Does Python help with the no-Unix handicap?

[Grant Edwards]

In article <20000612212452.P20700 at xs4all.nl>, Thomas Wouters wrote:

>> >Is it's base structure less related to any one specific operating
>> >system?
>
>> Perl isn't so much related to an OS, as it is to some other
>> utilities (awk,sed,grep) and languages (bourne shell).
>
>Yeah, right, and a chair isn't geared as much to a human as to a one-to-two
>meter tall, bi-legged creature with two arms, a flat back and bends in all
>the right places ;)
>
>I guess it depends on your definition of OS, and of UNIX ;)

Well, believe it or not, I actually did most of my initial
awk/sed/grep shellscript learning under VMS.  (For God's sake,
don't tell anybody...)

DEC used to have a product called DECShell than consisted of
the entire set of version 7 shell tools (including the Bourne
shell, sed, awk, lex, yacc, and a libc that did a fair job of
emulating the Unix system calls).  

Process creation under VMS involved a lot more overhead that
undre Unix, so shellscripts ran a bit slower than DCL command
scripts (DCL seemed to somehow run scripts without starting a
lot of new processes)

But still, I managed to write a set of shellscript utilitities
that cross-referenced and verified a whole bunch of things in a
1200 page SRS written in LaTeX.

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  If I felt any more
                                  at               SOPHISTICATED I would DIE
                               visi.com            of EMBARRASSMENT!