Aside from the fact that “C,” itself, is not necessarily “ANSI C,” programming languages in general are tools for the job, and, as such, they are much less important than the continuity in service of the things that have been fashioned using them. This I know: that Perl is a rugged, reliable, industrial-grade system, consisting not merely of the language but of literally tens of thousands of modules built using that language in its various incarnations. Features and oddities and inconsistencies are an inevitable part of any human enterprise. The market value of the system is the market value of the mission critical systems now in service that were built using it ... “priceless.”
