Re: when and why did python(-minimal) become essential?

[Jari Aalto <jari.aalto@cante.net>]

Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org> writes:

> Le samedi 28 janvier 2006 à 21:19 -0600, Manoj Srivastava a écrit :
>
>>         And if we followed the the line of argument you are pressing
>>  uncritically, we'd bloat essential/base with gazillions of
>>  interpreters from people too lazy or incompetent to learn the
>>  interpreters already in base.
>
> I prefer to be labeled as incompetent by people like you than to write
> scripts that no one will be able to understand later. Every time I face
> a write-once, never change perl script, the only thing to do is to
> rewrite it. And this isn't a Debian-specific issue.

Don't blame the language[1], but the people. You can as well code unbearable
code in C/C++/Mono/C# (whatever) that no-one can understand. The Perl
syntax is elegant, efficient and Python's regexp handling is nowhere
as intuitive as needed for day-to-day tasks where the poer is needed.

This is not to day that Python is bad - It has better OO, which Perl
unfortunately negletted fromt he very starts. Now, talk about Perl OO 
and that's hairy!.

Jari

[1] Example of Perl coding (do not blame the language):

# ****************************************************************************
#
#   DESCRIPTION
#
#       Convert tokens 7m, 2h, 3d into minutes. Die if value is not numeric.
#
#   INPUT PARAMETERS
#
#       none
#
#   RETURN VALUES
#
#       none
#
# ****************************************************************************

sub TimeValue ($)
{
    my $id = "$LIB.TimeValue";

    local ($ARG) = (@ARG);

    if ( /^(\d+)([mhd]?)$/ )
    {
        $ARG = $1;
        my $spec = $2  if defined $2;

        $debug  and  print "$id: val [$ARG] spec [$spec]\n";

        my $factor = 1;
        $factor = 60        if $spec =~ /h/i;
        $factor = 60 *24    if $spec =~ /d/i;

        $ARG *= $factor;

        $debug  and  print "$id: val [$ARG] factor [$factor]\n";
    }
    else
    {
        die "$id: Not a recognized time value [$ARG]. Try 2m, 2d, 2h";
    }

    $ARG;
}