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Date:      Mon, 18 Nov 96 13:09:01 MST
From:      bartlett@Exabyte.COM (Peter Bartlett)
To:        ejs@bfd.com
Cc:        chat@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: Who needs Perl?
Message-ID:  <9611182009.AA05333@fern.Exabyte.COM>

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> 
> 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 :-)
> 

Yeah, I've been doing the same thing to replace some C++ classes I wrote a
few years ago for lists, self-resizing hash tables and operation result
caches, persistent objects, patch tables, etc.

The thing that makes Perl nice is that it has a buit in "scalar" type that's
used for just about everything.  So for example only a single hash function
is needed.  The temptation with C++ is to write a hash table class that
works for any data type; this requires that the user write a hash function
for each base type to be hashed.  This is somewhat against the idea of
trying to make using these data structures almost effortless.

I guess this discussion has gone beyond the point where it has anything
to do with FreeBSD...

Pete



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