Funny this should come up—I was just thinking about the first time I ever used Perl, and contemplated writing a Meditation on it.

My first Perl program ever was very much your simple way to count lines. Perhaps I didn't even know about $. and incremented a counter in the body of the loop.

The interesting part is: I never got a result. It ran so slowly on my PC (a 16 MHz 80386SX I beleive) that I killed it when it was taking too long to finish.

I was disapointed that it ran so slowly and was not useful. But, when Perl was young and AWK was all the rage, didn't all computers have speeds in that order of magnitude? Perhaps the disk IO was eating it alive due to a poor or immature 32-bit environment that had to trap to real-mode DOS on every file-read call.

So... when Perl was young and the FAQ was being written, perhaps the buffer-at-a-time approach was significantly better performing. The logic of <FILE> to read up to the next newline might have been primitive in the early days, and changed when memory became cheap and buffers were no big deal.

—John

In reply to Re: How To Count Lines In File? by John M. Dlugosz
in thread How To Count Lines In File? by Cody Pendant

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