1992-03-02 16:20:32 +00:00
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Path: cwi.nl!sun4nl!mcsun!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!convex!usenet
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From: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen)
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Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
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Subject: Re: The problems of Perl (Re: Question (silly?))
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Message-ID: <1992Jan17.053115.4220@convex.com>
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Date: 17 Jan 92 05:31:15 GMT
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References: <17458@ector.cs.purdue.edu> <1992Jan16.165347.25583@cherokee.uswest.com> <=#Hues+4@cs.psu.edu>
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Sender: usenet@convex.com (news access account)
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Reply-To: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen)
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Organization: CONVEX Realtime Development, Colorado Springs, CO
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Lines: 83
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Nntp-Posting-Host: pixel.convex.com
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From the keyboard of flee@cs.psu.edu (Felix Lee):
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:And Perl is definitely awkward with data types. I haven't yet found a
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:pleasant way of shoving non-trivial data types into Perl's grammar.
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Yes, it's pretty aweful at that, alright. Sometimes I write perl programs
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that need them, and sometimes it just takes a little creativity. But
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sometimes it's not worth it. I actually wrote a C program the other day
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(gasp) because I didn't want to deal with a game matrix with six links per node.
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:Here's a very simple problem that's tricky to express in Perl: process
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:the output of "du" to produce output that's indented to reflect the
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:tree structure, and with each subtree sorted by size. Something like:
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: 434 /etc
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: | 344 .
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: | 50 install
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: | 35 uucp
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: | 3 nserve
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: | | 2 .
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: | | 1 auth.info
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: | 1 sm
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: | 1 sm.bak
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At first I thought I could just keep one local list around
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2015-04-03 19:42:32 +03:00
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at once, but this seems inherently recursive. Which means
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1992-03-02 16:20:32 +00:00
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I need an real recursive data structure. Maybe you could
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do it with one of the %assoc arrays Larry uses in the begat
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programs, but I broke down and got dirty. I think the hardest
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2015-04-03 19:42:32 +03:00
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part was matching Felix's desired output exactly. It's not
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1992-03-02 16:20:32 +00:00
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blazingly fast: I should probably inline the &childof routine,
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2015-04-03 19:42:32 +03:00
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but it *was* faster to write than I could have written the
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1992-03-02 16:20:32 +00:00
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equivalent C program.
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--tom
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--
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"GUIs normally make it simple to accomplish simple actions and impossible
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to accomplish complex actions." --Doug Gwyn (22/Jun/91 in comp.unix.wizards)
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Tom Christiansen tchrist@convex.com convex!tchrist
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