note
batkins
Turn the question back around and ask them the same thing.
<p>
And here are some advantages Perl has over ASP and Java (to throw at them while they're still trying to come up with some good reasons for their preferred languages):
<ul>
<li>Built-in text processing facilities - regexen, split, etc.
<li>CPAN - there's probably a module on CPAN that will do what you need, and will do it a lot more reliably since most CPAN modules are subjected to more testing than a handrolled module.
<li>Communities like PerlMonks
<li>And most importantly, a saner syntax. For example, let's open a file in Perl and write to it:
<code>
open my $fh, ">FILENAME" or die "Can't write FILENAME: $!";
print $fh "We are writing a line of text to a file.\nSecond line";
close $fh;
</code>
In ASP:
<code>
<%
Dim objFSO, objTextStream, file
file = Server.MapPath("samplefile.txt")
Set objFSO = Server.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set objTextStream = objFSO.OpenTextFile(file , 2, True)
objTextStream.WriteLine "We are writing a line of text to our text file" &
VBCfLf & "This is our second line of text" & VBCrLf
objTextStream.Close
Set objTextStream = Nothing
Set objFSO = Nothing
%>
</code>
Or Java:
<code>
try {
BufferedWriter out = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter("outfilename"));
out.write("We are writing a line of text to our text file\nThis is our second line of text");
out.close();
} catch (IOException e) {
}
</code>
I know which one I'd rather write. The Java example isn't as ludicrously verbose as the ASP sample, but I still find Perl's syntax much more straightforward.
<li>Perl's interpreter is extremely fast. If you run Perl with mod_perl or ISAPI, you'll get excellent performance. I would suspect this is faster than ASP and strongly suspect that this is faster than Java, but I have no numbers to prove this.
</ul>
<div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-185222">
<font size="-2"><i>Are you sure it was a book? Are you sure it wasn't.....nothing?</i></font>
</div></div>
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