Stahr, Lea wrote:
Inefficiency? Aren't all interpretive languages inefficient by
definition versus compiled languages?
Lea Stahr
Depends on the measure of efficiency.
A few years ago I wrote, in about a day, some REXX code that read PL/1
listings and generated 5000+ lines of code.
It's true I iterated a few times over the next couple of days, but I
co-opted to do the task, and the outcome was considered satisfactory, so
I guess they assessed it as very efficient use of programming resources,
and probably it beat (in machine usage) the use of PL/1 to do the same
task, and the traditional code,compile, test cycle.
A second example. I load some data into a database, several times a day.
I use a shell script and feed SQL statements into psql, an interactive
utility.
If I wrote a program in, maybe, C, then I might have better error
checking, but I don't think it would either run faster or use
significantly fewer resources.
I would run an example from Natural 1.0 (Software AG, 80s) but I don't
recall it very precisely, and Neale might jump on me. Basically, it
might go:
find ... where ...
accept/reject <condition>
display "header" this / "That" that.
which would produce a printed (or displayed) listing of stuff from a
database. A bloke at Facom promised we could do a demo using customer
data in two days, and we did it.
--
Cheers
John
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