On Tuesday 01 Oct 2002 11:03 am, you wrote: > As for why C is popular: it does the job, its *largely* portable and, if > you abstract out hardware differences, it can be made portable. What more > do you _need_?
Polymorphism, first class functions, an unbroken type system, string support, standard networking, threading etc Perhaps I'm just spoilt. > > 2. High level languages like python can, in theory, be much quicker > > than low level languages: http://psyco.sourceforge.net/introduction.html > But I'd say this is more because the language is interpreted rather than > it being high or low level. If a language is compiled, then your stuffed: > the compiler produces what it thinks of as the best code but it wont take > into account any hot-spots. Many interpreters compile to an intermediate form, which is then interpreted - hence bytecode. This can then be JIT compiled at run time. > > 3. Language choice is totally epsilon compared to algorithim choice, > > the difference between C and Python is prolly in the order of 10% at > > worst, the difference between a skip list and a linked list is so much > > more. Um, python is several orders of magnitude slower. Interpreters tend at best to be twice as slow, often ten times a slow, and for pure interpreters, often a 1000 times slower than compiled machine code. http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/bench/sieve/ C code for Sieve of Eratosthenes ~ under a quarter of a second Python code - 47 seconds Language choice is important for developer productivity. Choose a language suitable for the task. (in most cases, anything other than C). Once it works, it can be optimised. Until it works, its useless. George _______________________________________________ Scottish mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/scottish
