Hi,

I want to learn a scripting language. I have experience with c and c++, and have tried to learn a bit of perl. However, I get the impression that perl is a dumbed down version of c, and isn't any advantage over c. Am I getting the wrong end of the stick?

The reasons I am learning it are a) to expand my programming repetoir and b) to learn a language to help with admin tasks on my many computers.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Should I stay with shell scripting, or should I learn something like python, etc?

Thanks for any help,

Rhys

you're very wrong mate. perl is scarily powerful, and not related to c in any way. it's all horses for courses really, with perl being designed for text manipulation originally, something c generally sucks at.

This kind of question gets asked an awful lot. many people say python, personally i say perl because it is more traditional in it's structure. python can look strange, and is even heavily dependent on whitespace and things, which .. ughh ...

there are different tools for different jobs.

If I need to byte-level or very efficient tasks I use C

simple text stuff, sed

Complicated text processing, or CGI I use perl.

general everyday stuff korn shell.

stuf with a GUI, tcl/tk

really clever stuff, lisp of course!