Date: 18 Nov 1996 17:49:02 +0000 From: Paul Richards <p.richards@elsevier.co.uk> To: bartlett@Exabyte.COM (Peter Bartlett) Cc: chat@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Who needs Perl? (Was: cvs commit: src/share/doc/handbook ...) Message-ID: <57n2wfthtd.fsf@tees.elsevier.co.uk> In-Reply-To: bartlett@Exabyte.COM's message of Mon, 18 Nov 96 10:05:21 MST References: <9611181705.AA04748@fern.Exabyte.COM>
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bartlett@Exabyte.COM (Peter Bartlett) writes: > 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. 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. -- Paul Richards. Originative Solutions Ltd. (Netcraft Ltd. contractor) Elsevier Science TIS online journal project. Email: p.richards@elsevier.co.uk Phone: 0370 462071 (Mobile), +44 (0)1865 843155
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