This question may be too vague for a good answer, but my curiosity makes me ask it anyway. I thought I read somewhere that perl is actually faster than C for certain tasks. The vagueness of the question probably lies in exactly what task, who writes the program, the size and type of data, and a dozen other factors.
Specifically, I am writing a perl script to convert RTF to XML. I downloaded a utility called unrtf, written in C, which converts RTF to HTML, a somewhat easier task. I got depressed when I ran unrtf on small files and saw that it didn't take *any* time. But when I ran it on a big file of 1.8 megabytes, it actually took 6 minutes and 30 seconds. My script only took a minute! (Hooray, after all this hard work, that's a little encouraging to see!) When I ran the same file through a java utility called majix, it took over a minute. It is hard to say exactly, because majix supplies their own timer, and this timer only starts when java starts processing the documents, some 20 or 30 seconds after you launch it. I had actually considered learning C++ to make my little script really fast so that people would consider using it. I really doubt I would have really gone through all that trouble, but now I am wondering if C++ would have given that much of a time advantage--if any at all. Certainly, a perl script would be easier to maintain and debug. Thoughs on how C, java, and perl compare on speed? (I know I did a little test with sed, a python script, and a perl script, just changing the word "the" to "teh" in a huge file. Sed and python took about he same time, while perl was six times faster.) Paul -- ************************ *Paul Tremblay * *[EMAIL PROTECTED]* ************************ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
