|
687
|
1 Path: cwi.nl!sun4nl!mcsun!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!convex!usenet
|
|
|
2 From: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen)
|
|
|
3 Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
|
|
|
4 Subject: Re: The problems of Perl (Re: Question (silly?))
|
|
|
5 Message-ID: <1992Jan17.053115.4220@convex.com>
|
|
|
6 Date: 17 Jan 92 05:31:15 GMT
|
|
|
7 References: <17458@ector.cs.purdue.edu> <1992Jan16.165347.25583@cherokee.uswest.com> <=#Hues+4@cs.psu.edu>
|
|
|
8 Sender: usenet@convex.com (news access account)
|
|
|
9 Reply-To: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen)
|
|
|
10 Organization: CONVEX Realtime Development, Colorado Springs, CO
|
|
|
11 Lines: 83
|
|
|
12 Nntp-Posting-Host: pixel.convex.com
|
|
|
13
|
|
|
14 From the keyboard of flee@cs.psu.edu (Felix Lee):
|
|
|
15 :And Perl is definitely awkward with data types. I haven't yet found a
|
|
|
16 :pleasant way of shoving non-trivial data types into Perl's grammar.
|
|
|
17
|
|
|
18 Yes, it's pretty aweful at that, alright. Sometimes I write perl programs
|
|
|
19 that need them, and sometimes it just takes a little creativity. But
|
|
|
20 sometimes it's not worth it. I actually wrote a C program the other day
|
|
|
21 (gasp) because I didn't want to deal with a game matrix with six links per node.
|
|
|
22
|
|
|
23 :Here's a very simple problem that's tricky to express in Perl: process
|
|
|
24 :the output of "du" to produce output that's indented to reflect the
|
|
|
25 :tree structure, and with each subtree sorted by size. Something like:
|
|
|
26 : 434 /etc
|
|
|
27 : | 344 .
|
|
|
28 : | 50 install
|
|
|
29 : | 35 uucp
|
|
|
30 : | 3 nserve
|
|
|
31 : | | 2 .
|
|
|
32 : | | 1 auth.info
|
|
|
33 : | 1 sm
|
|
|
34 : | 1 sm.bak
|
|
|
35
|
|
|
36 At first I thought I could just keep one local list around
|
|
|
37 at once, but this seems inherently recursive. Which means
|
|
|
38 I need an real recursive data structure. Maybe you could
|
|
|
39 do it with one of the %assoc arrays Larry uses in the begat
|
|
|
40 programs, but I broke down and got dirty. I think the hardest
|
|
|
41 part was matching Felix's desired output exactly. It's not
|
|
|
42 blazingly fast: I should probably inline the &childof routine,
|
|
|
43 but it *was* faster to write than I could have written the
|
|
|
44 equivalent C program.
|
|
|
45
|
|
|
46
|
|
|
47 --tom
|
|
|
48
|
|
|
49 --
|
|
|
50 "GUIs normally make it simple to accomplish simple actions and impossible
|
|
|
51 to accomplish complex actions." --Doug Gwyn (22/Jun/91 in comp.unix.wizards)
|
|
|
52
|
|
|
53 Tom Christiansen tchrist@convex.com convex!tchrist
|
|
|
54
|
