From: tmb@arolla.idiap.ch (Thomas M. Breuel) Subject: Re: Tcl to replacement most of /bin & /usr/bin (was: Tcl on Linux machines.) Date: 17 Nov 1992 13:45:03
Someone writes:
>[replacing items in /bin and /usr/bin with interpreted scripts]
>
>By properly partitioning functionality into dynamically loadable
>libraries most of the necessary functionality ought to be doable
>in C functions. In which case the scripting language would only
>be there to glue C functions together into an application usable
>by a user. This should, then, make the `overhead' from
>interpreted scripts insignificant.
Maybe it would make it insignificant for copying a TeX file or listing
your home directory. However, there are many users (including myself)
of UNIX that routinely work with files that are more than 100M big,
that need to work on lines that have around 1000 blank-separated
fields, and that use directories with hundreds or thousands of
entries.
Currently, tools like "cut", "paste", "join", "sort", and "ls" are not
significantly slower than what I could write myself in C, and I hope
that it will stay this way...
Thomas.