From: "robin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Asa Rossoff wrote:
This is helpful, thanks. My reason for being concerned about both
speed
and memory are that currently my hardware is on the ancient side (P200
56MB
ram), and secondly, I know those issues are both of great consequence in larger scale operations, like on web servers and heavy data analysis.
I used to write Perl stuff on a similar machine. Compared with the amount of memory something like OpenOffice eats, any script you write in any language will have a minimal impact on system resources. You'd probably only notice the difference if you were using the box as a web server running data-crunching CGI applications that turned out to be popular enough to have a number of people accessing them at the same time, or if you use humunguous arrays or hashes (for example if you write a program that involves putting every definition in the Oxford English Dictionary into a hash, then don't expect to get your search results quickly!).
If you decide to go for Perl, mail me off list and I'll give you some pointers (well Perl usually calls them references - "pointers" is more of a C thing ;-)). I'm not an expert, just a guy who uses it for simple practical applications, but that's probably an advantage.
BTW, I'm not trying to start a Perl/Python war here. Apart from anything else, if we get going on that, those weirdo Ruby hackers will join in ;-)
ha :)
Okay, I may take you up on that. *Adds your email to address book*
In the long run, it would clearly be a good idea to learn Perl no matter what, since it is so widely used, and so many modules and scripts are out there for it already.
I haven't tried the cpan script from Linux yet -- but when I used it to install some modules under Windows, I was surprised to see it consume nearly 30 mb of paged-in ram. This was one thing that made me question whether Perl is good with ram usage.
It's probably because the cpan script is doing quite a lot. You can eat a lot of RAM with Perl if you want (e.g. by looping through massive arrays) but the kind of programs you'd be liekly to write should be fairly economical.
Sir Robin
--
"A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it,
is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both."
- James Madison
Robin Turner IDMYO Bilkent Universitesi Ankara 06533 Turkey
www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin
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