Furthermore your professor and TA are right in that Perl has a lot of overhead for complex math calculations. If I was doing a lot of numerical manipulation and performance mattered, then Perl would not be my first (or second..) choice. Part of the art of choosing the right tool for the job is knowing when your favorite tool isn't it.
Yes but no where is it made clear that Perl isn't the right tool for the job. Hell, I thought think Perl would be even better for this particular purpose as it lets you concentrate on the algorith itself. Since it's purely educational, it doesn't matter if the code compiles/runs in 1 second or 5 seconds, you can use the same algorithms and techniques in any language.

Now, if he had to do large amounts of mathematical operations in a really small amount of time such as breaking cyphers and so forth then I might agree that perl is not the right choice. But for writing basic algorithms to learn them, I have yet to see anything that suggests perl isn't the best choice.

Updated: Added "small amount of time" to further clarify my position.

In reply to Re: Re: Stereotypes about perl by BUU
in thread Stereotypes about perl by nherdboi

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.