Path: cwi.nl!sun4nl!mcsun!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!convex!usenetFrom: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen)Newsgroups: comp.lang.perlSubject: Re: The problems of Perl (Re: Question (silly?))Message-ID: <1992Jan17.053115.4220@convex.com>Date: 17 Jan 92 05:31:15 GMTReferences: <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, COLines: 83Nntp-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 aweful at that, alright.  Sometimes I write perl programsthat need them, and sometimes it just takes a little creativity.  Butsometimes 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 aroundat once, but this seems inherently recursive.  Which means I need an real recursive data structure.  Maybe you coulddo it with one of the %assoc arrays Larry uses in the begatprograms, but I broke down and got dirty.  I think the hardestpart 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 impossibleto accomplish complex actions."   --Doug Gwyn  (22/Jun/91 in comp.unix.wizards)      Tom Christiansen           tchrist@convex.com      convex!tchrist