On Fri, 11 Feb 2005, A B C wrote: > I've heard that Expect(tcl) is outstanding in what it > specializes in. Can any experts in both Expect and > Perl Networking comment? > > I want to know if Perl's Networking arena is superior > or equal to what Expect specializes in.
They can't really be compared like that. Perl, like TCL, is a general-purpose programming language. Expect, according to OSX's Fink, "is a tool for automating interactive applications such as telnet, ftp, passwd, fsck, rlogin, tip, etc." Basically, Expect is a way to automate working with any interactive program. The uses for this with network software are obvious, but it's not limited to that; I see no reason that you couldn't, for example, use it as the engine for a really good automated Tetris player (i.e. you have a console version of Tetris, and an Expect script that watches what happens and automatically sends keystrokes to the game to interact with it; there might be a lot of rules to write, but it should be doable). Several programming languages have mechanisms for building wrappers around Expect, including Perl. In this case, you need a module like Expect.pm or Expect::Simple, as described here: <http://search.cpan.org/~rgiersig/Expect-1.15/Expect.pod> <http://search.cpan.org/~djerius/Expect-Simple-0.02/Simple.pm> You can install Expect.pm in the CPAN shell, or Bundle::Expect to get all related modules that Expect.pm needs to work. -- Chris Devers -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
