Path: cwi.nl!sun4nl!mcsun!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!convex!usenet From: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl Subject: Re: The problems of Perl (Re: Question (silly?)) Message-ID: <1992Jan17.053115.4220@convex.com> Date: 17 Jan 92 05:31:15 GMT References: <17458@ector.cs.purdue.edu> <1992Jan16.165347.25583@cherokee.uswest.com> <=#Hues+4@cs.psu.edu> Sender: usenet@convex.com (news access account) Reply-To: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) Organization: CONVEX Realtime Development, Colorado Springs, CO Lines: 83 Nntp-Posting-Host: pixel.convex.com From the keyboard of flee@cs.psu.edu (Felix Lee): :And Perl is definitely awkward with data types. I haven't yet found a :pleasant way of shoving non-trivial data types into Perl's grammar. Yes, it's pretty awful at that, alright. Sometimes I write perl programs that need them, and sometimes it just takes a little creativity. But sometimes it's not worth it. I actually wrote a C program the other day (gasp) because I didn't want to deal with a game matrix with six links per node. :Here's a very simple problem that's tricky to express in Perl: process :the output of "du" to produce output that's indented to reflect the :tree structure, and with each subtree sorted by size. Something like: : 434 /etc : | 344 . : | 50 install : | 35 uucp : | 3 nserve : | | 2 . : | | 1 auth.info : | 1 sm : | 1 sm.bak At first I thought I could just keep one local list around at once, but this seems inherently recursive. Which means I need an real recursive data structure. Maybe you could do it with one of the %assoc arrays Larry uses in the begat programs, but I broke down and got dirty. I think the hardest part was matching Felix's desired output exactly. It's not blazingly fast: I should probably inline the &childof routine, but it *was* faster to write than I could have written the equivalent C program. --tom -- "GUIs normally make it simple to accomplish simple actions and impossible to accomplish complex actions." --Doug Gwyn (22/Jun/91 in comp.unix.wizards) Tom Christiansen tchrist@convex.com convex!tchrist