apt-class WAS: fai next level

[Diane Trout]

Jens Ruehmkorf <ruehmkorf at informatik.Uni-Koeln.DE> writes:

> Yup, I'm wrong there, at least when it comes to text processing. When it
> comes to some tasks, perl is even slightly faster than C. In some book I
> read recently, Kernighan and Wall made some performance comparisons. On
> Unix for a text-specific problem, fastest was perl, close after that C,
> considerably after that C++ (it was a general book on programming, can't
> remember the title).

I'd be interested in the reference. Have you seen "An empirical
comparison of C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Rexx and Tcl for a
search/string-processing program" by Lutz Prechelt? It compared the
solutions from multiple programmers in the different languages for run
time, program length, program reliability, length of time needed to
write. (Though given their methods the scripting language reprorts are
probably a bit low.)

> It's not the size of the scripts that matters. My point was: Diane could
> think of using her tool in different environments as well
> (debian-installer), where you don't have space for a perl itself. So iff
> she thinks of offering here tool somewhere else, she could use C/C++.
> Otherwise, use perl/python.

Actually in my other environemnt python would be fine, I was just
choosing C++ as the lowest common denominator (that still has string
handling abilities) since it seemed rude to try and force fai to suck
in another interpreter.

Another reason is in the programming part of my job it's mostly just
been in python and it'd be good for me to do something in C++ so I
don't completely forget the language.

diane