[aprssig] Programming Language Advice

[Ray Wells]

Thanks to the numerous people who replied to my request, I appreciate 
you taking the time.

My initial choice was perl, based on the number of perl scripts that 
accompany xastir. A majority of correspondents have reinforced my 
initial choice.

My nearest bookshop that's likely to have any of the books mentioned is 
400km away in Sydney or Brisbane. Given my lack of desire to ever be in 
a big city again it may be some time before I get to peruse stocks and 
make a decision. In the meantime I'll go back and RTFM again, and again! 
I may even ask stupid questions here.

Ray vk2tv

Curt, WE7U wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Jan 2009, Ray Wells wrote:
>
>   
>> The question is, what should I be using, perl or awk? Armed with the
>> answer I can devote my time in that direction.
>>     
>
> Choosy Xastir programmers choose Perl...
>
> I've done sed/awk/Perl/C, and others.  C sucks for string handling
> as there are a lot of details you need to take care of.
>
> Perl has sed and awk-type of things built-in, so with the one
> language you can do regular expression editing of strings quite
> easily.  You'll find a lot more Perl people these days than sed or
> awk.
>
> As far as Scott's comment about readability, you can make Perl as
> readable as anything else, it's just a language.  Some Perl
> programmers used to think it was cool to make terse scripts, but the
> readability suffers and they become much less maintainable.
>
> One of the weirdnesses of Perl is that a default variable gets used
> if none is specified.  If you don't know that particular fact it's
> hard to read a lot of Perl code 'cuz you don't know what's being
> worked on.  Other than that it's a lot like C or Pascal or Java.
> You can also do object-oriented programming in Perl, or
> mix-and-match some of that with structured programming.
>
> For Perl books these are the ones I use:
>
>      Learning Perl
>      Programming Perl
>      Perl Cookbook
>
> The "Perl Cookbook" is the most useful overall.  It has working
> examples of many of the types of things you might want to do, so
> you can borrow code bits from it.
>
> For getting started learning the language "Learning Perl" works,
> although I don't use it that much anymore.  I use "Programming Perl"
> mostly as a reference but really have to have it on the bookshelf
> 'cuz I do refer to it.
>
> "Mastering Regular Expressions" is another good one to have on the
> bookshelf.  I don't refer to it often, but when I need more advanced
> stuff I _really_ need that book.
>
>