Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Kay-Uwe Kasemir <[email protected]> · Wed, 29 Jan 1997 11:06:42 -0700

Hi Chris, hi all:

>It's also a negative to install gmake on UNIX (and a real negative, in
>my opinion, to install gmake on NT), but people seem to have 
>felt it was worth biting the bullet to gain the features.
The most irritating fact is that we have to use
computers at all ;-)
But as far as GNU make is concerned,
noone can argue that some maketool is really needed.

GNU make seems to be the only real option:
'make' and 'nmake' are very different and GNU make
does not only have nice features but is also the
only common make tool.

>The alternative to Perl is to write some C programs. If the scripts
>are simple and there arent plans to add a bunch more, this may be the
>most portable solution (though you still have to deal with the '/' vs
>'\' difference somewhere).
This is what Jeff suggested, carefully written, portable ANSI-C code.
But the things we do with scripts right now are
implemented as scripts because it's _so_ much easier to do
in scripts.
Think of shell one-liners like
"search all files in '.' for lines containing <reg.exp> and ..."
('/' vs. '\' isn't that terrible, both UNIX and Windows understand '/'.
 VMS or PCs with EPICS spread over partitions ['c:', 'd:'..]
 is were the trouble starts)

And if we could agree on a single, powerful scripting language
for those tasks - at least for new scripts -
then we would have the ease and elegance of scripts
without any compatibility problems.

Perl may seem strange, so tcl might be an alternative.
But does tcl or any other scripting language have system-independend ways to
* parse texts
* create files
* directory listing access, with and without wildcards
* get file dates, permissions, ...
* arrays, hash tables, ability to build structures?

When I started compiling EPICS on Windows I had to spend a month
searching for a shell, grep, sed, awk, ls, ... which compile on windows.
Every new script may break the Windows-build.
We shouldn't think of Perl like "Oh no, not another necessary program".
Installing Perl can be done by everyone who is able to read this
and using it at least for new sripts would help keeping things portable.

Respectfully,
-Kay

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System