Thanks, honorable Perl hackers !

I now have about 3 weeks of of studying to do, but I don't think I'll become proficient in Perl, since I am a mediocre shell-scripter anyway, I tend to write awkable or sedable things in C or even Java or Beta (!) - the worst I've done is probably write a [Reboot?Yes/No] in ProLog :-)

But I already see how a shell script could evolve into a full-fledged application, and I definitely see the value of filling the gap between csh and c/c++.
I think I will have great fun with this, so
let me give you something back ...

--- ICON --------------------------------------

At a bookstore there was a used book called
"The Icon programming language", by Ralph E. & Madge T. Griswold, priced ridiulously at a couple of E$.
A quick look at the back cover told me it was worth the price and more.

http://www.cs.arizona.edu/icon/index.htm

It is sort of "Perl meets Pascal" - not OO, but I guarantee you you don't need it.
ProLog, Lisp and an OO version of Icon are implemented on little more than an A4-page ...

her eis a program that takes search strings as arguments, and writes out all the matches, with the offset of the matched string:

mtc.icn:

procedure main(args)
while line := read() do
every i := 1 to *args do write(find(args[i],
line))
end

try it with some names

mtc john jim jenny fubar snafu bin laden

and then type some text:

I met john and jim last nite, it will write 7 and 16.


I wanted to go back and pick up the rest of the books, they were lying in a 'cheap second hand book' box, ideal Xmas presents for hacker friends, but they were all gone the day after.
Ther are no more cheap "Perl Resource Kit"s either.

Atle