While in university I wrote a talker for my fiancee and I to get together on. It came out at around 40,000 lines of code altogether (Ok, I admit I got carried away... it was almost a complete MUD including online coding by the time I finished ;) ) After a while I got bored with chasing rogue pointers and decided to do a complete rewrite in a language I had just heard about, Perl. The new system came in at under 10,000 lines ;)

Seriously though, the question is not really how big a perl program can be, there is no reason why you couldnt write full applications in perl (the people I work for, for example, have a working perl library exceeding 100,000 lines of code) the big question is 'is Perl really the right language?'

Perl has a number of great things going for it, primarially things like modules that avoid the need to reinvent the wheel and it's easy syntax structure that allows the programmer to concentrate on program flow rather than havng to worry about every little detail. The result of this is most perl programs will be smaller (in terms of lines) and more rapidly written than in other languages. However, the exact same thing works in reverse when it comes to program efficency. Perl is, by definition, an inefficent language when it comes to computer resources. It has to be simply due to the fact that it is interpreted 'on the fly'.

Therefore, while perl could be used for almost any program, there are a number of situations that preclude it.

A shame really ;)

In reply to RE: RE: How big is yours? by Caillte
in thread How big is yours? by Jonathan

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