as languages, independent of a particular execution
environment defined by hardware and operating system, I'd put
both Ruby and Python in that camp for light-ish weight
scripting.  For systems lanugages I'd look at Rust or Ada.  For
engineering large solutions I'd look at Go or Rust.  For serious
string processing applications, building compilers or the like,
I'd look at OCaml, Rust, Go, or even SML (the MLton compiler is
whole-program optimizing and quite good).  Haskell is also a
nice language, but tends not to be very accessible to workaday
programmers.

Some specific problems with Perl _as a language_ include lack of
static typing, though that is also true of Python and Ruby, but
also lack of formal argument parameters to subroutines (fixed in
Raku however), the abstruse object system, overly implicit
behavior with respect to scope for things like splitting strings
and so on (an attempt to inherent a sort of "current record"
notion from awk), and the inefficient "regexp" implementation
that goes way beyond the regular languages and uses backtracking
for matching e.g. backrefs.

At this stage, given a choice between Perl and Ruby or Python,
I'd pick one of the latter two every time.

Does that answer your question?

	- Dan C.