One Opinion on Perl (or Throwing Perls Before Bears)

The Virtues of Perl

• Perl is vastly better than the UNIX "C shell" (csh) scripting language. Unlike csh, perl is a complete programming language, with subroutines and local variables. This makes perl a great tool for writing system administration scripts.
• Although perl shares a number of features with awk it is more powerful than awk and easier to use for complex text processing applications.
• For anyone who is familiar with C and UNIX, perl is easy to pick up.
• Since perl is an interpreted language, it has a nice interactive feel. A change in a perl script can be immediately tested without going through a compile and link.
• Larry Wall, who designed and implemented perl, put it in the public domain. Perl has been ported to 99% of the worlds computer systems (e.g, UNIX, Windows 95 and Windows NT).

The Vices of Perl

• The syntax and semantics of perl are quirky. Its a bit like C, a bit like awk and a bit like csh. Then its got associative arrays and a few other unique features thrown in. Perl has subroutines, but it uses a bizzare argument passing convention.
• Perl does not have types or variable declaration. Variables are declared either in a local() statement or when they are used. Types are inferred by use. We can assume that perl follows C type conversion rules, but who knows. The compiler does not do simple "use before definition" checking. As a result, the perl compiler is of little use in catching programming errors.
• The documentation on perl is incomplete. If the source for perl were not in the public domain, it is unlikely that any two implementations of perl would be the same.
• Perl is a language for implementing quick hacks that would take longer if implemented in C or C++. As time goes on and more people use perl, this seems to be forgotten by some. Complex applications are now being implemented in perl and people concern themselves with the efficiency of perl execution.
• Perl is an interactive language without types, type checking or variable declaration. This may lead some people to think that it is easier to use than languages like C or C++. In fact, the opposite is true. Type checking and variable declaration are tools to help the programmer catch errors at compile time. In a perl script these errors must be caught by inspection or testing.
• A well written Perl script is more difficult to read than a well written C or C++ program. I think that one reason for this is the lack of formal types and variable declaration.

Ian Kaplan - 8/96

Perl book review

Adventures with Perl

software source page

back to home page