On Fri, Jul 21, 2000 at 11:41:04AM -0700, Jason R Thorpe wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 21, 2000 at 08:29:42PM +0200, Marc Espie wrote:
> 
>  > If you are concerned about discrepancies with other BSDs, you should try
>  > to get NetBSD (and maybe BSDi ? I don't follow BSDi...) to include perl
>  > in their base distribution.
> 
> Oh, puhleeze!  perl is far from necessary to do many of thing things
> its used for in `base distributions'.
> 
> Maybe people should actually learn shell and awk better.
> 
> Anyway, the last thing that embedded systems people want is perl
> required by basic system scripts.

Necessary ? No.
Useful, yes.

Next time you're bored, time NetBSD makewhatis (you know, the one in C).
Now, compare it to OpenBSD's version (you know the one in perl).

Now guess which one is faster.

As far as awk and sh go, yeah, sure. Those tools exist. Perl is simpler,
easier to maintain, generally faster, simpler to get secure, to debug, etc.

(also, perl is usually more portable than your random assortment of `standard'
shell tools... being involved with maintaining a few supposedly `standard'
tools, I know...)

Your choice, really... You can live in the '80s if you wish to.
-- 
	Marc Espie		
|anime, sf, juggling, unicycle, acrobatics, comics...
|AmigaOS, OpenBSD, C++, perl, Icon, PostScript...
| `real programmers don't die, they just get out of beta'