Basic HTML version of Foils prepared Sept 20 97

Foil 3 General Remarks on PERL I

From Tutorial on PERL Computational Science for Information Age Course CPS616 -- Sept 20 97. by Geoffrey C. Fox,Nancy McCracken,Tom Scavo
1 PERL is an interpreter (written by Larry Wall) and is a cross between C, the UNIX shell, sed, and awk. I certainly consider it easier to use than all four of these, since PERL produces clearer code (than especially the UNIX Shell) which is easier to write and debug.
  • In these notes, the emphasis is on PERL4, but some PERL5 features will be covered as needed.
  • Later we will describe PERL5 in detail, which was released late 1994 and is analogous to C++ in same way PERL is analogous to C.
2 Note C as a compiler will be more efficient than PERL. We use PERL for those tedious high-level things that take a long time to write but don't take much execution time.
  • Computationally intensive loops should be coded in C (or equivalent) and called from PERL
  • Note PERL is comparable to C for I/O and UNIX system calls but can be thousands of times slower than C for arithmetic
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