In article ,
Mike Henry wrote:
"Ted Edwards" wrote in message
...
Mike Henry wrote:
I'm also not too thrilled with the idea of using Java-based programs.
Why? I'm still sitting on the fence on Java. Can you recommend a book
or on line source for an intro to the language?
I don't really have a good (or at least not a knowledge-based) reason for
not liking Java programs. I'm partly persuaded against them based on DoN's
dislike of Java-script activated on web pages but that probably doesn't have
anything to do with a stand-alone Java program.
Actually -- JavaScript has *nothing* in common with the Java
language other than the four letters in the name. It was so named by
Microsoft to try to ride on the coat-tails of Sun's introduction of Java
as a scripting language in web browsers.
Java (in browsers) is more secure than JavaScript, but both
suffer from the same basic security problem -- they download a program
from a remote site, and run it on your local computer, thus allowing
access to things which you might rather they not have access to -- such
as passwords you use to connect to your ISP. Yes -- the better
implementations try to control such access -- but in any complex system,
there are security holes, and I chose to deal with this by eliminating
the opportunity for such programs to run on *my* machine. I would much
rather that they run as CGI programs on the web server from which you
are viewing the page. This gives the authors of the programs more
incentive to control *precisely* what the programs are allowed to do,
since they are running on the *server*, not the viewing browser's
machine.
However, I have nothing against Java as a language -- though I
have not played with it yet, it is present on several of my *Sun*
machines. It even comes embedded in the suite of languages that the Gnu
C Compiler (gcc) can compile -- along with Fortran-77, c++, and (if you
really want it) Ada. :-)
Then too, I'd guess that a
Java program must suffer at least a little speed loss since I believe that
it is essentially an intrepreted program. That may not make any difference
in actual practice of course. The issue of importing existing Outlook and
OE archives would still be a show-stopper for me, though.
I've lost track of what this was originally about. As
mentioned, you can get java programs (both interpreters and compilers)
for many machines -- even for Windows, if you install the CygWin
package, which includes the Gnu C compiler (gcc) along with a lot of
other tools normally found on unix systems.
Oh yes -- this was about how to move messages archived in
Outlook Express to other MUAs (Mail User Agents), such as eudora,
Forte's Agent, and other such programs, just to get out from under the
thumb of Microsoft's proprietary format.
For that -- I would consider any language which made it
possible, as long as it did not have to run in a web browser. Probably
the best choice for this sort of thing would be "perl", which at the
beginning of the original man pages said that "perl" stood for
"Practical Extraction and Report Language", but at the end of the man
page in the "BUGS" section (All unix programs used to have a "BUGS"
section in the man pages -- sometimes used simply to list features that
the author of the program would like to add someday, sometimes to
document real bugs), it said:
"Don't tell anybody that I said this, but perl really stands for
'Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister'".
The "Pathologically Eclectic" part came from the fact that perl
included useful features from almost every language that the author had
used, including unix shells, "awk", "sed", "grep", (even) BASIC, and
Lord only knows how many others. :-)
I have seen an example (where I used to work) where someone took
a perl script and modified it to perform another task -- all the while
thinking that it was a shell script. :-) Essentially, programs in perl
tend to look like the writer's own favorite language.
It was written within the past fifteen years, and has grown
significantly, including tons of libraries to do all kinds of things.
One thing which I use it for is spam filtering, as there has been a very
good example of a Bayesian filter written in perl.
Enjoy,
DoN.
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