On 03/02/2015 10:49 AM, KatolaZ wrote:
> On
> And as they have already explained above, this is exactly the reason
> why some non-critical Debian system utilities (such as debconf or
> adduser) are written in Perl or Python :) And they were so cool to
> manage to reduce the dependencies of these packages to the bare
> minimum (basically, the interpreter).

Personally, I'd rather they were written in C, if only to avoid the
"scripts calling scripts that call scripts" scenario, KatolaZ.

You don't have to agree with me. The fact that you don't is actually why
we are having this chat. I want to hear your thoughts.
>
> I would like to point out that this is not just a curse of
> Debian. Also other distros and other operating systems (like FreeBSD)
> use perl and python scripts for some non-critical system software,
True, enough!

> just because sometimes you can do in three lines of Perl what would
> require a few hundred lines of C (plus a few additional libraries)...
That is not entirely true. I've heard that said many times. I've
deliberately written code in C instead of Perl, just to test that
assumption. Personally, I've found it to be just that: an assumption.

When you code in Perl, you are using subroutines and libraries that were 
incorporated into Perl core.    The fact you are calling an entire 
subroutine when you "split" strings in Perl is no different than having 
a C string library.  You call the library to do the work.  You don't 
care how it does it, only that you get the results.  C gets a bad 
reputation because a percentage of programmers never learned how to 
prevent buffer overflows or leaks is all.  That is certainly not C's fault.

You can do both of those things in C#, which is supposedly "bullet-proof."