is perl better?

[Terry Reedy]

"Ville Vainio" <ville at spammers.com> wrote in message
news:du7ishiqk7x.fsf at mozart.cc.tut.fi...
> I don't think this has anything to do with language features. It's a
> library issue. Perl achieves the functionality by some system calls,
> and I can't see why Python couldn't be made to execute the same system
> calls. In fact it would seem trivial, Perl is OSS after all.

There is an issue of codebase philosophy.  Based on what I have read here
and on PyDev, Python is mostly written in portable-as-possible ANSI C 89.
For i/o, for instance, it uses the C stdio library.  System-specific
#IFDEFs are generally used only when necessary, since each has a cost in
maintenance.  As a result, it can run on any system with a decent C
compiler while being maintained by a small core (of about 10?) volunteer
developers.

The Perl developers, people have reported on clp, special-cased their i/o
code for various versions of Windows by going behind (under) the portable
library to make direct system calls specific to Windows and probably
different versions of Windows.  This requires specialist knowledge,
continually updated, and extra time on a *continuing* basis.

Certainly, Python can be made to execute the same system calls as Perl.
But *someone* has to find, read, and understand the Perl code and then find
the appropriate place in the Python code to make the change, test it on the
multiple current versions of Windows, document it at least in the code, and
promise to stick around for several years to recheck the code for future
versions of Windows.  And he has to do this in preference to any of the
other hundred things he could do.

Is it worth it so someone can write a monstrous 6000 char command line
instead of the 2000 char limit MS imposes on the standard 'front-door'
entry method?   Probably not.

Terry J. Reedy