Larry, Did you ever try the -i or -x options on get(1) to include or exclude deltas? Alan On Wed, Nov 17, 2021 at 7:39 PM Larry McVoy wrote: > I'll defend perl, at least perl4, vigorously. I wrote a lot of code in > it on 20mhz SPARCs. Yeah, like any kitchen sink language you have to > develop a style, but it is possible. All of Solaris 2.0 development > happened under a source management system I wrote, NSElite, that was > almost 100% perl4. There was one C program, that Marc might like, > that took 2 SCCS files that had the initial part of the graph in > common but the recent nodes were different in each file, and zippered > them together into a new SCCS file that had the newer nodes on a > branch. It was F.A.S.T compared to the edit/delta cycles you'd > do if you did it by hand. > > My perl4 was maintainable, I fixed bugs in it quickly. > > When it happened, perl4 was a God send, as much as I love awk, perl > was far more useful for stuff that awk just didn't want to handle. > > On Thu, Nov 18, 2021 at 09:21:49AM +1100, Rob Pike wrote: > > Perl certainly had its detractors, but for a few years there it was the > > lingua franca of system administration. > > > > -rob > > > > > > On Thu, Nov 18, 2021 at 8:21 AM Dan Cross wrote: > > > > > On Wed, Nov 17, 2021 at 3:54 PM Warner Losh wrote: > > > > > >> On Wed, Nov 17, 2021, 1:48 PM Dan Stromberg > wrote: > > >> > > >>> On Wed, Nov 17, 2021 at 11:35 AM Norman Wilson > wrote: > > >>> > > >>>> Wasn't Perl created to fill this void? > > >>>> > > >>>> Void? I thought Perl was created to fill a much-needed gap. > > >>>> > > >>> There was and is a need for something to sit between Shell and C. > But > > >>> it needn't be filled by Perl. > > >>> > > >>> The chief problem with Perl, as I see it, is it's like 10 languages > > >>> smashed together. To write it, you only need to know one of the > 10. But > > >>> to read it, you never know what subset you're going to see until > you're > > >>> deep in the code. > > >>> > > >>> Perl is the victim of an experiment in exuberant, Opensource design, > > >>> where the bar to adding a new feature was troublingly low. > > >>> > > >>> It was undeniably influential. > > >>> > > >> > > >> It's what paved the way for python to fill that gap... > > >> > > > > > > I feel that Perl, and to a lesser extent Tcl, opened the floodgates > for a > > > number of relatively lightweight "scripting" languages that sat > between C > > > and the shell in terms of their functionality and expressive power. > From > > > that group, the one I liked best was Ruby, but it got hijacked by > Rails and > > > Python swooped in and stole its thunder. > > > > > > - Dan C. > > > > > > > > -- > --- > Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com > http://www.mcvoy.com/lm >