Re: Perl versus UNIX Korn Shell

> On Wed, Nov 05, 2003 at 04:19:44PM -0500, Esposito, Anthony wrote:
> > How would you convince someone that programming in Perl is better than
> > using the UNIX Korn Shell? 
> > 
> > I need some 'intellectual ammo' to convince my colleagues that Perl is a
> > better, more powerful language, to do our scripting.  Any suggestions?
> > :-)

I'd forego the 'intellectual ammo' -- you shouldn't shoot your
colleagues (well not usually :-) -- and arguing makes people defensive:
Just convince them by solving problems better and faster and sooner than
they can in shell.  It works better than proselytizing.

I'm doing that at work: several people have borrowed books or articles
from me after seeing an app or a one-liner that did just what they wanted:
they wanted to do do cool things too!

If you do want ammo, my war-story is: I'm doing some Perl courses at IBM
in the UK, Perl is *the* scripting language used for writing tests and
product builds for MQ, the SSA disk group ... and the Java development
group.  Their main requirements are a common language across all
platforms:  none of this :-
	case `echo "X\c"` in
	X?c)	ECHON=-n ;;
	*)	ECHOC='\c' ;;
	esac
	echo $ECHON "Some prompt: $ECHOC"
or
	case `uname -o` in
	Solaris)  # ...
		;;
	AIX)	# ...
		;;
	HPUX)	# ...
		;;
	esac
which doesn't work on OS/400, OS/2 and Win32 'cause there's no shell ...

Best wishes
-- 
Chris Benson