P.H.P. and Python (and Tcl/Tk!)

[phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org]

> /bin/sh, awk, early Perl, PHP, and to some degree Tcl/Tk are slightly
> further down that road in that all data are strings, but some operations
> can interpret them as numbers, etc.  This has both performance and
> reliability/safety implications, but they are rarely critical.  Most of
> these languages are also pure interpreters and have some performance hit
> (a few more months worth of Moore's law).

When we first started using Tcl/Tk (which is interpreted) , there was a
significant performance hit in comparison to compiled languages. It was
worth it, because the speed was (just) adequate and the features and
convenience of the language were a good fit to our applications.
Subsequently Tcl/Tk has incorporated various on-the-fly complilations that
improve the speed without impacting the convenience of an interpreted
language. We can now do screen updates on our oscilloscope hardware at a
rate that is indistinguishable from an analog scope. Some of that is due
to the high-speed USB connection, some due to increased processor clock
rates, and some due to improvements in Tcl/Tk. We can now do a dual trace
display, an FFT calculation and plot, and a histogram plot at a rate some
20x faster than we could originally do the trace plot alone.

You probably wouldn't want to use Tcl/Tk for a weather prediction program
or air traffic control, but it's fast enough for many applications. That
probably applies to many other interpreted languages, as Dave suggests.

Peter
-- 
Peter Hiscocks
Syscomp Electronic Design Limited, Toronto
http://www.syscompdesign.com
USB Oscilloscope and Waveform Generator
647-839-0325

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