Leaving aside my tendency to complain about bad spelling and grammar, I would suggest that for most problems a good compiled language (Fortran compilers have beaten very skilled assembly language programmers for about 40 years; I see little reason why C/C++ wouldn't do as well) will beat even the best hand-coded assembler for many classes of problems, which will beat Perl, Python, Ruby, or Java. In computationally-intense problems, Perl, Python, Ruby, or Java will probably be approximately equal. Whether they are adequate for your needs is a different question, but my guess is that if one of them is, any of them will be.

Note, however, that Perl, Python, Ruby, and Java are largely designed to be platform-neutral, and the coding you're describing seems to require some fairly low-level twiddling, which probably is quite platform-dependent, so it will probably require some C (or assembly) to manage the platform-dependent bits. Conveniently, production-quality modules for your tasks may exist on CPAN, and they may be production quality across platforms.

I like Perl; I find it has more than sufficient performance for 90% of the coding I do. The odd 10% is computationally intensive, so none of Perl, Python1, Ruby, or Java quite cut it.

1 For aesthetic reasons, I don't like Python, so I have essentially no experience with it.

Information about American English usage here and here. Floating point issues? Please read this before posting. — emc

In reply to Re: Is Perl right for me? by swampyankee
in thread Is Perl right for me? by RobinV

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