> Hello all, I am starting to teach myself to program using a scripting > language. I've heard that both Perl and Python are powerful and fairly easy > to use. > > Are there any inherent advantages to one or the other for the beginning > programmer? By beginning I mean no other programming experience other that > a little basic a long time ago. (That should probably be a long long time > ago, as in the beginning of Star Wars). well, Python is pretty much designed for readability and maintainability; it still has some very powerful concepts, tho. it's not a trivial language like BASIC. :) perl is beautiful in its compactness; the amount of expression one has in a very small space is amazing. (I'm given to understand that APL was the same way, but don't know much else about it.) I personally think Python is a better choice if you just want to learn to write code (I'm intending to do the same thing myself, if I can ever break my Diablo2 habit). Perl may have more applications, tho (at least at the moment). check out the tutorial links at python.org; they're very good. shell scripting isn't a bad thing to learn, either. :) Carl. -- Network Engineer Real-Time Enterprises (952) 943-8700 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: tclug-list-unsubscribe at mn-linux.org For additional commands, e-mail: tclug-list-help at mn-linux.org