In message <199801231529.QAA02841@saruman.ics.muni.cz>, Jaromir Dolecek writes:
>I would never persuade anyone Perl is the best language in our
>Galaxy.  But it's fast and powerful tool, suitable for many tasks.
>There are other, maybe better alternatives, but arguing that writing
>in C is better than writing in Perl is IMHO bogus.

I dunno.  There are a lot of classes of tasks for which I think C is better...

Still, I've had to do a lot of work to get C to have even many of the
string-handling features I want.

>I prefer scripting languages, I can concentrate on what I want
>to do instead of finding, whether the (char *) pointer points to right
>place ;-) And easy-to-use dictionaries (or, to speak Perl, hashes)
>are Good Thing (TM) too.

Yes.

>I use Perl almost exclusively for all my staff just now (with
>exception with one-shot-scripts, which are generally easier to
>write in shell). I would never use shell scripts somewhere, where
>I need speed (such as CGI) - it's much much slower (mainly because
>it starts lot of processes). I would never use C-program somewhere,
>where I need maximum flexibility (having to compile each time something
>changes is too much pain in majority of cases). Did you ever
>lost sources to a C program, which has worked for long time without
>problems and suddenly breakes ? I did, it's not something I would like
>to undergo often :-(

I never lose my source...

I use sh or C for anything I want to have portable, for now, but if
NetBSD started shipping with perl, I might well convert some of my
scripts to perl.  A lot of them would be *lots* faster, I certainly
admit...

>Perl as language is rather mixed and it's hard to write code way
>readable to any other person (or to you after two months :-) ).

I think it's possible, but it's harder than doing the same thing in
C, or even sh.  I'm not sure why; probably because perl encourages
quick hacks.  :)

Anyway, I think perl is a better language for CGI scripts than C, and
I'm pretty sure it's not just because my comfort level with C isn't
high enough yet.

-s