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Perl's advantage over bash/awk/sed is that you can test, organize, and maintain code more effectively. This may not matter if you are programming to solve tiny unrelated problems, but it's a waste of effort if you are doing similar things frequently.

Python is basically Perl but with different syntax, libraries, and community.



Out of curiosity, what do you consider to distinguish one Turing-complete language from another aside from those three traits?


Semantics. For example, writing a program to read "2 + 2" and evaluate the result is going to be very different from Perl and Python in Java or C++.




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