[Coco] Re: Other languages for OS-9

[Gene Heskett]

On Wednesday 13 September 2006 11:32, Andrew wrote:
> > Bash is, at the moment:
> >
> > [amanda at coyote src]$ ls -l /bin/bash
> > -rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 593304 Mar 11  2004 /bin/bash
> >
> > So I think the 64k &  :)  grin is rather an understatement.
> >
> > OTOH, because it is so capable a language all by itself, I'm doing
> > things in a shell script that I would have used basic09 for on the
> > coco, or ARexx for on the amiga.
>
>Gene,
>
>I got curious on sizes after I saw your post on the size of bash, and I
>decided to check the size of mine (bash, that is) - over 600k here. So,
>then I checked Perl and Python - 10k and 3k respectively. I assume the
>size difference is because of all the libraries and modules both
>languages can pull in, thus the core is smaller?
>
>Has anybody ported either of these over to OS-9? Python sounds perfect,
>provided the libraries and such it uses aren't overly huge...
>
Perl and python are both essentially the managers/interpretors, pulling the 
required functionality in from libraries or sub-scripts.  This can make 
them seem to be much smaller than they are, but you cannot do very much if 
you were to nuke everything but them.

Perl is handy where you've got the whole cpan thing installed, there's not 
much that perl can't do.  The whole cpan repository is probably over 4GB 
though.  And my impression of perl syntax is that whatever works must be 
the right way to do it, TFN of course.  Who knows what Larry will add in 
the next release.

Python I've gotten interested in a time or 3, but its syntax is confusing 
to an old assembly/basic09/c/ARexx coder so I've found its a bit dense for 
me, or I am in fact dense.  Toss a quarter & call it. :)  So I now do most 
of my stuff in scripts that start with the famous shebang #!/bin/bash or 
#!/bin/sh, which gets you a somewhat limited subset of itself.
 
>-- Andrew L. Ayers
>    Glendale (Phoenix), Arizona

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.