EDI in linux (everone PLEASE read)

[Roger Oberholtzer]

On Mon, 16 Sep 2002 12:10:36 -0500
Ben Duncan <bns at meta3.net> wrote:

> Although everone has a favorite language. when designing such a 
> system, one must compare cababilties,
> ease of programming, acceptance, and extensiability.
> 
> Perl, being a favorite of many people, I find lacking in handling 
> easily, the "3" dimension strings and arrays that would be
> required. Python seems to handle these strings and file access in a 
> more straight forward (ok GROUP everone chime in here,
> you want hurt my feelings on pro's and con's of languagues to use).
> 
> C would get the job down, but be take a lot of codeing. C++, I have 
> absolutely NO CLUE, as well as JAVA, since I find
> Object Oriented Programming - strange -.
> 
> GNU/COBOL would work because COBOL is designed to manipulate DATA in 
> that fashion ( or as an alternative
> KOBOL from The Kompany - which is a Commercial COBOL compiler, but 
> priced at $40 USD - which is
> within my budget).
> 
> Interrupted languages such as Perl, Python, Tk/Tcl, would probably get 
> slow in having to deal with such large
> characters strings, as used in EDI ...

Tcl, at least, has been reimplemented with binary objects. So, the older
need to convert strings back and forth to binary numners is largely gone.
Searching for strings in Tcl is probably as fast as for any just in time
compiled language (when Sun supported Tcl, it got a byte compiler that also
sped things up quite a bit). Since Tcl itself traditionally ran string-based
scripts, it has always had great string handling functions and well
implemented hash tables. Although our web site software is pulling me into
python, all GUI apps that we develop are in Tcl/Tk. We need cross-platform
support.

OTOH, Tcl's default object orientation is a bit 'different'. However, you
can choose from a number of OO implementations to meet your taste. Tcl
itself does not impose only one model. There are varying opinions as to
whether this is a strength. (I see it as one.)


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