Damon Jacobsen wrote:
I have yet to figure out any advantage these other languages offer over c++. VB, Perl, Python, etc all seem the same to me. All these languages seem to be halfway between c++ and a scripting language. The only new language that seems to offer any benefits is Java, but only due to its cross platform capability. I would welcome anyone who knows/uses these other languages to share their benefits.
All of the above except C/C++ basically do garbage collection... If
your program stops referring to a variable or it goes out of scope at
some point, it's memory is released.
Another obvious difference between C++ and these languages is the
ability to execute dynamic code.. ie, you could generate perl code in a
string, within a perl program, and call 'eval' on it to have it
executed. With C++, you'd have to compile it first... similarly for
python and php.
Another "advantage" would be 'dynamic typing'.. many scripting languages
effectively infer datatypes, rather than forcing you to declare them
explicitly. Some people really don't like this though... but it's
really difficult to do such a thing with C/C++.
As for being cross platform, I think you'll find perl and python are
pretty flexible in terms of platform portability.... unless you are
talking about working with those embedded java-only processor applications.
In general, I would agree that the other languages you mention do not
include notably different concepts in programming, they are just
implementations that are better for certain purposes. But if you look
at ocaml, mercury, lisp*, xslt or haskell, there are definitely
different programming concepts at play there which may be of use to you
and are fairly difficult to replicate in other languages.
_______________________________________________
RLUG mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.rlug.org/mailman/listinfo/rlug
