On Fri, Aug 02, 2002 at 10:52:49AM +0200, Guenter Milde wrote:
> 
> It looks like my tip was not the best one, sorry.

No need to apologize. The more you know about other software, the better
your own software will be.
> 
> Maybe you could use the wvWare library (the one also used in Abiword) for
> the picture conversion? It did convert included pics from a word document
> into EPS. (But maybe using convert from ImageMagick will do as well, i
> wonder if not wvWare actually does this...)
> 

I'll have to try this out.

> (BTW: if you would like to program instead of hacking, switch to
> python: 
> 

Ugh! Don't even tell me this is true. I learned perl first, and then
switched to python because I liked its object-oriented nature. I agree
that the syntax in python is much better. Like you said, it is a true
object oriented language. Object oriented perl is crazy.

I originally wrote my script in python using a lexer called plex. This
version of my script took 12 minutes to parse a 1.8 megabyte file. So
this version of python was 12 times slower than my current version of perl. However, I 
think it is plex that made this script so slow. 

I wonder if I wrote my script in python without using plex, would it run
slower than perl? Perl is really, really fast with regular expressions.

Another reason I decided to use perl was that I wanted to make my script
more universal. It is likely that someone could download my perl script
off the web and use it one minute later. With a python script, this
might not be the case, since python is not as popular.

None-the-less, this whole time I've been thinking "I wonder if I should
have written this in python?" I have set around 50 flags in my perl
script. The script is true spaghetti code with a million if-then
statements nested 4 and 5 levels deep. It is ugly. I think this is a
case where you really need a true object oriented language! 

Anyway, I hope I made the right decision in using perl, since I've
invested so much time in my script. I guess later I could always convert
it to python.

>IMO it is far better suited for XML like stuff, as it has the
> ability to create appropriate classes etc...)

But I think python has some problems in this regard. I belong to sig,
the mailing list for the python library that parses xml. The posters on
the list agreed that the current libraries are a bit buggy. 

Overall, I agree that is is much nicer to write in python than in perl.

Thanks

Paul

-- 

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*Paul Tremblay         *
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