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Re: Comparison between Perl and Ksh

by traveler (Parson)
on Mar 06, 2002 at 20:43 UTC ( [id://149836]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Comparison between Perl and Ksh

While it depends greatly on the task at hand, some reasons I have not used ksh or bash for development are (in no particular order):
  1. If you have a situation requiring lots of operations where the shell would fork a simple program (e.g. date, rm, ln) and where perl would do it directly, the fork overhead may be very high.
  2. Perl code can be easier to maintain. Some shell-only programmers may disagree, but I tend to forget why I did certian "tricks" in shell scripts. But I can generally figure out my old perl scripts.
  3. Perl has better support for functions.
  4. CPAN
  5. Perl expressions are generally easier to follow than calls to expr/sed/grep.
  6. It is probably easier to find new good Perl programmers to add to a team than to find new good ksh programmers.
I am in the process of converting most of my non-trivial shell scripts to perl. I recently tried to explain two large scripts, one perl one shell, to a group of inexperienced programmers. They could follow the perl, but not the shell, and the shell was much simpler code, honestly. The issue in that case was that the shell required verboseness and tricks that were not necessary in perl.

HTH, --traveler

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