Spectra meets Perl

The scripting language Perl is used for all kinds of applications. Many of us know it from CGI programming or from developing computer administration tools. Furthermore, a lot of small Perl scripts are created for daily purposes like directory scans or string replacements in ASCII files and so on.

The fact that Perl is widely used was certainly one of the main reasons to chose it as the new macro language for Spectra. Apart from that: “Perl is a language for getting things done” or “Perl was designed to make easy jobs easy” as the authors of [1] put it. These statements are probably correct for several reasons. To mention just a few:

• Perl is extremly good in list processing, including hashes.
• Perl has an excellent implementation of regular expressions.
• Perl is extendable. There is a long list of freely available Perl modules. An important module is PerlTk, the interface to Tk GUIs.
• Perl has packages forr separating name spaces and object class definitions.
• Perl has an implementation of dynamically scoped variables: closures.
• Perl is an interpreter that can be linked to C code.

Spectra is now available as a Perl module and Perl scripts can be called from Spectra. That means: all Perls features like data types, statements, control structures, operators, and functions can be used by a Spectra programmer.

This note focusses on the Spectra-Perl interface. It hardly describes Spectra features. See the Spectra and Online manuals for details about these programs. (Spectra, Online)

Documentation about Perl can be found on the web , a good place to start browsing is www.perl.com, or in books, e.g.: “Programming Perl” by Larry Wall, Tom Christansen and Randal L. Schwartz, “Advanced Perl Programming” by Sriram Srinivasan and “Perl Cookbook” by Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington, all printed by O'Reilly.