Bob La Quey wrote: > On 10/25/07, Andrew Lentvorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Bob La Quey wrote: >>> I am in basic agreement with using an appropriate >>> scripting language whenever possible. I would say >>> in defense of C, after one builds up from the low >>> level, then one is effectively working with a scripting >>> languge that just has C as its syntax. >> Sorry, I might agree, but I have never seen a good set of libraries for >> C that matches even the basic (hash, list, vector) data structures >> available in any scripting language. > > Understood, but are not those underlying data structures nearly > always implemented in C? Seems somehow odd that these implementations > are good in scripting languages but not in C itself. > >>> One is using C functions and libraries that do mostly >>> the same thing that the scripting language is doing. >> Then they should go get D (http://www.digitalmars.com/d/) or Objective C >> or something. > > Probably true. > >>> In some ways it is more economical intellectually to >>> simply stay in C. Multi hundred line programs do _not_ >>> have to be inpenetrable if they are well written. >> No, but it is more intellectual effort to *read* no matter how well >> written. Finding a bug in 200 lines is always harder than finding one >> in 10 lines--even if the 10 line program is Perl ;) > > We may have to disagree about this. > > In Perl in particular the unreadability comes about because > Perl has a huge number of context variables that the expert > Perl programmer is referring to when ever a single line of code > is written. Perhaps the simplest example is something like > > print ; > > Or some such. Huh? print what? OH, $_ (What the hell is that?) > And BTW printing $_ is followed by printing the current value of $\ > which is WHAT? > > The more expert the Perl programmer the more use they make > of the context hence the shorter the code and less explicit > the code gets...
I'm not sure that is really true. At least for production code, from decent programmers. >..It becomes a lot like trying to decipher a > poem by a hugely literate poet who makes endless allusion > to other poems. At some point the poet is talking only to > herself and her private world context. Regards, ..jim (sometimes defends perl! has also written some bad perl!!) -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
