On Dec 8, 2006, at 10:18 AM, Norman Palardy wrote:
On Dec 08, 2006, at 9:07 AM, Kem Tekinay wrote:
It started with some friendly ribbing. I have a friend who thinks
that the
answer to all things is "perl," and he goes on and on about its
benefits,
speed, flexibility, etc., etc. Meanwhile, perl code looks to me like
something my cat created when he walked across the keyboard.
Long term maintainability is a big consideration.
I've worked on 2 fairly large projects where Perl was used as a
development language where subsequent maintainers have simply
rewritten large portions because it was simpler than trying to
decipher the code at hand. I know someone will say "Well that's
just because you had guys maintaining code that did not know Perl".
Fortunately on one it was the same guy about 18 months later and he
could not read his own code :)
Perl CAN be used in a nice structured way but that's not the way
you usually see it done. It's often the "barfed punctuation on the
keyboard" style
Imagine my surprise when it took RB a minute to do what perl did
in 15
seconds. I'm not surprised that perl is faster, only HOW much
faster it is.
My argument was going to be, "see, difference wasn't that much,
and RB is
much easier to read," but these results make it no contest.
So my question is: Why is RB so much slower? What is it doing
that's making
the difference? And could I do something to close the gap?
I certainly would not have guessed that might be the case.
I'd expect a difference but not 4x slower
How do you evaluate "isNumber" ?
The rest seems pretty straight forward and reasonable
Try replacing the original line:
If IsNumeric(line) Then
with:
If (Val(line) <> 0) Or (IsNumeric(line)) Then
instead. Val should drop out (with a return value of 0) almost
immediately if the string isn't interpretable as a number, and the
following "... Or (IsNumeric(line))" catches the case where the
numeric value of the line was, in fact, supposed to be 0. You might
try the CDbl() function instead of Val() and see if there's any speed
difference.
If it does turn out that IsNumeric() is your computational
bottleneck, then hopefully either Val() or CDbl(), combined with
short-circuit If-Then evaluation, should speed up the task a bit.
Finally, keep in mind that Perl was SUPPOSED to be designed for
text processing; it's likely it contains optimized string
manipulation/search code that RB doesn't have (unless you use a
plugin, or shell out to sed/awk (under OS X/Linux)...)
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