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