From owner-freebsd-chat Mon Nov 18 11:11:42 1996 Return-Path: owner-chat Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id LAA05212 for chat-outgoing; Mon, 18 Nov 1996 11:11:42 -0800 (PST) Received: from horst.bfd.com (horst.bfd.com [204.160.242.10]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id LAA05207 for ; Mon, 18 Nov 1996 11:11:38 -0800 (PST) Received: from harlie (bastion.bfd.com [204.160.242.2]) by horst.bfd.com (8.7.6/8.7.3) with SMTP id LAA09212; Mon, 18 Nov 1996 11:08:32 -0800 (PST) Date: Mon, 18 Nov 1996 11:08:31 -0800 (PST) From: "Eric J. Schwertfeger" X-Sender: ejs@harlie To: Paul Richards cc: Peter Bartlett , chat@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Who needs Perl? (Was: cvs commit: src/share/doc/handbook ...) In-Reply-To: <57n2wfthtd.fsf@tees.elsevier.co.uk> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-chat@FreeBSD.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On 18 Nov 1996, Paul Richards wrote: > This is a pretty silly point of view. 'C' is always going to be faster > than perl for correctly implemented solutions. Stating the Perl is > faster than badly written 'C' isn't very fair. In this case, replace badly written with commonly written, and it does become a fair comparison. There is no universally available hash array library for C. The db library does have this available, but how many C programmers even know that the db library allows for in memory databases that never touch disk (except for swap)? Plus, that library isn't everywhere (not that it can't go just about everywhere). I recently did my very first non-trivial Perl program, a report generator control harness for automaticly generated nightly/weekly/monthly reports for several reports and customers, and despite the fact that I was learning as I went, it still took me half the time it would have taken with C, which I feel very comfortable with. Now, eventually, I'll have C++ class libraries that should duplicate all the functionality of Perl that I like (assuming I don't decide to be a hermit and program in Modula-3 or Ada95 :-)