Warren -- ...and then Warren Vail said... % % I am looking for a comparison of features supported by PHP vs those % supported by Perl.
In general, I'd say that there's nothing that one can do that the other can't, though I'd also say that for things not native to the language (or even for things native that someone wanted to do differently :-) perl will have a better library of modules available. % % My gut tells me PHP is more robust, but we are trying to implement something Interesting... perl is a much more mature and seasoned language than php; why do you figure the latter to be "more robust", or perhaps how do you define the term? [Don't get me wrong; I think that php is growing like a weed and will, within just a few years, show that same level of maturity, depth of functionality (very much via contributed code), and breadth of deployment.] % in a company that has long had a standard allowing Perl as a "sanctioned" % language, but current management does not want to fight for PHP as a new % "sanctioned" language (most managers there have never heard of PHP and the % resident Java zealots have almost established a monopoly). The kind of Bleah. Anything but Java! % thing I am looking for is SESSION support, I know it's supported by PHP, but % not sure about Perl. I don't want to have to grow my own session manager. Recall that, for many years, nearly all dynamic web pages under Apache were written in perl; after all, nobody wanted the overhread of a shell process and nobody wanted the hassle of writing in C. I will say with confidence that perl can do anything that php can do, including sessions (though I'm not an expert in either language; in fact, my perl is quite rusty since I've been doing very primarily php for a while now). There is almost no "piece" in perl, such as the session manager you mention, which you have to write; it's not uncommon to write a script which uses a bunch of different modules and all you write is a bit of glue calling one and handing to the other :-) Does that make it right or wrong for you? Nope; not by any means. One of the great shining points of php, IMHO, is how easy it is to write the code and how you can turn it on and off for spitting out raw HTML (though I must admit that I very, very rarely do so myself and even keep trying to move to abstraction of data via templates, but that's neither here nor there), and I agree with Mike that you can get punctuation soup pretty quickly in perl -- though that's usually because of lazy programming, and you can have lazy or bad programming in any language, including php. You might talk to some of the more sane perl zealots there (yes, I'm sure there are plenty and off the deep end, too :-) to learn a bit about perl and cpan and more. You might find it not so bad. I definitely prefer it for doing system scripts; I use the php CLI for one-lining test code, and I have written php system scripts, but perl is [currently] better suited to tasks where the web is nowhere in sight. % One alternative is mainframe COBOL, which clearly will not support what we % want to do. As I said, anything but Java :-) % % What would I lose by implementing in Perl (other than my mind)? Probably nothing. Meanwhile, by moving away from their standard language for this one project, you'd be introducing a whole new ball of maintenance that probably shouldn't be there. If you want php for one project, don't. If you want php as a new language, you might pick some of the uglier perl scripts they have and rewrite them in php to show how straightforward and pretty it is. % % thanks in advance, Good luck! % % Warren Vail % [EMAIL PROTECTED] HTH & HAND & Happy New Year :-D -- David T-G * There is too much animal courage in (play) [EMAIL PROTECTED] * society and not sufficient moral courage. (work) [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Mary Baker Eddy, "Science and Health" http://justpickone.org/davidtg/ Shpx gur Pbzzhavpngvbaf Qrprapl Npg!
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