From: "Rob Coops" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Personaly I switch between PHP and Perl a lot and I found that they can > compliment each other quite well. All you can do in perl you can do in PHP > in some way and visa versa. I have to say though that Perl is by far the > best when it comes to working with large chunks of data.
Yes you're perfectly right. All what you can do with Perl you can do with PHP, and sometimes much easier. You can use an old truck to reach to a certain point same way you can with a Rolls Royce. Of course, using PHP will make the program run slower, however it is cheaper to get a truck than a Rolls Royce. Oh, I said "same way" but I was not talking about the same road, because the trucks don't have access to all the roads. I was just telling that you can create the same programs in PHP. Or better said... almost the same programs, because for example you can create a program with a Windows GUI in perl using more libraries for this (like Win32::GUI, WX, GTK2, Tk) but you cannot do this in PHP. I have seen that some PHP programmers have started to create a library for doing this, but is far less developed than perl libraries for this. You can even create Windows services in Perl, can include Visual Perl in Visual Studio, can use perl as another language in .asp programs instead of Visual Basic, can use perl script in Windows Scripting Host applications, can use PerlScript instead of Javascript on the computers where perl is installed (as a client side language)... Did you know which are the differences between Apache modules mod_perl and mod_php? I guess you know that mod_perl doesn't have a bigger speed as the only advantage... Have you tried to make a complex site that might need biotechnology information or financial data in PHP? I have seen that perl has very many free libraries on CPAN that can help a lot in these fields and more others. But these are just things which can be seen. However, the most important parts are the other advantajes which are harder to explain to a php programmer, because perhaps he won't understand. PHP biggest advantage is that it can mix html code and programming code so the dynamic web pages are very easy to create, but have you read World Wide Web Consortium's recommendations? One of them says that it is not recommended to mix the html code with the programming code, so using a templating system is the best way. PHP has very few templating systems and they just kill php's biggest advantage, while there are very many templating systems for perl, some of them very fast, some of them very complex, with different interfaces... so you can choose what you may like. PHP can be compared with Visual Basic, because just like VB, it has very many core functions which are very hard to remember, but I found that PHP programmers consider that it is normally to create programs with the PHP manual opened. Another advantage of perl which was not pointed in that web page is that perl has perldoc, a command that displays the documentation for each perl module, and that documentation is contained in the libraries, or it is installed when the libraries are installed from search.cpan.org, or using the cpan shell, or using the ppm shell under a few OS's... And I am sure there are much more to say. Teddy -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
