[Corpora-List] What is best for text processing Perl of Python?

[Michael Maxwell]

Steve Finch wrote:
> OK, not to get into a religious war I would say that no-one has really
> stuck up for Perl.
> ...many of the individual computational operations you want to
> do in language processing [are] expressible in little more than 1
> line, and effortlessly well implemented.
> ...
> Not being a Pythonite, I cannot comment on Python.

Being a Pythonite (and as a morphologist, I approve of that word!) myself,
I guess I would say that the ability of Perl to express such operations in
one line is both its benefit and its shortcoming.  Personally, I can't
understand my own code a month after I've written it (comes with olde
age), and I would much rather take a dozen lines and comments to code some
operation, so I can understand later what I did.

Of course, if you want to do a one-off (maybe on the command line), then
Perl is the way to go.  (Unix/ Linux commands like sed, grep, awk etc.
will often also get you there, although if you use the non-ASCII portion
of Unicode heavily, using these programs can get quite messy.)

   Mike Maxwell
   CASL/ U MD


_______________________________________________
Corpora mailing list
Corpora at uib.no
http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora