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Posted by Mladen Gogala on 08/25/05 02:33
On Wed, 24 Aug 2005 16:35:10 -0400, Kenneth Downs wrote:
>
> C does not have those either. Rather than the term "common purpose"
> programming language, perhaps you mean something more like 4GL or
> higher-level language?
C is, essentially, portable macro-assembly language. It's main purpose is
to write system programs, not to be used as a scripting language, although
I have to admit that I used it like a scripting language in combination
with flex.
>
> My thinking is that a common purpose programming language allows me to make
> anything for myself, like a formatting system.
Depends on what do you mean by "common purpose". Every programming
language is a common purpose programming language, but scripting
language for ad hoc tasks must have certain high level constructs
like regular expressions and formats available. Things like
$dir .= "/" unless $dir =~ /\/$/;
or
$dir ||= "/tmp"; (This is actually a neat and dirty trick to say
if (!defined($dir)) { $dir = "/tmp"; } )
are extremely convenient, relatively short and easy to write. That is
why Perl is so extremely popular (the above line is from Perl script,
in case anybody wondered)
>
> As for bulk loads, aren't those a feature of the db server? If the db
> server supports it, then PHP ought to be able to feed it. Or do I
> misunderstand?
Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Oracle supports bulk loads but
one cannot be used from PHP. PHP is primarily web scripting language
and it reflects on its structure. Large bulk loads are almost never a
part of web applications. The same logic applies to the formatting.
Writing large, multi-paged ASCII text reports and sending them to
printer is usually not a part of web-based application. Displaying
things in tables, by using PEAR HTML_Table or something similar is.
It's much easier to create a HTML table in PHP then in Perl. That's
what PHP is intended for.
--
http://www.mgogala.com
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