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