On Tue, 26 Aug 2003, Bijan Soleymani wrote: > On Tue, Aug 26, 2003 at 11:25:55AM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote: > > Some time after I left the COBOL job, I was employed writing C > > in an app that screamed for COBOL. I'd say that 1/5th of the > > SLOCs, and most of the bugs, were of the form: > > > > strncpy(really_long_variable, another_long_variable, > > sizeof(another_long_variable)); > > > > By commercial, I meant record-oriented "data processing" type > > software, not programs sold in stores and catalogs or by sales > > people. > > I find that Perl is a very nice language that avoids such low-level > problems. There's a whole family of such scripting languages that begin > with the letter P. Perl, Python, Php, Pike,... > > The advantage here is that the main (only?) implementation of each of > these languages is an excellent free software implimentation designed > for Linux/Unix and ported to every imaginable OS (from VMS to Windows to > Plan 9). > > Other advantages include the fact that these languages are general > purpose and can pretty much handle all kinds of problems. And also the > fact that they are easily extensible through C.
This just isn't true. Perl at least is brought to its knees by a variety of problems that C has no trouble with whatsoever. I've had simple pixel-crawling image processing algorithms take a day to run in Perl, when I rewrote in C about 30 seconds. And that's with PDL (admittedly PDL call overhead was I think the major thing slowing perl down, but that's hardly reassuring). The scripting languages just aren't anywhere near as fast as the older, simpler, compiled ones. Its not that I don't still write first drafts of many codes in perl, its just that now I budget time to rewrite them in C if I need to (its still usually faster overall to prototype first in perl, even if you know you are doomed speed-wise). I don't know if perl and cobol have the same relationship, or if there are common business tasks that still need the speed, but it seems like a definite possibility. Britton > > I don't know much about Cobol, but if it's a simple language then I > think it might be worth it. But if it's a complex language with such a > limited scope then I think it's not so great. > > SQL is a good example of a simple very specific language. > Perl is a good example of a complex very general language. > > Very specific languages that are too complex are being killed off by > languages such as Perl. For example people going from awk to perl > (there's even an a2p script that'll do automatic conversion). > > Bijan > -- > Bijan Soleymani <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > http://www.crasseux.com > -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
