[wellylug] Help in finding a good technical/Linux related bookstore

[Cliff Pratt]

Bruce Hoult wrote:
> On 6/13/07, *Andrej* <andrej at paradise.net.nz 
> <mailto:andrej at paradise.net.nz>> wrote:
> 
>     For instance if the machine were to run many of the tasks
>     that were to be scripted.  Each invocation of the python
>     interpreter will cost you more RAM than awk or sed will.  If
>     the task can be done in awk or sed there's no good reason
>     to choose the heavy weight alternatives.  Sure, I am happy
>     to use perl; but some tasks are simple enough to be accomplished
>     in awk (with a ~ 300K memory footprint) or sed (take off another
>     100K?) rather than python or perl (~ 6M footprint on both
>     accounts), and with less CPU overhead as well.
> 
> 
> I've never seen a task that runs faster (that is, uses less CPU) in awk 
> or sed than in perl.  And I've benchmarked quite a few of them!  Even 
> something as simple as awk '{print $5}' runs faster as perl -lane 'print 
> $F[4]', even on tiny files.
> 
> Anything that you think you want to do in a combination of sh, awl, and 
> sed is far better done in Perl.
> 
> If you have existing awk or sed, run them through a2p or s2p (which have 
> come with Perl forever).  They'll run faster.  And you can add features 
> more easily.
> 
> If the program is going to be more than a few dozen lines then you're 
> better off again in Ruby, which deals with regexps and so forth as 
> neatly as Perl, and classes and OO stuff as well as Python.  And has 
> proper lambdas too.
> 
Mary had a little Lambda,
Its fleece was red as Ruby,
She scheduled it with cron one day
And called it Ruby Tuesday

What's a Lambda?

Cheers,

Cliff