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

[Craig A. Berry]

On 1/14/24 2:55 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
> 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).  

It still does that well and the whole unix/linux tech universe would
dissolve into a pile of unusable bits if Perl weren't there holding it
together. It can do a whole lot more, though, and all sorts of serious
systems have been written in it.

> This implies a Unix context
> not VMS, though I suppose the POSIX environment for OpenVMS
> might be applicable.

It is not.  Extreme portability has been a hallmark of Perl for decades
and the VMS port has been around for roughly 30 years.  In fact, I don't
even know what you mean by "POSIX environment for OpenVMS."  I think
there was something called that a long time ago, though I never saw it
or used it.  There have been various things in the CRTL and the file
system that provide compliance with one POSIX standard or another. Perl
on VMS has generally not relied on any of them but has attempted to
support some of them.

> 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.

That's a good, if predictable, list of the most popular languages around
in the marketplace. I was genuinely curious whether, given the
(implicit) list of DCL, TPU, and Perl available to all VMS users out of
the box, you would be able to give an on-topic, practical answer rather
than a lecture about how many languages you know and what's wrong with
the languages people can actually use. We see how that turned out.

> Some specific problems with Perl _as a language_ include lack of
> static typing, though that is also true of Python and Ruby

They are dynamic languages, and as Steven Schweda would say, "dynamic"
is spelled differently from "static" for a reason.

>, 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.

Raku, despite it origins, is a language unrelated to Perl. Any benchmark
I've ever heard of shows Perl has a more performant regex engine than
most or all the others. Discussions about a better object system are
ongoing. Perl isn't perfect, but it continues to improve in its fourth
decade without the massive corporate support that some other languages
get. To your credit, you did not say it looks like line noise, the
oft-cited criticism from people who don't know what regular expressions are.

> 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?

Yeah, pretty much.