Editing AwkVsPerl

A valid question, since awk is a subset of perl (functionally, not necessarily syntactically); also, the authors of perl have usually known awk (and sed, and C, and a host of other Unix tools) very well, and still decided to move on. There are some things that perl has built-in support for that almost no version of awk can do without great difficulty (if at all); if you need to do these things, there may be no choice to make. For instance, no reasonable person would try to write a web server in awk instead of using perl or even C, if the actual socket programming has to be written in traditional awk. However, gawk 3.1.0's /inet and ftwalk's built-in networking primitives may remove this particular limitation. However, there are some things in awk's favor compared to perl: * awk is simpler (especially important if deciding which to learn first) * awk syntax is far more regular (another advantage for the beginner, even without considering syntax-highlighting editors) * you may already know awk well enough for the task at hand * you may have only awk installed * awk can be smaller, thus much quicker to execute for small programs * awk variables don't have `$' in front of them :-) * clear perl code is better than unclear awk code; but NOTHING comes close to unclear perl code Tom Christiansen wrote in Message-ID: <3766d75e@cs.colorado.edu> {{{ > Awk is a venerable, powerful, elegant, and simple tool that everyone > should know. Perl is a superset and child of awk, but has much more > power that comes at expense of sacrificing some of that simplicity. }}}

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