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Date:      Mon, 18 Nov 1996 11:08:31 -0800 (PST)
From:      "Eric J. Schwertfeger" <ejs@bfd.com>
To:        Paul Richards <p.richards@elsevier.co.uk>
Cc:        Peter Bartlett <bartlett@Exabyte.COM>, chat@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: Who needs Perl? (Was: cvs commit: src/share/doc/handbook ...)
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.3.95.961118105310.22317D-100000@harlie>
In-Reply-To: <57n2wfthtd.fsf@tees.elsevier.co.uk>

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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 :-)




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