[maemo-developers] implementation of 2-dimensional array in bash - kind request

[From: Jason Edgecombe]

William Gordon Rutherdale wrote:
> C is a good solution.  So is Perl, which comes on OS 2008.  So is 
> Python.  Perl lets you construct nested lists, which gives you the 
> equivalent in capability to multi-dimensional arrays.  Python gives 
> similar constructs.
>
> There is no reason IMHO to be writing shell scripts of any kind on a 
> system where Perl and Python are available.
>
> Shell programming is just weak for many reasons including lack of data 
> structure capabilities and should be avoided whenever possible.  I say 
> this as someone who has accumulated years of shell programming 
> experience in a professional software shop as well as other languages.
>
> The strongest of the shell programming languages, namely bash and ksh, 
> have this problem.  Perl and Python are practical for exactly the reason 
> that they are good replacements for these shell languages.
>
> -Will
I agree with you here that perl and python are easier to do complex 
things with than bash or ksh, but I wanted to point out that python may 
be the better choice on the Nokia tablets. Perl is my favorite language, 
but the perl install on the tablets is missing a lot of the standard 
modules. For example, 'perl -e "use English;"' gives an error. python 
seems to be a more complete install and even includes gtk, so it's 
arguably the best choice of scripting language for the platform given 
what's preinstalled and in extras.

Sincerely,
Jason