-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Sun, Mar 05, 2017 at 11:48:47AM -0800, David Christensen wrote: > On 03/05/2017 07:42 AM, Richard Owlett wrote: > >I'm interested in "expr" and "bc". > >The man pages lack reasonable examples. > >The tutorial/HOWTO pages confuse the issue with fancy page layouts > >and/or code samples showing how impressive the author can make the > >script's output. > > > >Suggestions please. > > https://www.perl.org/
Perl's a nice language. But *if* you are doing things in shell and just need to reach out to a small util to do a small thing (The Shell Way, so to speak) you are better off with small utilities: tomas@rasputin:~$ time dc -e "2 2 + p" 4 real 0m0.004s user 0m0.000s sys 0m0.000s tomas@rasputin:~$ time perl -e "print 2 + 2" 4 real 0m0.011s user 0m0.012s sys 0m0.000s Of course, if your program becomes complicated, Perl (or Guile, or Python, or Lua or what not) will be a better choice: lexical variables, a module system, closures, objects, all the kaboodle. regards - -- tomás -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAli8gO4ACgkQBcgs9XrR2kYsRwCbB62U94dZZrMTu4hkymzv75IO VQUAn2lCn/vbrM7sD6wX6p9GNIBoE7P3 =rXYY -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
