Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Mueen Nawaz wrote:
>
> >     Eh? Compiled Haskell's not all that slow. It beats scripting
> > languages easily. Comparing it with Perl is not very illustrative of much.
>
> How about compiled Perl then? Cos it beat that too...

Compiled Perl just means stored bytecode loading faster into Perl's VM/AST
/whatever.  Same for Python or Ruby.  The bytecode is still interpreted without
a JIT and those are still highly dynamic languages where code optimizations
through type analysis is very much impossible.

Haskell compiles to native code and is a static typeful language.  The
comparison is unfair.  Haskell also comes complete with a very succint syntax
reminiscent of Perl, except not quite as unreadable.  I think the time of Perl
has gone and suggest people trying Perl6 with Pugs to drop it and go Hugs
instead. :)

That said, there's no language out there to do batch flat file processing with
such ease and grace as Perl.  Not even Haskell or Ruby.  The problem, I guess,
is that it's a structured file format and handling it with regexes alone gets
ugly pretty fast... if they go for std XML processing instead, they have no
real advantage over any other languages doing the same...

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