On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 10:43:18 -0600 Jeremy Turner [email protected] wrote:
Perl has lots of shortcuts, like the implicit @_ and $_ variables from loops, and what not. This saves time and script size, but can make it difficult to read for other programmers. I think Perl needs a good deal of commenting. Of course, no language is immune from the need of good comments. =)
A bad programmer can make any programming language hard to read. In these modern times if you are worried about saving a few bytes of the size of your source you are seriously just wasting your time.
I've been a Perl programmer for years and never used the implicit @_ and $_'s except in "one time use/throw away" scripts. They really don't save you any time and only cause confusion for others and yourself when in maintenance mode.
Java had the first crack at being platform independent. It got a reputation at being very slow in the beginning, and many people still repeat that. It will never be as fast as C (neither will Perl). I haven't compared the emulation percentage of Mono to .NET verses open implimentations of Java to Sun's Java, in other words how completely does the open source implimentation stack up to the propriatary one.
Also, C# is an ECMA standard. I'm not sure if Java is.
Actually Perl was around first and is still to this day more successfully platform independent that Java. While I agree that Java/Perl/C#/etc will never be "as fast" as a well written C program, the difference these days is so small it doesn't matter.
If you're really worried about the couple of milliseconds difference you are spending your time worrying about the wrong things.
The cost/time difference of developing an application in C vs the speed benefit just doesn't make sense. Save yourself 75% of the development time and put $20 more processor in your box. ;)
--------------------------------- Frank Wiles [email protected] http://www.wiles.org ---------------------------------