14 Jan
1999
14 Jan
'99
7:21 p.m.
On or about 11:53 PM 1/15/99 -0500, Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner was caught
in a dark alley speaking these words:
It was thus said that the Great Roger Merchberger once
stated:
> And Perl is some of most of these - at times
faster than C, yet sometimes
> simpler than Basic, almost as powerful as APL, and runs on more machines
> than Java! (of course, APL runs on more machines than Java...)
First off, this isn't wholly off-topic... there *is* a Perl interpreter for
the Atari ST's... ;-)
Now, how can Perl be faster than C when it's
written in C?
Easy. 'Cause I said so!!! ;-)
Mind you, it's not a whopping lot faster, but how it can be faster (by a
few to five percent) is this: Larry Wall (who wrote Perl) optimized it in
such a way that any ol' schmuck (like me) says "I could do this in C!!!"
and does so, but not as efficiently as Larry did... therefore, code in Perl
is faster than the reworked version in C.
Oh, and when I called it an "interpreter," that's a misnomer. It may look,
walk, talk, and smell like an interpreter, but it's actually a JIT compiler
in disguise... that's why it's so darned fast in comparison to an interpreter.
Ever heard the quote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from a Perl script?" *That's* why. ;-)
Keep on Truckin',
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
=====
Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- zmerch(a)30below.com
SysAdmin - Iceberg Computers
===== Merch's Wild Wisdom of the Moment: =====
for (1..15) { print "Merry Christmas\n"; }
(from perl.1 man page, version 4.)