[ILUG] When to use Perl

[Fergal Daly]

On Tue, Jul 31, 2001 at 01:29:01PM +0100, Harry Moreau wrote:
> Definitely not with C/C++.  While fast, it's just too difficult to parse
> text in a bug free manner.
> 
> As an alternative to perl, you might consider tcl or python, which are IMO
> much easier to learn than perl.
> 
> Both have much more regular syntax than perl and are either intrinsically
> or extensionally object oriented; python intrinsically and tcl with the
> [incr tcl] extension.  Furthermore both python and tcl are very easy to
> extend with new functionality implemented in C/C++, because they were
> designed to be embedded languages.

Just in case anyone was beginning to doubt it, Perl also has an incredibly
flexible object system as a core feature of the language. This includes
dynamic method creation/dispatch, dynamic class creation and even
"multi-method" dispatch - where you select the correct method based on the
class of more than 1 of the objects involved.

While I'm at it, Perl is not only embeddable and extensible but it has the
exteremly funky Inline module which lets you include bits of C in your Perl
programs and call them as if they were just perl functions.

use Inline C => << 'END_OF_C';

void japh(char *x) {
	printf("Just another %s hacker\n", x);
}
END_OF_C

foreach my $lan (qw( Perl C))
{
	japh($lang);
}


The C will be dynamically recompiled only if you haven't changed the C code
since the last time. It's not just a gimmick, you can access shared
libraries and the whole shooting gallery with this. See

http://search.cpan.org/doc/INGY/Inline-0.43/C/C-Cookbook.pod

for a bunch of examples.

People often talk about coding in high level languages but doing the high
performance bit in C or assembler. It's not going to get any easier than
this!

Fergal