Front page | perl.perl5.porters |
Postings from August 2000
On 06 Aug 2000 12:27:21 +0200, JVromans@squirrel.nl (Johan Vromans) wrote:
> Jeffrey Friedl <jfriedl@yahoo-inc.com> writes:
>
> > \V The \V regex operator would be a "large cut" operator.
> > \v The \v regex operator would be a "small cut" operator.
>
> As has been remarked a couple of times now, the pattern matching with
> (formerly) regular expressions is a programing language in its own
> right, and this language is now trying to evolving into a more
> powerful language. Nothing wrong with that, but one can question
> whether the current language is suitable for that.
>
> Maybe the time has come to start thinking about a different approach,
> in which pattern matching can be do a more perlish way instead of the
> regex way. An example of such an approach can be found in the SNOBOL
> and Icon programming languages. And of course, adding something new
> does not mean that the current way of doing it will be abandoned.
>
> As a small, but hopefully illustrative example: In the early days of
> 4GL tools, there was often a need to extend the 4GL with a simple 3GL.
> Nothing complicated, just setting a few variables or testing some
> values and act accordingly. Over the years, most of these wannabe-3GLs
> have evolved into complete programming languages although it was never
> the intention to do so in the first place. As a result, the languages
> suck and are very poorly implemented. The morale: not every
> 'programming language' is suitable to be extented ad infinitum.
Agree. But not all of these languages are open source.
I deal with above situation on a daily basis, extending and maintaining
extensions to 4GL that is NOT open source, but needs to be extended. I.e.
we've build in X.25 support and the possibility to enter diacritical marks
into our 4GL applications. Both not supported by the base package :-(
Perl can address these kind of problems in a different way, cause it's open
source.
--
H.Merijn Brand Amsterdam Perl Mongers (http://www.amsterdam.pm.org/)
using perl5.005.03, 5.6.0 & 516 on HP-UX 10.20, HP-UX 11.00, AIX 4.2, AIX 4.3,
DEC OSF/1 4.0 and WinNT 4.0 SP-6a, often with Tk800.022 and/or DBD-Unify
ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/languages/perl/CPAN/authors/id/H/HM/HMBRAND/