From owner-freebsd-chat Mon Nov 18 12:13:08 1996 Return-Path: owner-chat Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id MAA08940 for chat-outgoing; Mon, 18 Nov 1996 12:13:08 -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 MAA08933 for ; Mon, 18 Nov 1996 12:13:06 -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 NAA26092; Mon, 18 Nov 1996 13:12:49 -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 NAA19090; Mon, 18 Nov 1996 13:12:48 -0700 Received: by fern.Exabyte.COM (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA05333; Mon, 18 Nov 96 13:09:01 MST Date: Mon, 18 Nov 96 13:09:01 MST From: bartlett@Exabyte.COM (Peter Bartlett) Message-Id: <9611182009.AA05333@fern.Exabyte.COM> To: ejs@bfd.com Subject: Re: Who needs Perl? Cc: chat@FreeBSD.org Sender: owner-chat@FreeBSD.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > > 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