[ILUG] When to use Perl

[Barry Carroll]

Hi,

I'm using quite a lot of Perl under linux @ the moment.

As it was designed partly/mostly? for parsing text there
are a multitude of modules that might already be in
existence for what you wish to do.

Perl source can also be converted into C source and C programs
can also call Perl scripts if required.

Best place to start is http://www.perl.com IMHO, and http://CPAN.perl.org.

The procedure for converting from a Perl source file to C is:

1: Convert the source:
======================
perlcc -sav script.pl (will compile into executable and save the source to
script.pl.c)

or

perlcc -gen script.pl (will generate the c source only, will not compile)

2: Manually Compile if required:
================================
gcc -o script script.pl.c -I/usr/libdata/perl/5.00503/mach/CORE/ 
-L/usr/libdata/perl/5.00503/mach/CORE/ -lperl -lm -lcrypt

Barry.

-----Original Message-----
From: Dale Dunlea [mailto:dad at raidtec.ie]
Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2001 12:43 PM
To: ilug at linux.ie
Subject: [ILUG] When to use Perl


Hi all,
I haven't coded in ages and the only (software) languages I currently
know are C/C++.

I'm planning to write some code to parse a fairly large (and quite
poorly structured) text file[1] and then do *very* fancy things with it
and then output and optimised version of the text file. So my question
is, should I learn perl and do it that way or should I soldier along
with C?

Thanks
Dale

[1] For the curious among you, the text file is VHDL source code and I
want to systematically search for nets where the propagation delay could
be reduced by restructuring the driving logic. Someone was bound to ask.

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