From: "Harold Grovesteen"
> I am confused by the placement of REBOL on the Y coordinate. If REBOL
> is "more efficient" than TCL or Visual BASIC would not greater
> efficiency place it lower on the Y axis, say between Visual BASIC and
> C/C++/Java? Would not placing it higher than Tcl imply it takes more of
> the system to do the same thing rather than less?
>
> Harold Grovesteen
I guess the language may be imprecise, in a Lewis Carol sort of way. What I
recall about the article was that Dr. Ousterhout was characterizing
languages based on how much work is done by any single statement (my words,
not his). Without having reread the article, it seems as though he
guestimated that a C statement does about 5 lines worth of Assembly
language, and that a high level scripting language statement may encapsulate
2 to 10 times what a C statement does. It seems as though he thought that
Tcl was about 5 to 10 times as efficient as C in this schema. My guestimate
based on using both was that REBOL was more efficient (in this specific
regard) than Tcl, hence my suggestion on the Y scale (which was logarithmic,
if I recall).
Is this clearer?
Regards,
--Scott Jones
> Carl Sassenrath wrote:
>
> > I would agree with your placement in X and Y. -Carl
> >>
> >> From Scott Jones
> >> I would place REBOL around the C, C++ range on the x coordinate, and
> >> somewhat higher than Tcl on the y coordinate based on my knowledge (and
> >> opinion ;). In that everything starts as a string in Tcl code
> >> (the bytecode
> >> compiler apparently makes some assumptions about type in order to
improve
> >> performance), it is considered fairly typeless. C is typed on
> >> the face, but
> >> allows type coersion/conversion almost too easily (accounting for the
ease
> >> of making errors). What I know/recall of Java is that it is
> >> strictly typed,
> >> and in fact sets fairly tight constraints on type conversions.
> >>
> >> As far as the amount of work done by any given statement, REBOL is clea
rly
> >> more "efficient" than Visual BASIC and usually more efficient
> >> than Tcl (by a
> >> "guestimated" factor of 25 to 50%). Some of the efficiency lies in
REBOL
> >> being more "functional" in that more commands can be strung together
and
> >> thereby avoiding the explicit assignments. And other portions of the
gain
> >> are in the inclusion of clean abstractions of a number of protocols,
> >> including file and http manipulations.
> >>
> >> Glad the reference was helpful.
> >>
> >> --Scott Jones
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