Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

[email protected] (Richard Wolff) · Tue, 4 Feb 1997 09:58:33 -0700

"I can do anything you can do better.  I can do anything better than you."

That song refrain has been running through my head as I ponder
language comparisons -- but it's really only an indicator of where we
can end up if we aren't wary!

In the Perl/Python comparison, here's what Watters, van Rossum and Ahlstrom
say in their book "Internet Programming with Python" (If you're not up
on things Python, Guido van Rossum is the author of Python).

  "...in contrast to Python (a fairly minimalist language) the Perls [4 and 5]
are fairly maximalist languages -- including many of the features of the C,
sed, ksh, and awk programming languages as well as a number of features
borrowed from elsewhere or simply invented on the fly.  In spite of the
large number of features in the Perls, we know of no Perl feature that
cannot be emulated easily in Python.  By contrast, we believe that Python's
advanced exception handling features and many of the features of the
Python object model cannot be emulated adequately using any version of Perl.
One clear advantage that the Perls have over Python is that they include
very powerful and fast regular expression matching facilities built into
the language syntax.  We believe that Python is a generally better language
for most software engineering tasks due to its more uniform and simpler
syntax and symantics."

Everyone seems to rank the Perl regular expression handling as the best and
fastest, but I haven't found the Python regex and regsub modules lacking
anything I needed for the typical admin tasks such as parsing log files,
filtering to remove comments in code to be downloaded into a motor
controller, etc.

Lutz, in his book "Programming Python" also (and equally reluctantly)
makes a short comparison of Python with Perl (and Tcl).  He writes

  "... Without question, Perl is a powerful system administration tool.
But once we move beyond processing text and files, Python's features
become attractive."

Since I think that there's a place for scripts beyond the question of
make/install, and would prefer one scripting language to a plethora,
I think that's an argument in favor of Python.  YMMV.

In order to answer the question

	"does this have text/file/path manipulation support 
	comparable to perl?"

perhaps an example or two of what's needed/wanted would ground the discussion
enough to avoid the generality that I quoted at the head of this note.

Richard

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System