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C vs Perl: What are the differences?
Introduction
In this article, we will discuss the key differences between C and Perl programming languages. Both C and Perl are widely used programming languages, but they have distinct characteristics that set them apart. Let's explore these differences in detail.
Syntax: One of the major differences between C and Perl is their syntax. C follows a structured and procedural programming approach, whereas Perl is known for its flexible and expressive scripting syntax. C uses curly braces for code blocks and semicolons to terminate statements, while Perl uses special characters like brackets, colons, and semicolons for different purposes.
Typing: Another significant difference is the typing system used in C and Perl. C is a statically typed language, which means that variable types must be declared explicitly before they can be used. On the other hand, Perl is a dynamically typed language, allowing variables to adopt different types at runtime without any explicit declaration.
Memory Management: C provides manual memory management using functions like
malloc
andfree
, where developers have full control over memory allocation and deallocation. In contrast, Perl has automatic memory management through a garbage collector, which handles memory allocation and deallocation tasks transparently to the developers.Object-Oriented Programming: C is primarily a procedural language and does not have built-in support for object-oriented programming (OOP). However, with the use of external libraries like GObject, OOP features can be implemented in C. On the other hand, Perl has native support for OOP concepts, allowing developers to create classes, objects, and apply encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism easily.
Platform Independence: C is a low-level programming language and is considered to be platform-dependent. It means that C code written for one platform may not run on another platform without modifications. In contrast, Perl is platform-independent, meaning that Perl scripts can run on different platforms without requiring any changes, as long as the Perl interpreter is available.
Performance: C is known for its high performance and efficiency, as it can directly access hardware and memory. It compiles the code into machine language, which allows it to execute instructions faster. On the other hand, Perl is an interpreted language, resulting in a slower execution speed compared to C. However, Perl excels in tasks that involve text processing and regular expressions, where its flexibility and built-in features streamline the development process.
In summary, C and Perl differ in their syntax, typing system, memory management, support for object-oriented programming, platform independence, and performance. Understanding these differences is essential for developers to choose the right programming language for their specific requirements.
I intend to use a programming language which I'll use as AWS runtime and write a script that will comb through tons of files in a directory and its subdirectories and search for simple text regular expressions and process and write the matches in a file as output. I have heard that Perl is good for regex based search but I also want the performance to be good as it will have to go through tons of files for IO. In this post: https://filia-aleks.medium.com/aws-lambda-battle-2021-performance-comparison-for-all-languages-c1b441005fd1, I see that Rust works well as AWS Lambda runtime with very good performance. Which one should I choose as my AWS lambda runtime for this problem? Golang is also an option as it is fast as per the above link.
I used to work in a Perl shop and must admit that the language is very simple for tasks like these, but as you mentioned it's not fast at execution time. I'm now a Go programmer professionally but I taught myself the language while in college purely out of interest and eventually found my way to the job, not the other way around. I've recently been learning a little rust because of how much that language comes up in conversations around Go. I find the concept of the borrow checker nice but I have to admit I feel lost like I am in most flavors of new fancy framework js. That's not to say Rust is really anything like js, but the learning appears the same to me as someone who's convinced they could learn just about any programming language if it was necessary (over time I've seen procedural, OOP, declarative and functional stuff but never programming logic outside of the prolog code I wrote in school).
Go isn't made for your specific task at hand but it's a very easy language to pick up and it has good directory traversal standard library code and good regex (even though with time perl's has been optimized to be faster and I think it's written in C++) but more than anything Go is "cloud native" programming in that an awful lot of new microservice tech stacks are centered around it, docker and kubernetes are written in it, and there's a thriving community whose focus is generally web-first and performance-oriented. This means for your use case there might already be a large cohort of gophers that have asked the stackoverflow questions for you
I personally would push you towards the NYT Profiler for Perl before I would towards Rest, but that's because I know you wouldn't waste any time being able to get to the task at hand and then make it go faster, and I expect all but a few rustaceans would be able to do so with the same speed.
Whatever you pick I wish you the very best of luck!
Actually, I'll add, C++ and C# as well.
Well, I'm into Computer Science since 1996, so I understand a bit of everything plus a lot of different OSs, I study 10 hours per day every day. However back in the 90s we didn't have books or universities about programming, all were passed through if you knew somebody in that profession. Which I did and in that time, he showed me .NET and MySQL, and that offered a lot of jobs also Java. Today you have a lot of options but I'm already discarding new languages as I believe they will jot succeed.
My always dream was to create game, and software. I don't understand all programming concepts and I'm studying all languages at the same time, so I'm heavy loaded. But that keeps me more aware.
I made a choice: use Python for everything but if you want performance, apps, security, compatibility, Multiplatform. What should I choose? The real question here is: which language should I go 100% and that language will teach me all I need about programming BUT without getting lost in that language forever (I discard any Assembly possibility) and one that has full documentation, support and libraries.
In my experience: I found a lot of info for python and java. But hardly I have ever found anything for C lang, C++ and, what about C# (it's only for Windows, is it easy, I saw a lot of documentation). Thanks!!
Python can be linked with C++ both language are similar in many places (using same libraries or concepts to build libraries) - except memory and static types. C++ is more assembler and have different syntax (need 3x-4x coding more).
If you do engineering it is perfect stack - Java is to slow in coding (4x more code) and little faster than Python - whatever it is hard to mix Java/C++ what is easy Python/C++.
In the most program you do not need super performance but if you need C++ is the best and have rich Object Language much richer than Java and more poor than Python. Python is true object language - everything is object.
Whatever sometimes more important is framework than language for specific use.
I would go with Python, it is fast to code, readable and very powerful without giving you too much to think about (e.g. memory management). If you're looking for speed, Cython is a fairly good way to get there, since Python is a C-based language it can be compiled to C using Cython and will get you a very significant boost in speed! You can also make use of C libraries if you prefer. The only downside to Cython over Python is that it is compiled and not interpreted, which can make debugging a pain (but you might find yourself doing most of the debugging in Python before switching to Cython). C languages are a bit of a pain to read up on (API, libraries etc.), but Stack Overflow has you covered in most cases!
All programming languages are cross platform except Java, but even that's not that bad. Performance: C(++), Go, Rust, Java, Ada, OCaml, Haskell, C# Apps: JS, TS, ReScript, Go, C(++), Java, Haskell, C#, Dart Security: Java, Go, Rust, COBOL, C(++), C# Compatibility: Java(due to it's VM), C(++), Go, C# Libraries: Java, Go, C(++), C# Documentation: Java, C(++) (since they are mature) What do you mean without getting lost in the language? I'd not advocate for C(or C++), considering it's hard to understand the memory, and it's for those into programming theory. You are looking for all you need. Go for Java, it has a library for everything, it has a reasonable learning curve, and pretty much you are going to encounter it everywhere- it's like a programming black hole you can't escape.
When working on Python, I noticed that Python is only useful for data science. I am looking for a programming language that:
Is different in terms of paradigm(I used OO only in Python for data analysis, I want something that is a different paradigm to improve my coding skills)
Is excellent at systems engineering
Will enhance my Python projects and basically make Python better
Has an excellent future, will skyrocket in terms of demand
Is very performant, excellent performance
Has a steep learning curve(it's because I want a simple language and an advanced language in my stack)
I found these two languages to fit my needs, and I need help choosing. Which would be better for me considering my needs
Rust is more useful compared to C on some cases like in web assembly. C is more tedious to code. Rust is modern and has a lot more of opportunities. If you are also investing for the future I recommend Rust over C.
It must be Rust, It absorbs the advantages of other languages,safe, good performance and develop quickly, The community is also growing and active. I think there are some difficulties to learn Rust, but when you have mastered it, you will write good programs than C lang
include include int main(){ char name[10], pasword[10]; printf("enter you user name :"); gets(name); printf("enter your pasword : "); gets(pasword); printf("your name : %s \n your password : %s \n", name, pasword); if ( name != "youcef") { printf("name undefined\n"); } else { printf("finde name"); }
}
his not working
You will want to do a few things here. First, replace gets
with fgets
. Then, you're going to want to use strcmp
from string.h to compare the input with the desired result. The code listed below has been updated with a working example with the previously mentioned recommendations. This isn't perfect and there are other ways to accomplish the same task. Explore other options that are available when you have a chance and see if you can improve on this example.
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
int main()
{
char name[10],
pasword[10];
printf("enter you user name :");
// Use fgets as gets is insecure and can easily lead to buffer overflow exploits
fgets(name, sizeof(char) * sizeof(name), stdin);
// Remove \n from fgets stdin read with null character so as to not have to include
// in strcmp later.
name[strlen(name) - 1] = '\0';
printf("enter your pasword : ");
fgets(pasword, sizeof(char) * sizeof(pasword), stdin);
printf("your name : %s \n your password : %s \n", name, pasword);
// If strcmp result > 0 || < 0 it's not a match
if (strcmp(name, "youcef") != 0)
{
printf("name undefined\n");
}
else
{
printf("finde name");
}
}
Dear, Yusuf You can't use if statement to compare two strings, but you can use strcmp() function which means string compare The behavior of strcmp function is: If (string1 < string2)? Then: return a negative value. If (string1 > string2)? Then: return a positive value.
If(string1 == string2)? Then: return (0).So, you can modify this statment to: if(strcmp(name,"Yousef") != 0) printf("name undefined\n");
else printf("find name");But, In this case there is one logic problem that (strcmp) function don't ignore the letter case. For example: If you input name : yousef
The first letter here (y) is small, but in the comparing statement above is capital, So the result will be "name undefined", but in fact "yousef" = "Yousef".To solve this problem you should use stracasecmp() function. This function ignore the letter case while comparing. The code will be: if(strcasecmp(name,"Yousef") != 0) printf("name undefined\n");
else printf("find name");Attention: Include string libreary after using these functions to skip any problem may be found.
includemay Allah bless you ^_^
Python has become the most popular language for machine learning right now since almost all machine learning tools provide service for this language, and it is really to use since it has many build-in objects like Hashtable. In C, you need to implement everything by yourself.
C++ is one of the most popular programming languages in graphics. It has many fancy libraries like eigen to help us process matrix. I have many previous projects about graphics based on C++ and this time, we also need to deal with graphics since we need to analyze movements of the human body. C++ has much more advantages than Java. C++ uses only compiler, whereas Java uses compiler and interpreter in both. C++ supports both operator overloading and method overloading whereas Java only supports method overloading. C++ supports manual object management with the help of new and delete keywords whereas Java has built-in automatic garbage collection.
As a personal research project I wanted to add post-quantum crypto KEM (key encapsulation) algorithms and new symmetric crypto session algorithms to openssh. I found the openssh code and its channel/context management extremely complex.
Concurrently, I was learning Go. It occurred to me that Go's excellent standard library, including crypto libraries, plus its much safer memory model and string/buffer handling would be better suited to a secure remote shell solution. So I started from scratch, writing a clean-room Go-based solution, without regard for ssh compatibility. Interactive and token-based login, secure copy and tunnels.
Of course, it needs a proper security audit for side channel attacks, protocol vulnerabilities and so on -- but I was impressed by how much simpler a client-server application with crypto and complex terminal handling was in Go.
$ sloc openssh-portable Languages Files Code Comment Blank Total CodeLns Total 502 112982 14327 15705 143014 100.0% C 389 105938 13349 14416 133703 93.5% Shell 92 6118 937 1129 8184 5.7% Make 16 468 37 131 636 0.4% AWK 1 363 0 7 370 0.3% C++ 3 79 4 18 101 0.1% Conf 1 16 0 4 20 0.0% $ sloc xs Languages Files Code Comment Blank Total CodeLns Total 34 3658 1231 655 5544 100.0% Go 19 3230 1199 507 4936 89.0% Markdown 2 181 0 76 257 4.6% Make 7 148 4 50 202 3.6% YAML 1 39 0 5 44 0.8% Text 1 30 0 7 37 0.7% Modula 1 16 0 2 18 0.3% Shell 3 14 28 8 50 0.9%
Pros of C lang
- Performance69
- Low-level49
- Portability36
- Hardware level29
- Embedded apps19
- Pure13
- Performance of assembler9
- Ubiquity8
- Great for embedded6
- Old4
- Compiles quickly4
- No garbage collection to slow it down3
- OpenMP2
- Gnu/linux interoperable2
Pros of Perl
- Lots of libraries72
- Open source66
- Text processing61
- Powerful54
- Unix-style49
- Regex47
- Stable37
- Concise syntax32
- Hackerish29
- Easy to use22
- Swiss army chainsaw16
- Code Less Do More13
- CPAN12
- Freedom9
- All purpose8
- Readability5
- Familiar5
- Many ways to do it5
- Community5
- Object-Oriented4
- Modular4
- Smart (does alot for you)4
- Postmodern3
- It's the best one-off task language3
- For a man2
- Good man pages2
- Auto case variables1
- Single Source Library (CPAN)1
- Multi-threaded support1
- Multiparadigm1
- C-style1
- Hashes1
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Cons of C lang
- Low-level5
- No built in support for parallelism (e.g. map-reduce)3
- Lack of type safety3
- No built in support for concurrency3
Cons of Perl
- Messy $/@/% syntax4
- No exception handling3
- Bad OO support2
- "1;"2
- No OS threads2
- Variables are global by default1
- Copy-on-create for interpreter-based threads1
- Barewords1
- Errors/warnings are ignored by default1