From owner-freebsd-chat Mon Nov 18 09:09:14 1996 Return-Path: owner-chat Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id JAA27976 for chat-outgoing; Mon, 18 Nov 1996 09:09:14 -0800 (PST) Received: from firewall.Exabyte.COM (firewall.exabyte.com [206.104.178.2]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id JAA27968 for ; Mon, 18 Nov 1996 09:09:11 -0800 (PST) Received: from prime1.Exabyte.COM (prime1.Exabyte.COM [161.81.18.231]) by firewall.Exabyte.COM (8.6.12/8.6.10) with ESMTP id KAA12185 for ; Mon, 18 Nov 1996 10:09:08 -0700 Received: from fern.Exabyte.COM (fern.Exabyte.COM [161.81.16.132]) by prime1.Exabyte.COM (8.6.12/8.6.10) with SMTP id KAA13612 for ; Mon, 18 Nov 1996 10:09:07 -0700 Received: by fern.Exabyte.COM (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA04748; Mon, 18 Nov 96 10:05:21 MST Date: Mon, 18 Nov 96 10:05:21 MST From: bartlett@Exabyte.COM (Peter Bartlett) Message-Id: <9611181705.AA04748@fern.Exabyte.COM> To: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Who needs Perl? (Was: cvs commit: src/share/doc/handbook ...) Sender: owner-chat@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > Ollivier Robert writes: > > ... > > Sure. And C will be faster than perl. > > ... > In my experience this is not necessarily the case. I have in the past compared performance of programs written separately in Perl and C. These were written to perform a complex engineering task involving lots of text manipulation, array operations, integer math, etc. The Perl program (several thousand lines) won hands down. The reason? Perl's "associative array" data type. Very rarely do C programmers take the time to implement hash tables for the various data types they wish to do searches on. Usually the result is long searches of linked lists, perhaps sorted lists for some performance improvement. With Perl the hash tables are built in, resulting in far better search times. However, I disagree with the inclusion of Perl in the FreeBSD distribution, in my opinion it should be considered "application software" and distributed separately. --- Peter J. Bartlett E-Mail: bartlett@exabyte.com Exabyte Corporation Voice: (303) 417-5703 1685 38th Street Fax: (303) 417-7180 Boulder, CO 80301