in the early nineties I bought the tawk (Thompson awk) compiler and developed since than a lot of programs for my companies. The compiler produces fast reliable code and has a lot of useful extensions for the Windows environment.
Until now it worked in the W95, W2K and XP without problems but now that I have to move to W7 / 2008 Server I am in doubt if it is wise to try to continue with this although excellent but outdated and no more supported product.
My questions to you :
- What can you recommend for real-world business applications (all of them run in batch mode – no GUI) ?
- Has someone made a bigger transition (manual reprogramming) from xxx (here: awk) to Python ?
- What Python implementation should I use ?
I need fast file I/O and extensive random access to 100.000+ dictionary elements for 1.5 Mio monthly transactions - Which is the most stable version ? 2.7.x ? 3.1.x ?
- Does 3.1 support Windows Automation ? I have to drive the Excel API through COM and need access to MS-SQL
- And : is Python really the choice for this kind of task ?
Thank you for your honorable answers
Meiki
Python is a good choice for these types of tasks. You should use Python 2.7.2 and since you are on Windows, you may want to use the Activestate Python distribution http://www.activestate.com/activepython/downloads which is standard Python bundled with a number of additional useful libraries and an easy to use package manager named PyPm.
Also, you should have a look at the slide presentations here http://www.dabeaz.com/generators/ and here http://www.dabeaz.com/generators-uk/index.html because Python generators are a powerful way to handle the same types of batch processing that AWK is used for.
As for Windows automation, the Activestate distro for Windows includes this, or you can download and install pywin separately if you are using the Python.org distro. I’ve used Python and COM to extract data from Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Outlook mailboxes and Lotus Notes databases among other things.
If you want to stick with the awk style of doing things, you can write some Python helper functions so that your Python programs don’t look so foreign to awk eyes. In fact, pyawk.py may already be all that you need http://pyawk.sourceforge.net/ You can download it here http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyawk/files/pyawk/pyawk-0.4/ however be warned that Python has evolved a lot since it was last updated.