The Awk Programming Language (1988) [pdf]

Re:The Awk Programming Language (1988) [pdf] by Annatar on Thursday May 24, 2018 @12:02PM (#17145291)

The illumos project undertook a massive effort to eradicate any and all dependencies on Perl (which had also been made part of the core operating system decades prior, by themselves no less). While they're still at it, they have managed to rip out most of it and replace it with binary executables in C or shell.

Yes, writing a build engine in AWK would be perfectly doable, but the right tool for that job is Make.

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Re:The Awk Programming Language (1988) [pdf] by kamaal on Monday May 28, 2018 @02:29AM (#17170875)

That's easy to do.

But that's not the end of it. The whole point of Perl is avoid a salad of C and shell utils. Also in many cases the moment you have to deal with >2 files at a time shell utilities begin to show their limits.

The resulting code is often far more unreadable than anything you will ever write in Perl.

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Re:The Awk Programming Language (1988) [pdf] by Annatar on Tuesday May 29, 2018 @05:54AM (#17177772)

I’m sorry you believe that, but it’s simply not true, especially since UNIX is designed to be driven by a combination of binary code and shell executables. Perl is a mess whose syntax borders on hieroglyphic once poured into software. That doesn’t mean that it’s not a capable language; but it’s not a language in which written programs are maintainable or easily debuggable.

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