On Mon, Jan 19, 2004 at 03:43:33PM +0100, Luc Maranget wrote:
> Of course all my nice reasoning fails when you consider ``scripting'',
> but even then, the idea of putting regexps in strings leads to unncessary
> complications (ie many backslashes).
> A more convenient way would be by some regexp data type either
> abstract or concrete.

I think you hit the nail on the head there.  The problem is indeed
that much interesting programming these days is "scripting" - ie.
lots of short single-purpose programs maintained in a collection of
programs rather than an application.

If you analyse what Perl has which other languages don't, it can be
mostly reduced to these items:

* Syntactic support for processing lines in a file, ie:

	while (<>) { ... }

  which is an astonishing piece of brevity.  It reads all the command line
  arguments, opens the files specified and hands them line-at-a-time to
  the code inside the while loop.  I think ExtLib has some functionality
  to do a small part of this.  It should be included in the standard
  distribution.

* Syntactic support for regular expression matching / substring extraction.

  (As discussed before.)

* No (visible) compilation required.

  #!/usr/bin/perl

  Very useful.  There was some discussion before about writing scripts
  starting with:

  #!/usr/bin/ocaml

* Certain idiomatic forms, such as:

	statement if condition;
  and:	statement unless condition;

  which reduce code size.

* Absolutely huge library.

  I'm trying to do my bit here by writing libraries, and specifically
  with perl4caml which allows you to use Perl libraries with OCaml.  A
  central CPAN-like resource would still be very useful.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones. http://www.annexia.org/ http://freshmeat.net/users/rwmj
Merjis Ltd. http://www.merjis.com/ - improving website return on investment
Perl4Caml lets you use any Perl library in your type-safe Objective
CAML programs. http://www.merjis.com/developers/perl4caml/

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