Re: the C JIT

[Sam Tregar]

On Thu, 31 Aug 2000, David L. Nicol wrote:

> Perl looks, and AFAIK has always looked, like "C plus lune noise" to
> many people.

I think Perl looks like "C plus moon noise" to former C programmers.  I
imagine some people see it and think "Csh plus Awk noise".  Perl is a lot
more than C-with-scalars.

>       strong typing

C's typing is not particularily strong.  Witness the common abuse of
"(void *)".  Witness enums that are all compatible with integers.  If we
want strong typing (I don't) there are better places to look.

>       run-time efficiency

C doesn't get run-time efficiency from its syntax, so we can't really
expect to get anything here.  It gets it from its compilation
architecture.  If you want to build a Perl frontend for GCC I think you
might find a way leverage C's efficiency but you won't get it just by
accepting C syntax.

-sam