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. Bijan -- Bijan Soleymani <bijan@psq.com> http://www.crasseux.com
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