On Fri, 2003-08-29 at 17:13, Bijan Soleymani wrote: > On Tue, Aug 26, 2003 at 04:35:04PM -0800, Britton wrote: > > > > On Tue, 26 Aug 2003, Bijan Soleymani wrote: > > > > > On Tue, Aug 26, 2003 at 11:25:55AM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote: > > > > Some time after I left the COBOL job, I was employed writing C > > > > in an app that screamed for COBOL. I'd say that 1/5th of the > > > > SLOCs, and most of the bugs, were of the form: > > > > > > > > strncpy(really_long_variable, another_long_variable, > > > > sizeof(another_long_variable)); > > > > > > > > By commercial, I meant record-oriented "data processing" type > > > > software, not programs sold in stores and catalogs or by sales > > > > people. > > > > > > I find that Perl is a very nice language that avoids such low-level > > > problems. There's a whole family of such scripting languages that begin > > > with the letter P. Perl, Python, Php, Pike,... > > > > > > The advantage here is that the main (only?) implementation of each of > > > these languages is an excellent free software implimentation designed > > > for Linux/Unix and ported to every imaginable OS (from VMS to Windows to > > > Plan 9). > > > > > > Other advantages include the fact that these languages are general > > > purpose and can pretty much handle all kinds of problems. And also the > > > fact that they are easily extensible through C. > > > > This just isn't true. Perl at least is brought to its knees by a variety > > of problems that C has no trouble with whatsoever. I've had simple > > pixel-crawling image processing algorithms take a day to run in Perl, when > > I rewrote in C about 30 seconds. And that's with PDL (admittedly PDL call > > overhead was I think the major thing slowing perl down, but that's hardly > > reassuring). The scripting languages just aren't anywhere near as fast as > > the older, simpler, compiled ones. Its not that I don't still write first > > drafts of many codes in perl, its just that now I budget time to rewrite > > them in C if I need to (its still usually faster overall to prototype > > first in perl, even if you know you are doomed speed-wise). I don't know > > if perl and cobol have the same relationship, or if there are common > > business tasks that still need the speed, but it seems like a definite > > possibility. > > Please note that he was complaining about bugs caused by low-level > string copying in C. Look at his example with strncopy() above. Perl > (and other scripting languages) don't have this type of problem at all. > Image processing and handling textual records are two completely > different problems. I wouldn't recommend perl for processing images, and > I wouldn't recommend C for dealing with textual strings.
Absolutely. And guess what? DP/MIS apps have lots of strings (names, addresses, descriptions, etc) and numeric calculations where floats are *not* acceptable... -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Ron Johnson, Jr. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Jefferson, LA USA "Fair is where you take your cows to be judged." Unknown -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
